Big Switch Networks, the leading platform-independent Software-Defined Networking (SDN) vendor, announced that Dan Talayco has been appointed as Chair of the Open Networking Foundation’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG). Dan is a Senior Architect at Big Switch, and was appointed to the TAG as a member in November of last year. The selection reinforces Big Switch Networks’ technical leadership in SDN, and underscores the joint commitment between Big Switch Networks, the ONF, and its member companies to deliver open, standards-based implementations of SDN and OpenFlow.

Dan Talayco, Big Switch Networks Senior Architect and Open Network Foundation Technical Advisory Committee Chair (Photo: Business Wire)

“Dan Talayco has been a core contributor to OpenFlow since its early beginnings and was instrumental in the development of the OpenFlow 1.0 standard,” said Guido Appenzeller, CEO and co-founder of Big Switch Networks. “His selection as Chair of TAG is validation of the value he has provided as a member. We are very proud of Dan and extremely committed to this important work.”

“ONF is fueled by the talents of its members, and leadership contributions play an especially important role in the continued growth and adoption of open standards and SDN,” said Dan Pitt, Executive Director of the Open Networking Foundation. “We are grateful when our member companies support their employees in ONF's leadership roles.”

Dan leads the Big Switch architecture efforts to help switching partners design and implement OpenFlow. Prior to joining Big Switch Networks in, Dan was a Research Engineer working on OpenFlow under ONF Co-founder Nick McKeown and Clean Slate Lab Head Guido Appenzeller at Stanford University. For over two decades, Dan has held a wide variety of positions in both the private sector and educational institutions including Principal Scientist at Broadcom, Director of Software Development, at Aprius Inc., Assistant Professor at Boston College, Franklin and Marshall College and Kalamazoo College. Dan has also served as vice-chair of the ONF’s Hybrid Programmable Forwarding Plane Working Group. Dan was recognized as the “Unsung SDN Hero” by SDNCentral for his contributions to advance SDN. He is the author or co-author of a dozen U.S. patents and has contributed articles to industry publications. Dan has a B.A., Mathematics, Computer Science from Kalamazoo College and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from The University of Michigan.

The Technical Advisory Group acts in the role of a CTO to provide high-level guidance on any technical issues faced by the board and helps define the technical scope of ONF. It is responsible for identifying and resolving the most challenging issues such as reconciling the tradeoffs between vendor independence and vendor differentiation, and between near-term compatibility and future-proof design.

Rob Sherwood, CTO of Controller Technologies at Big Switch Networks, also chairs of the ONF’s Architecture & Framework Working Group (ArchWG). The ONF ArchWG will map out the scope of SDN in terms of architecture, framework, and North Bound API for OpenFlow and other components.

About Big Switch Networks

Big Switch Networks is the leader in Open Software-Defined Networking. The company’s Open SDN platform embraces industry standards, open APIs, open source, and vendor-neutral support for both physical and virtual networking infrastructure. Big Switch Networks product suite supports a broad range of networking applications, including network virtualization for public and private cloud data centers built upon OpenStack, CloudStack and other platforms. Big Switch Networks is privately held and has raised over $45M from Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and others. For additional information follow us @bigswitch or visit: bigswitch.com

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