August 27, 2002

by Charles Waltner, News@Cisco
Photo and Cisco Fellows quotes courtesy of Packet Magazine

Cisco has over 35,000 employees worldwide. Only nine of them are Cisco Fellows -- an elite group, indeed. The number may be small, but then again; there are only so many people whose efforts fundamentally influence the evolution of networking technology.

Cisco Fellows (left to right) Kirk Lougheed, Fred Baker, Silvano Gai, and Steve Deering.

Cisco Fellows shepherd standards development, pioneer innovation, foster cooperation and enliven imaginations. In short, they make those around them better at what they do. Their ceaseless work and tenacious leadership is driven by the best possible motivation: to simply make networking better.

"The Internet grew because people cooperated," said Harald Alvestrand, a Cisco Fellow and the current chairman of the influential Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). "The industry is littered with experts who know a lot about their fields but have little incentive to settle battles and get something done in the real world. Cisco Fellows contribute by taking the state of the art and saying, 'Let's stop squabbling and put it to use!'"

The nine Cisco Fellows include: Alvestrand, Fred Baker, Wen Chen, Bruce Davie, Steve Deering, Silvano Gai, Kirk Lougheed, Keith McCloghrie, and David Oran.

Their contributions read like a history of Internet networking advances: inventing Cisco's IOS (the industry-leading and most widely deployed network system software), inventing IP multicast, inventing Tag Switching, pioneering video streaming, pioneering voice over IP, pioneering IPv6, and pioneering HTML.

While their technical accomplishments are unrivaled, Cisco Fellows distinguish themselves even further by their committed leadership. They guide, negotiate, broker, reconcile, and motivate throughout Cisco and the industry. They chair influential industry organizations, publish authoritative papers, design essential standards, and envision new technologies. Individual contributions are important, but Cisco Fellows know that the best way to innovate is through collaboration.

"Individual contribution is not the thing that gets promoted. The best work is not done that way," said David Oran, a pioneer of voice-over-IP technology. "I like to work on teams. But I want to make an impact without leaving fingerprints."

Everything a Cisco Fellow does is informed by incomparable technical expertise and vision. But most importantly, Cisco Fellows leave a legacy of excellence wherever they go.

"The primary job of a Cisco Fellow is to educate others," said Fred Baker, a former chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and current chairman of board of the Internet Society (ISOC). "The most important thing I can do is to make sure that the next person who fills my shoes is better than me."

The Cisco Fellows include:

Harald Alvestrand: Alvestrand currently serves as the chairman of the IETF, the leading international organization for networking technology development and standards. A resident of Trodheim, Norway, he has co-authored over 15 RFCs (IETF documents which define Internet technology standards). He also spearheaded key developments in HTML. Alvestrand now works for the Enterprise Consulting group and advises on research projects for Cisco's Europe, Middle East and Africa operations.

Fred Baker: Baker specializes in congestion management and has authored foundational routing protocols and quality-of-service (QoS) mechanisms, including queuing and scheduling strategies, TCP Pacing, and the RSVP QoS signaling protocol. He has worked in telecommunications for 25 years, and is former chairman of the IETF. In August 2002, Baker was named as the Chairman of the Board of The Internet Society (ISOC).

Wen Chen: A native of Taiwan, Chen's work has served as the foundation for the industry's most popular video streaming standards. He is recognized as a pioneer in digital image coding and invented several groundbreaking algorithms for digital video. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and International Organization for Standards (ISO) have adopted many pieces of his work as part of FAX and video coding, including MPEG and JPEG specifications. Chen is an honorary professor at three universities in China and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Bruce Davie: Davie helped invent Tag Switching, the precursor to Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS), a crucial technology innovation that brought traffic engineering and fast rerouting capabilities to IP routers. He now serves as a system architect in IOS Layer 3 Services. He actively publishes journal articles, conference papers, and book publications as an active member of IETF, IEEE, and Internet Research Task Force's End-to-End Research Group.

Steve Deering: Deering is an internationally recognized authority on networking and Internet Protocol. He invented IP multicast, co-founded the Internet Multicast Backbone (Mbone), and was the lead designer for version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IPv6). He has chaired or co-chaired many IETF working groups and is an active participant in End-to-End Research, as well as a member of the Internet Architecture Board.

Silvano Gai: Gai has been a principal developer of significant improvements to the Spanning Tree Protocol and VLANs, innovations that significantly reduced the convergence time of switched networks. Currently, Gai leads the system architecture teams for Enterprise VoIP and for Content Services. He has filed 13 patents since joining Cisco in 1997 and has published widely, including two books and more than 50 articles for professional journals and conference proceedings.

Kirk Lougheed: One of Cisco's founding executives, Lougheed created the software that became Cisco's IOS. He also designed the first high-speed switching software for routers. He now serves as a lead architect working with IOS technologies in Cisco's Internet Technologies Division.

Keith McCloghrie: McCloghrie is the world's foremost expert on defining Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Management Information Bases for enterprise networks and has co-authored over 50 RFCs. He has contributed to ATM Forum standards and chaired its LAN Emulation working group. He is co-inventor of Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) and has filed 10 patents while at Cisco. He now works to define Cisco Assure's QoS Policy architecture.

David Oran: Oran has been instrumental in building the architectures, protocols and products to advance voice-over-IP technology. He serves as co-area director for routing standards for the IETF's Internet Engineering Steering Group. Also he was the SIGComm lecturer for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a group dedicated to advancing the art and science of information processing. Oran currently works as an architect for Cisco's packet telephony products.

Charles Waltner is a freelance writer based in Oakland, CA.