Dave Ward joins PacketFabric as Chief Executive Officer
PacketFabric, an innovator in fast, adjustable-on-demand connectivity for enterprise customers and a portfolio company of Digital Alpha Advisors, announced Dave Ward will be joining as Chief Executive Officer.
Dave joins PacketFabric from Cisco, where he was the company’s Chief Technology Officer of Engineering, Chief Architect and a Senior Vice President at Cisco’s Networking and Security Business.
Upon joining, Dave said “I could not be more excited to join PacketFabric at this critical juncture in the company’s trajectory. During a career spanning over two decades in the telecommunications and networking sectors, I’ve been privileged to drive innovation for Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks.
“PacketFabric is fundamentally rethinking enterprise and service communications in a way that others have not. I’ve been very impressed with PacketFabric’s technology, go-to-market and business models, strong customer feedback and unique talent.
“I believe PacketFabric can lead and positively disrupt the next phase of transformation for the networking industry. I’m honored and excited to lead the company at this critical time in Internet history.”
Digital Alpha Managing Partner Rick Shrotri added, “Dave is an industry luminary and one of the very few ‘Big Internet’ architectural systems thinkers, and we are fortunate to attract him to PacketFabric. He brings unmatched networking and telecommunications expertise, business acumen and senior industry relationships.
“Under Dave’s guidance, I am even more excited about PacketFabric’s growth potential. We believe Dave is the right leader to transform the industry with PacketFabric.”
Dave brings impressive breadth and depth of experience and industry relationships to PacketFabric. As head of Cisco’s Chief Technology and Architecture Office, Dave led Cisco’s core innovation programs, unifying and advancing strategic co-innovation partnerships and programs with internal business units and external customers, partners, government, developers, academia, standards and open-source groups.
These extensive relationships will be invaluable to PacketFabric as it looks to expand into new product and markets through partnerships and joint ventures.
These co-innovation programs continuously reinvented and enhanced the capabilities of the Internet by creating new offerings and technologies inside and outside Cisco’s traditional product portfolio.
Dave and his engineering teams built numerous hardware and software products, including networking orchestration and automation, virtualized and cloud-native services, cloud networking and security products, 5G Networking and system architectures, and IoT-based solutions for smart cities, healthcare, conservation, media and entertainment. Dave also led architectural governance, technology strategy and development, and university research.
PacketFabric is fortunate to be led by a network architecture leader recognized for advancing the capabilities of the Internet the past two and a half decades. Dave joined Cisco in 1999 when the company acquired the Internet Engineering Group.
He is also one of two individuals to be both Cisco and Juniper Fellows working on the operating system and next-generation routing systems, including ASICS, Optics, and network APIs and SDN.
Dave holds hundreds of patents. His pioneering advances and industry leadership around Software Defined Networks (SDN), Cloud Networking, and Network Function Virtualization has led to the formation and progress of numerous open-source, networking, and standards organizations.
He has helped catalyze the movement of the networking industry into Open Source by spearheading the major projects that are now foundational in the industry.
He served on the Boards of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, Advanced Imaging Society, Linux Foundation, Linux Foundation Networking, ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector, Governmental Advisory boards and Open Networking Foundation.