Tom is Technical Director for NFV at Red Hat where he is head of the Office of The CTO's Networking area. There he leads a team of engineers focusing on the many areas of Open Source Networking including SDN, NFV, data plane acceleration, and container networking efforts. In addition, Tom leads the NFV Partner Engineering team which is focused on supporting Red Hat's Telco/SP customers. Tom works across Red Hat’s products and business to strengthen and sure up its networking technologies around these products by working on M&A, partner and company strategy. He serves on the Linux Foundation Edge Board and Networking Technical Advisory Council (TAC), and has previously held similar roles in the OPNFV and OpenDaylight projects. Tom is an Apache Software Foundation Committer and is co-Maintainer of The Public Yang Repository on GitHub.
Prior to Red Hat, Tom was a Distinguished Engineer at Brocade where he was The Chief Architect of Open Source in the Software Business Unit. Tom lead teams responsible for building commercial products based on open source, including the Brocade SDN Controller (BSC) which at the time was the widest commercial distribution of OpenDaylight. He has made numerous contributions to upstream open source projects such as OpenDaylight, OPNFV and OpenStack.
Prior to Juniper Tom held positions of Distinguished Engineer at Huawei Technologies, VP/Senior Principal Software Architect at CA Technologies, Director of Network Architecture at British Telecom (BT) and Senior Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems.
Tom has been an active participant in the IETF, ITU, and IEEE, and is the author of several books including SDN: Software Defined Networks: An Authoritative Review of Network Programmability Technologies (OReilly 2013) and Network Function Virtualization (Morgan Kaufmann 2016 ). He received his BSCS from The University of New Hampshire, and a M.Sc. from The University of Massachusetts in Lowell, where he has been an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science since 2000 and teaches courses on the topic of data communications. Tom co-edits the SDN Programmability Blog at http://www.sdnprogrammability.net