Brocade announced today the appointment of networking industry expert Benson Schliesser to the position of Distinguished Engineer. With a deep background in network architectures, cloud computing and data centers, Schliesser will play an integral role in the direction of Brocade Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) strategies and work with customers to ensure the resulting products meet their requirements.
Schliesser will join the Office of the CTO and report to Ken Cheng, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Corporate Development & Emerging Business.
“Benson’s history of leadership roles as an end-user, a vendor and in industry associations is a clear indication of his broad understanding of the evolving networking landscape and technologies,” said Cheng. “His past experience with leading large-scale cloud service rollouts and data center virtualization deployments will make Benson an invaluable resource for Brocade customers who are focused on adopting SDN and NFV technologies.”
At Brocade, Schliesser will focus on strategic initiatives to further Brocade leadership in the key areas of Ethernet fabrics, software networking and data center routing and switching. Additionally, he will work with customers to design next-generation architectures to rapidly deliver new services.
With nearly two decades of networking architecture experience, Schliesser has spent his career designing and deploying next-generation data center and cloud services. Most recently, he served as a distinguished engineer in the office of the CTO at Juniper and prior to that as a principal engineer in the service provider CTO office at Cisco.
Earlier in his career, he spent more than a decade in the office of the CTO at Savvis and oversaw the network architecture of the company’s many cloud based services.
Deeply involved in a number of industry associations, Schliesser is currently a chair of the Network Virtualization Overlay (NVO3) Working Group for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). He is also a member of ETSI ISG NFV, IEEE Communications Society, OpenDaylight Project and other organizations
“The feverish pace of a software-focused networking industry is creating a gap between customers and some vendors as both parties try to keep pace with new architectures,” said Schliesser. “In combining its pedigree of storage networking with the innovations in both Fabric and virtual routing technologies, Brocade has the most complete vision and mix of assets to successfully help customers build next-generation cloud and data center environments.”
Schliesser joins other notable Brocade employees involved in and leading industry associations, including Curt Beckmann – Chair of Forward Abstraction Working Group, Open Networking Foundation, David Meyer – Chair of Technical Steering Committee, Board Member, OpenDaylight Project, Scott Kipp – President, Ethernet Alliance, David Peterson – International Representative for Technical Committee T11, InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) and Steve Wilson – Chair of Technical Committee T11, InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS).