Profile of David Ward
David Ward
Senior Vice President, Chief Architect, and Chief Technology Officer, Development
Cisco Systems, Inc.
As Development CTO and Chief Architect at Cisco Systems, David is responsible for defining strategy and leading research and development of new innovation via tight partnerships with customers and academia. He is known in the industry because of his knowledge and expertise in IP/MPLS routing, high availability, network design, and systems software. He is the Routing Area Director at the IETF and chair of four Working Groups: IS-IS, HIP, BFD and Softwires. Also, he is leading the work on defining a transport profile for MPLS at the ITU-T. He speaks frequently at the North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG), IETF, IEEE and RIPE conferences and collaborates with several university and private research groups, including Stanford, MIT, Cambridge and Tsinghua University.
David held the roles of software architect for IOS-XR; co-system architect of the CRS-1 multi-terabit router & ASR9000; and co-system architect of several next generation routers, line cards, route processors and service blades for multiple routing products in Cisco's Service Provider portfolio.
David served as CTO of the Platform Systems Division in Juniper Networks, responsible for the switches, routers and data center products in the portfolio as well as the Operating System (Junos) and ASICs. David was also a Juniper Fellow and Chief Architect working on the operating system and next generation routing systems.
David graduated from Syracuse University with a BS in International Relations, and later received a Ph.D. (ABD) and Master of Science in Forestry from University of Minnesota.
David has a small vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains and an heirloom tomato farm along the St. Croix River in Somerset, Wisconsin.