We are especially excited to have Doug Marschke as a speaker at TFI2014 since he is also hosting a 1-day SDN essentials class the day before (Thursday, 21 August).

Doug is currently the founder of a SDN services company called SDN Essentials. Specializing in Education and Professional services for various SDN architectures. Over the last two years, Marschke has been immersing himself into SDN, presenting at colleges and with partners, taking interviews on webcasts, authoring books, and joining leadership forums like Open Networking Foundation, OpenDaylight and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. Prior to his transition as the SDN Evangelist, and CTO/Founder of SDN Essentials, Marschke founded, built and sold Proteus Networks, a network services company that was the premier stop for routing and switching education and professional services. He created many of the Juniper Networks certification exams, including the JNCIE Enterprise Exam and wrote and published JUNOS Enterprise Routing and Junos Enterprise Switching. Marschke has been the leader of true “engineering rockstars” and the largest group of Ingenious Champions at Juniper’s top VAR and Partner of the Year. He is certified as JNCIE-ENT #3 and JNCIE-SP #41. Since he graduated from the University of Michigan, Marschke has been on a mission with his ventures to help service providers and enterprises optimize their networks for better performance, cost and reliability. He’s worked with national and international students, customers, partners, associations and peers, so he’s prepared to take on and drive SDN education and solutions with SDN Essentials. In his free time he runs and independent film company (www.funnyhowfilms.com) and two san Francisco restaurants (www.tacoshopsf.com) and (www.tacko.co).

We asked Doug a couple questions about SDN and this is what he said:

What is SDN?

The classic definition of SDN is really the separation of control and forwarding with a central (OS) environments.  Two other confusing definitions have also arrived as well, one is overlay architectures from companies like VMware, Plumgrid and Juniper. Lastly, adding an API onto a current platform has been the solution for many of the incumbent vendors.

Why are you excited about SDN?

It really changes the way that we “network” networks.  The modern problems we have to solve need to be looked at differently as some of the older protocols and techniques are not going to hold true.

How does the network of the future differ from today’s?

I would offer 3 predictions:

1. Less “big iron” solutions
2. Less reliance of proprietary single box solutions
3. More basic connectivity solved in software

Learn more from Doug at the SDN Essentials course on Thursday (21 Aug) and talk to him and all of our SDN experts on Friday (22 Aug) at The Future of the Internet 2014: Defining Software Defined Networks – space is limited, so register today!