Abstract:

SDN promised to free us from the tyranny of legacy protocols and incumbent technology vendors. However, despite considerable research interest over the past five years, SDN still remains constrained by protocols and its commercial adoption is very slow. In this talk, I will discuss the main technology, standardization and business barriers that are hampering widespread adoption of SDN technologies. I will also share my thoughts on how SDN technologies could be re-architected and deployed in mission-critical networks.

Bio:

Syed Ali Khayam has a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University. From February 2007 to January 2012, he served as an assistant professor at the School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (SEECS), National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Pakistan. At NUST-SEECS, he was the founding director of the Wireless and Secure Networks (WiSNet) Research Lab [http://wisnet.seecs.nust.edu.pk]. WiSNet lab published over 70 publications in the networks, communications and security areas, including publications in IEEE Transactions, ACM and Elsevier journals, ACM CCS, IEEE Infocom, RAID and ACSAC. In his academic career, he won research and consultancy grants from Nokia Research, Korean Research Foundation, Pakistan National ICT R&D Fund, Tellabs, Marvell Technologies and Nokia-Siemens Networks. He has 5 patents pending at USPTO.

In March 2011, he co-founded a technology company, xFlow Research, which was focused on providing services in the software-defined networking space. During his tenure as CEO of xFlow, the company won business from Marvell Technologies, Broadcom, Dell, Netgear, Cavium Networks, and Calient Technologies.

In March 2012, xFlow’s team was acquired by a California-based startup, PLUMgrid, with products in the Virtual Network Infrastructure (VNI) space. Since then, he has been working as the Region Manager (South Asia and Middle East) for PLUMgrid.

Host:

Dr. Alex Liu