Mark Townsley Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, California, Us

Chief Architect for Cisco+ Secure Connect, Cisco’s unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) that brings the best of Meraki Cloud Management and Umbrella Cloud Security into a single platform. As part of Meraki’s senior engineering staff, I also lead the awesome Secure Connect full-stack, backend, automated QA, and cloud head-end engineering teams. I am also proud to have launched Meraki’s cross-platform IPv6 effort which delivered “Meraki Simple IPv6” - the easiest to deploy and manage enterprise IPv6 implementation in the industry.

Palaiseau, Île-De-France, Fr

Part-time faculty member and Computer Science Professor in charge of INF 566, Network and Protocols. In INF 566 we take a tour of various Internet Protocols, some successful and others not, aiming to understand how and why one protocol ends up more successful than another. Students learn and apply a protocol success taxonomy to current, past, and upcoming protocol domains in order to understand how the Internet and networking technology is evolving.

Palaiseau, Île-De-France, Fr

Co-development and teaching of Network Protocols course. Work with graduate student and post-doctorate researchers on various topics related to networking.

San Jose, Ca, Us

As co-founder and the senior technical member of the Paris Innovation and Research Laboratory (PIRL), I played a pivotal role in shaping the lab’s strategic direction and fostered multiple collaborative projects with major stakeholders. I spearheaded the technical program at the annual Cisco-Ecole Polytechnique Research and Innovation Symposium and mentored numerous doctoral students, overseeing over 40 research internships at Ecole Polytechnique, with 11 receiving prestigious awards of excellence. Motivated by France’s rich engineering talent, I was instrumental in establishing the “Internet of Everything” endowed chair with Ecole Polytechnique, leading to the launch of this dedicated research facility in Paris. Under my leadership, PIRL evolved into a robust, enduring R&D center, inaugurated in 2015 by Emmanuel Macron and celebrated as a cornerstone of France’s emergence as the “Silicon Valley of Europe” by then Cisco CEO John Chambers. The lab continues to maintain strong ties with local academia and the startup ecosystem, and I contribute to this vibrant community by lecturing and teaching at Ecole Polytechnique.

San Jose, Ca, Us

In charge of technical and managerial duties for over 30 working groups and 60 working group chairs as IETF Internet Area Director. Founding member of the World IPv6 Day and World IPv6 Launch team alongside other engineers from Google, Comcast, Akamai, Facebook and Yahoo!. Led Cisco's participation in the IPv6 World Launch both as a residential home router vendor (with the Cisco Linksys product line), and as a website (ensuring www.cisco.com was reachable over the Internet with IPv6 and advertised AAAA records accordingly in the Internet DNS). Led development of the 6rd standard in the IETF (RFC5969), incorporated it into Cisco's largest (CSR, ASR) and smallest (Linksys) routers, and worked alongside Service Providers worldwide to see it deployed at scale. Negotiated new policies for IPv6 address allocations at RIPE and ARIN Regional Internet Registries for networks that deployed 6rd. Developed and presented the "Business Case for IPv6" at technical conferences, the Broadband Forum, and Cisco customer events. Spearheaded creation of the IPv6 World Congress in Paris, an event that from 2010-2015 was among the top IPv6 technology conferences worldwide.

San Jose, Ca, Us

Led team to rearchitect Cisco's IOS virtual interface (idb) subsystem and created a new tunnel switching (sss) path in order to meet new scaling requirements brought by the widespread adoption of L2TP into the Dialup and DSL Broadband space. L2TP had positioned our routers to grapple with virtualized PPP sessions rather than those bound to a hardware interface, a precursor to what later would be commonly referred to as a "Virtual Network Function" (VNF). Also served as chair of the IETF's L2TP Extensions Working Group, which was formed after the publication of the base L2TP specification in August 1999. Spearheaded work on L2TPv3 (RFC 3931), which expanded the use of L2TP from PPP into other "pseudowire" types including Frame Relay, Ethernet, L3VPNs, MPLS, ATM and TDM.

San Jose, Ca, Us

Embedded software development in C and (MIPS) assembly for Cisco's IOS operating system and router products. Principal author of the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) specification (RFC 2661) and development of Cisco's implementation, including a leading role participating in multiple industry interoperability events to ensure the 40+ L2TP implementations under development at the time achieved compatibility with one another.

Internet, Oo

The IETF Homenet working group focuses on standardizing and evolving IP networking technology within residential home networks. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/homenet/about/

Internet, Oo

The IESG is made up of peer-nominated individuals from across the Industry. Each IESG member provides technical review for all RFCs approved for publication by the IETF during their tenure, as well as direct managerial authority over the operational and technical direction of the area in which they are nominated into as Area Director. I served two 2-year terms as Internet Area Director, which at the time was the largest of the IETF areas with 31 Working groups and over 60 working group chairs to manage. The IETF Internet Area has a broad scope, including the Internet Protocol network layer (both IPv4 and IPv6), DNS, DHCP, IP mobility, multihoming, multicast, host and router configuration, network time protocols, identifier-locator separation, residential homenet auto-configuration and routing, along with various L2 and L3 tunneling technologies. The Internet Area is also responsible for specifying how IP will run over new link layer protocols as they are defined, including new "IoT" adaptations such as 6lowpan. During the years I served between 2005 and 2009, the Internet Area also included L2VPN, L3VPN, Pseudowire, and MPLS technologies that have since been moved to the Routing Area of the IETF.

Internet, Oo

The IAB is chartered both as a committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and as an advisory body of the Internet Society (ISOC). Its responsibilities include architectural oversight of IETF activities, Internet Standards Process oversight and appeal, and the appointment of the RFC Editor. The IAB is also responsible for the management of the IETF protocol parameter registries.The IESG is responsible for technical management of IETF activities and the Internet standards process. It administers the process according to the rules and procedures that have been ratified by the ISOC trustees [see RFC 2026/BCP 9, The Internet Standards Process]. The IESG is directly responsible for the actions associated with entry into and movement along the Internet "standards track," including final approval of specifications as Internet Standards.During this period, I was nominated by my peer IESG members to serve as the IESG liaison to the IAB, which included participation in regular IAB meetings and activities as well as ensuring cooperation between the two bodies.

Internet, Oo

Chair for group responsible for standardization of extensions to the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP). L2TP is a widely deployed tunneling and layer-2 emulation protocol standard that is available in a wide variety of products, including all Apple iOS devices, Android devices, as well as Windows and MAC OSX systems and networking equipment from Cisco and dozens of other vendors. L2TP is used to provide multi-protocol VPN connectivity and the primary interconnect between "wholesale" and "retail" dial-up and broadband Internet Service Providers around the world. With L2TPv3, a variety of other applications have been enabled as well, including IP-based L2VPN, L3VPN and "pseudowire" services for Ethernet, Frame Relay, ATM, MPLS, etc.

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

I was part of a small team in IBM's Network Hardware Division tasked to create a "Shiva killer" dialup remote access and routing product. We were given a Proteon-based router and developed remote access hardware modules and software functionality to do just that; This included the full range of Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) functionality at the time (PPP, PPPoE, IPCP, L2TP, DHCP, RADIUS, etc.), as well as subscriber management (AAA), virtual interfaces, and various semi-proprietary IBM protocols.

College Park, Md, Us

Management and support of the Systems Engineering and Integration Laboratory, software development and research for cross-area projects at the University of Maryland and Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks.

Rochester, Ny, Us

Software engineering and programming in C and C++ for PC-based applications used in the medical and dental industry. I worked with a small team of founders at Infosoft, a start-up that created the SoftDent dental office management system that ran on Novell Networked PCs. Infosoft went through several acquisitions, and is now part of Carestream. As of 2018, the SoftDent application is still in use by over 13,000 dental practices in the US.

Birmingham, Alabama, Us

Member of small team of scientists devoted to developing new and innovative techniques for non-destructive characterization (NDC) of materials used in orbital space stations (e.g., carbon fiber structural tubing). Included custom software development in C, C++, Foxpro, Matlab, ASYST, as well as development of measurement and mathematical modeling tools, automation, etc. (Full-time work during alternating scholastic quarters, together with ongoing contract work.)

Birmingham, Al, Us

System Administration and software development for Electrical and Computer Engineering school PR1ME mainframe, PC, and custom-built electronic systems. Assisted with connection to ARPANET (precursor to the Internet), as well as the Alabama Supercomputer Network for access to CRAY and Digital VAX VMS systems. Hands-on lab instructor and tutor for EE130 FORTRAN programming course.

Sale of various brands of IBM PC Compatible systems to retail and small business channels.

Sale, setup and repair of locally assembled IBM PC compatible systems.

Part-time (7 months per year) and full-time (5 months per year) retail sale of consumer electronics.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Ms (Summa Cum Laude), Computer Science

Bs (Cum Laude), Electrical Engineering