John Harper

Resume - John Harper

John Harper is currently Vice-President of Engineering at Anagran Inc, a Silicon Valley startup building an innovative IP router and flow manager based on flow-routing technology, founded by Dr Larry Roberts. There he is responsible for all aspects of product strategy and development, including hardware, software and FPGA engineering. He has also been a key individual contributor to the company's technology, with particular emphasis on the real-tme algorithms for successfully managing TCP traffic in the Internet.

Previously John was VP for IOS Engineering at Cisco Systems, responsible for the common software that runs on all Cisco routers, based at Cisco's headquarters in San Jose, California. His responsibility included all of the platform-independent software for routing protocols, multicast, IP mobility, IPv6, security, quality of service and several other functions.This software is the key to Cisco's success and directly supports over half of Cisco's revenue. The group consisted of around 300 people, in several locations including San Jose, North Carolina, Tokyo, Great Britain and India. While in this role, John created an engineering group in Tokyo, to take advantage of Japan's leadership in areas such as mobile and broadband communications and IPv6. Managing this complex, concurrent development environment was a major element of John's responsibility. He instigated and led the development of many areas of technology leadership, such as secure virtual private networks, rapid network convergence, network route optimisation and multi-topology routing. During his five years in this role, John also put in place many initiatives aimed at raising the quality of IOS, resulting in a substantial increase in customer satisfaction rating for IOS quality.

John is an experienced senior engineering manager, with over 25 years experience of management. He also has a solid record as a leader and individual contributor in complex software, telecommunications and networking, and is an inventor of 25 patents. He has a passion for algorithms and networking, and remains an active software developer both professionally and for his own interest.

John holds a first-class honours degree in Computer Science from the University of Lancaster, England. He has several personal interests including flying, building vacuum tube amplifiers, and modern languages.

Key Skills

Engineering management: product development planning, delivery to schedule, quality management, for large software and hardware developments.

Computing Technology: object-oriented methodology, distributed and client/server computing, contemporary software engineering and computer science. John has a strong interest in algorithm design, especially distributed algorithms. His preference for networking over the years has been mainly because of the tough problems it poses in this regard.

Hands-on development experience of large projects using C/C++, Boost, PHP, MySql, Python, assembler and several other languages.

Data Networking and Telecommunications: design, implementation and use of network communication protocols including the Internet and others; network routing protocols; integration of voice and data networks.

General management: planning, budgeting, managing to budget, recruitment, company management.

Successfully managing multi-national research and development, both from the headquarters and as leader of a remote organisation. This is hard to get right, and John has a very solid track record of making remote groups work as well as or better than the HQ teams

Intellectual Property: John has extensive involvement in patents and related aspects of intellectual property. At Cisco he supervised the patent process in the area of IP routing, which resulted in the filing of around 100 patents per year.

Organizational: including many positions where influence and leadership are more significant than power, as well as more traditional project and people management roles.

Languages: John speaks French at a bilingual level, and basic conversational German and Japanese. He is a native English speaker.

Working cultures: John has lived or worked in the UK, the US, Belgium, France and Germany, and has worked closely with teams in Japan and India.

Standards: John has chaired a large international standards committee in ISO, and has participated in many committees in ISO, ITU-T, IETF, ETSI and elsewhere. He is familiar with the standardization process and the challenges of being effective in this environment.

Career History

2006 - present	Vice President, Engineering, Anagran Inc (see above)
2001 - 2006	Vice President, IOS Routing, Cisco Systems Inc (see above)
1999 - 2001	Director, IOS Europe, Cisco Systems Inc. John joined Cisco to run the IOS Europe group. During this time he grew the organisation from 28 people to over 80.
1995 - 1999	Founder and CEO of Q3 Consulting, a technology consulting company covering the convergence of computing technology and telcommunications. Q3's largest single assignment was to build a technical team responsible for the design and procurement for a satellite-based multimedia communications system at Inmarsat, the world's leading operator of communications satellites. This system entered service in 2005.
1974 - 1995	Many positions at Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), including: Engineering Manager and Technical Director, Telecommunications Business Group: Network Management and Intelligent Networks Technical Director, Wide Area Networking: responsible for network protocol architecture of DECnet, TCP/IP and open networking. During this time, John also chaired a major international standards committee, with over 100 members from all major countries. Various technical and management roles in Digital Equipment in networking, operating systems and programming languages.
1971 - 1974	University of Lancaster, Lancaster, England, resulting in First Class Honours degree in Computer Science.