About Adam

I have an uncommon combination of experience as a large-scale platform engineer and technology executive. My focus is building large-scale systems and platforms, and the products that are used to create them, first in Australia and for more that 20 years Internationally with enterprises, government and service providers. It’s involved developing and inventing technology, some of it patented, and participating in industry collaboration. Stanford Graduate School unlocked the desire to understand the overall business of technology, not just the engineering, expanding my horizons and resulting in being a founder & CEO. I can design systems, write code, create and manage engineering and product teams, manage large budgets, read a balance sheet, negotiate contracts from both sides of the table, run marketing programs, manage customer issues and relationships. I have served business and technical executive roles.

Great teams, not individuals, create successful results and I owe my success to those whom I collaborated. Great teams start with putting people first. A significant number of my teams members have been Engineers. Great Engineers are artists who are able to see beauty in their designs and code, they are smart and often introverted. I invest significant energy in creating an environment and the associated process that respects and supports every team member. Ensuring contributions are appreciated, business goals are measuring and achieved while respectfully implementing performance management is an are where I have achieved remarkable success. Combining attention to detail and going one layer deeper have driven the outsized results produced by my teams without creating unmanageable workloads. Rarely outcome of strategic planning, I consider subtraction as an equally valuable strategy to addition. Balancing subtraction with addition has created the space for my teams to go deeper with attention to details — a technique I have employed with significant success.

Dunstan Associates - Infrastructure & Networking Development Specialist

Inter dispersed with my full-time employment, I have undertaken a number of specialized consulting projects. Although I have business leadership expertise, I focus on Engineering oriented projects and roles. Consulting projects included in my profile include Mercedes Benz and Bresnan Communications.

I have extensive experience in the development of large scale platforms and the teams that support them. Networking, Cloud infrastructure (hardware & software), data collection and management are areas where I have specific expertise.

I can help create, improve or remediate the key application, platform, infrastructure projects addressing technology, team, processes and costs.

Acnodal - Co-Founder

We started Acnodal to address application access in Kubernetes. While working on building large scale multi-tenant Kubernetes systems we learned that there was not a simple solution for accessing modern, API driven production applications.

I served as the principal architect for both PureLB and the EPIC gateway. In addition I developed parts of both products, the SaaS console and infrastructure used by EPIC to deliver Gateways as a Service.

EPIC, the API Gateway platform for K8s is one of the results of our efforts. Its an Open Source API Gateway Service platform for Kubernetes supporting multi-tenant and multi-cloud kubernetes. The platform consists of a controller using the k8s Gateway API installed on any Kubernetes Cluster, the external Gateway Cluster and a Gateway-as-a-Service frontend. We solved a number of difficult problems including seamless transport between clusters and the Gateway Service using eBPF.

PureLB is an OpenSource Service LoadBalancer controller. When were were learning the low level details necessary to build the EPIC platform, we decided that while learning we could contribute to the community by developing a different and in our option better Service LoadBalancer controller. We also through that we would provide comprehensive documentation. PureLB is used by thousands of organizations and is the only Service LoadBalancer that support Dual-Stack IPv6 and in addition support an Egress Gateway function.

Most of my writing on Kubernetes in Thermokline, a Medium publication.

Thermokline - A medium publication about Kubernetes Networking

PureLB. Source @ GitLab | Documentation

EPIC. Source @ GitHub | Documentation

CTO - Daimler AG - CCP/Cloud Mobility

I was approached to run a 2 week workshop on building Cloud Systems with Opensource for Mercedes in Stuttgart. A great opportunity to learn about a new business and visit some great automotive museums.

The workshop turned into a multi-year program at Mercedes to build a large-scale cloud-computing platform based upon Kubernetes for connected and self-driving mobility applications. We developed a team, distributed throughout the world consisting of external contractors and Mercedes employees. Finding infrastructure expertize is difficult in the US, even more so Internationally, so we staffed with Developers who were interested in infrastructure and trained the team to develop infrastructure platforms. We deployed platforms in Daimler facilities in Asia, Stuttgart and a larger scale platform in a DataCenter in Munich.

Working with senior leaders at Mercedes, I learned about the Automotive business, from vehicle development through production, distribution and sales. I had the opportunity to help in many different areas of the organization, and even spent time on the factory assembly line. IT procurement adopted my methodology for purchasing equipment and applied it to the equipment purchase for their new primary German DataCenter resulting in equipment cost savings of 50%

CenturyLink - VP SDN/NFV Engineering

As part of the acquisition of Active Broadband Networks, I took an Engineering Management role. The team and I, built and deployed a full stack NFVi system, first release taking less than 12 months for deployment in 52 datacenters worldwide. We developed system management architecture to transform operational systems providing the overall framework to develop the NFVi system. The NFVi system consists of the virtualization POD based upon Openstack internally packaged and white box switches running an internally developed Network Operating System. Managed by containerized central control systems, infrastructure installation and management is fully automated with full system Orchestration and Management provided by a combination of in-house and open source tools. As the platform became automated, we also began changing associated operating procedures, by realigning process the team was able to reduced new POD installation time from 4-6 weeks to 2 days.

The development of white box switches providing the opportunity to revisit the network hardware business and experience first hand the impact of the mega-scale cloud providers and the Open Compute Project. The team developed a Network Operating System for OCP style white box switches in less than 9 months and has initiated other in-house network hardware projects.

The team continued to develop a virtualized Broadband Network Gateway, acquired in the Active Broadband Network transaction, that is truely and SDN platform using OpenDaylight controllers and high performance software based forwarding using DPDK. As we as a number of other developments including a vRouter with optional DPDK high speed forwarding.

During the merger of Centurylink and Level3 I was a member of the Integration that created the foundations for the combined company known today as Lumen.

The efforts of my team and the processes we implemented were recognized by Centurylinks vendors. During my tenure procurement estimated that my efforts resulted in capital savings of over $250M.

I was also regularly in the press and on the speaking circuit, here are some examples.

CenturyLink to Open Source NFVi Orchestrator - LightReading

Virtualization & Automation - Intel Chip Chat

CenturyLink says CORD will reduce costs, increase broadband response times - Fierce Telecom

CenturyLink Delivers DSL Using CORD Platform - LightReading

CenturyLink Surges Forward with Its Own Version of CORD - SDx Central

CenturyLink VP: CORD Benefits Exceed Expectations - Broadband World News

CenturyLink: Kill Complexity to Speed NFV - LightReading

Fireside Chat: DevOps Growing Pains - Highlights

Active Broadband Networks - Founder, President & CEO

At Active Broadband Networks we developed pioneering intelligent network control software for Cable Operators and created the first high performance software based Broadband Edge NFVi platform for Fixed Broadband providers. Our customers included the worlds largest operators.

Software Defined Broadband Network Gateway The Software Defined Broadband Network Gateway (SD-BNG) was the second product family developed by Active Broadband Networks, the worlds first Virtualized Broadband Network Gateway. The SD-BNG was an all software solution designed to be deployed in Central Offices providing DSL and GPON services. Unlike the solutions it displaced, the platform separated the control plane and forwarding plane enabling scale and virtualization. The control plane was one of the first complex OpenDaylight controller implementations using a scalable OpenFlow implementation and a purpose built service activation component that removed the need for any changes in IT systems. The forwarding engine was another “first of its kind”, developed using Intel’s DPDK for use on Intel platform’s under visualization. Traditionally software-based forwarding engines have suffered from poor performance when large numbers of QoS queues are in use. As per subscriber queueing is a BNG requirement, we developed and patented a unique hybrid future-time scheduler that supported popular queuing mechanism while managing hundreds of thousands of queues and maintaining high performance. The SD-BNG was the worlds first “CORD™ architecture” platform

The SD-BNG along with the engineering team was acquired by CenturyLink in 2016.

ABN Introduces SDN Controller for Edge Access

Active Resource Manager The Active Resource Manager combines Network and Subscriber Data Management with Policy Management to deliver a comprehensive Subscriber, Service and Application Management solution for Broadband Service Providers. Developed and deployed before the advent of BigData technology, the Active Resource Manager provided a proven scalable usage data collection platform, with integrated service management algorithms, policy manager and PCRF. Its uses included Usage Based Billing, Tiered & threshold subscriber management, Turnkey Prepaid Service as well as other security and capacity management applications. The Active Resource Manager was deployed by some of the worlds largest providers including Comcast where the platform managed 30 million devices, Cox Communications and Liberty Global companies including Virgin Media.

The inspiration for Active Broadband Networks was the result of an extended consulting project that I undertook for the Cable Operator Bresnan Communications where we rebuilt their IP backbone as they acquired properties.

The Active Resource Manager IPR was acquired by Incognito in 2016 ABN Announces Active Resource Manager Incognito Acquires Active Broadband Networks OSS business

Bresnan Communications - Network Architect

Bresnan Communications was a Cable Broadband Operator. I was contracted following their acquisition of a number of different MSO properties to redesign and implement their IP Backbone network. Bresnan was also suffering from reliability problems with their Broadband routers (CMTS), I undertook a detailed hardware and software analysis of the platform determining that the root case was a problem with a non-replaceable ASIC component.

My work helped Bresnan combine multiple different broadband properties into a reliable platform that met their Broadband Internet customers needs.

3Com - Enterprise Marketing

A short visit during the autumn years of a once great company….. My role was management of Enterprise Marketing. 3Com had become a consumer focused company and my programs were focused on developing larger size transactions by focusing on solutions for Enterprise customers. My primary program called “6 pack” bought together a cross functional team to develop tools for providing sales with all of the information necessary to develop Enterprise business based upon six key offers.

Avici Systems

An exciting time during the rapid growth of the Internet Infrastructure. A venture funded company that went public in 2000, we built the worlds first hyper-scalable terabit router. First to market with 10G (OC192) and implemented the worlds first 10G Internet Backbone at AT&T. Built using supercomputer technology, in-house silicon and software, the platform was fascinating and I was lucky to work with some truly brilliant people. I had a variety of Executive roles building the company, marketing, product management, engineering and business development.

While at Avici System I attended Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Wellfleet/Bay Networks

At Wellfleet/Bay Networks I was Principle Corporate Systems Engineer focused on the largest networking projects, Product Manager for IP routing and worked in M&A. Large notable projects were are Stock Exchanges, Banks and Communication companies. Of note was the multicast network used by Raytheon to implement Wide Area Augmented GPS, the foundation of the modern accurate GPS systems that reduced flight times between LA and NY by almost an hour. Designed and implemented the replacement of the market data feed at the NYSE, as well as networks at a number of other Internal Stock exchanges including the ASX.

Australia

Following my service in the Royal Australian Navy, I was employed by a number of companies as a Systems Engineer, some may be familiar. ACI Computer Services, Imagineering, Infotron and Wellfleet prior to moving to the United States. At each company I worked on large scale network infrastructure projects for large corporations and government. Networking was much more diverse prior to the broad use of IP technology, projects include Voice Networking at ANZ bank using TDMs. Multiprotocol networking at the Age Newspaper. The largest project being the design and implementation of the Network, Server, Mainframe and Workstation infrastructure for the Australian Taxation Office in the 1980s, at the time the largest project ever awarded in Australia.

Optical Internetworking Forum

While employed at Avici Systems, I served on the Board of Directors and as President of the Optical Internetworking Forum.

Patents & Standards

SYSTEM AND METHOD OF ADAPTIVE CONGESTION MANAGEMENT Patent date Issued Nov 10, 2020 Patent issuer and number US20200021526

PRE-PAID SERVICE SYSTEM AND METHOD Patent date Issued Oct 13, 2015
Patent issuer and number US9,159,038

SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR NETWORK CONTENT DELIVERY Patent date Issued Oct 13, 2015
Patent issuer and number US9,158,769

METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR FORWARDING MULTICAST DATA BY RELAYING IGMP GROUP MEMBERSHIP Patent date Issued Nov 25, 2003
Patent issuer and number US6654371

Cable Modem Operations Support System Interface Specification CM-SP-CM-OSSIv3.1