ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Keynote Info
Water Under The Bridges
Co-Founder, Systems Approach LLC
The bridge is one of the most common metaphors used in networking, which is why you see it on the cover of so many networking books, including several of mine. It represents the architectural element that connects things together. In my career, I have also acted as the "bridge" between communities (industry and academia, for example) and worked to forge connections between different technology areas—both multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) and software-defined networking (SDN) followed this pattern. I will discuss some of the major technological developments that I have been involved in and the factors that, in my view, enabled these technologies to have an impact. An important factor is the ability to communicate ideas to a range of different target audiences. My focus on communication also led to my early decision to write textbooks, and I will discuss the evolution of the Systems Approach series as we have sought to increase our impact on our readers.
Bio: Bruce Davie began his networking career at Bellcore in 1988 where he worked on the Aurora Gigabit testbed, a collaboration with MIT, UPenn and IBM. He then went to Cisco, where he led a team of architects responsible for Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). He worked extensively at the IETF on standardizing MPLS and various quality of service technologies. Bruce also spent five years as a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2012 he joined Software Defined Networking (SDN) startup Nicira as a lead architect and was then a principal engineer at VMware following the acquisition of Nicira. In 2017 he took on the role of VP and CTO for the Asia Pacific region at VMware. He co-founded Systems Approach with Larry Peterson in 2020 to focus on producing computer science books and educational material. He is a Fellow of the ACM and chaired ACM SIGCOMM from 2009 to 2013. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh.
