Paul Congdon – Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder, Tallac Networks

paul congdonPaul Congdon is Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Tallac Networks, Inc. He is responsible for innovation and the technical direction of Tallac Networks contributions in wireless, Software Defined Networking and application development. Paul is also currently the Chair of the Wireless and Mobile Working Group in the Open Networking Foundation. In his 28 years in the networking industry, he has become widely esteemed as an inventor and leader in driving the networking industry.

Before joining Tallac, Paul was a Fellow at Hewlett-Packard, leading wireless research in HPLabs and held positions as CTO for HP’s ProCurve Networking Business Unit, Vice Chair of the IEEE 802.1 committee and Technical Advisor for the IETF RADIUS Extensions Working Group. Paul earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis and his Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, and Master of Science degrees from California State University, Chico.

His long-time activities with the IEEE 802 standards efforts involved him in the creation of the Ethernet LAN and a wide range of network devices and technologies, including routers, Layer 2/3/4 switches, iSCSI storage devices, SNA, X.25, FDDI, Ethernet, wireless LANs, virtual LANs, link aggregation, LLDP, Virtual Edge Port Aggregators (VEPA) and access security protocols, including IEEE 802.1X. He is co-inventor of the commonly used TCP checksum offloading, a program for accelerating the networking performance of TCP/IP within servers. He currently holds 12 patents related to the networking industry and has several more in process. When Paul is not working or spending time with his family he enjoys numerous outdoor and competitive activities such as snow skiing, mountain biking, running, swimming and baseball.