Dan Pitt has been a leading voice of the Open Networking movement since its inception. He served as executive director of ONF from 2011-2016, launching the concept of SDN into the vernacular, and since 2017 has been senior vice president of MEF (currently retired but active), applying SDN, NFV, Cloud, Disaggregation, and Open Source to the offering of new, dynamic services across a global system of automated networks.
Since 2009 he has been an Executive in Residence at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, California, the world’s foremost startup accelerator, and advises private and public companies to commercialize new ideas in broad areas of IT.
Prior to ONF he ran startup companies in Canada and Australia, served as Dean of Engineering at Santa Clara University, held executive management roles at Nortel Networks and Bay Networks, developed and managed networking technology and HP Laboratories Palo Alto and IBM Research Zurich, and taught computer science and electrical engineering at Duke and UNC.
He holds a B.S. from Duke and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois and is a Fellow of the IEEE. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and son and plays brass horns and mandolin in the band Klezmore Square.
