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 based on flow-routing technology, founded by Dr Larry Roberts. There he is responsible for all aspects of product development, including hardware, software and FPGA engineering.

Previously John was VP for Core IP Engineering at Cisco Systems, reporting to the Vice President for IOS (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 and several other functions. His responsibilities have also included the Quality of Service and security functions in the routers, such as IPSec, NAT and Firewall. This software is the key to Cisco's success and directly supports over half of Cisco's revenue. The group consisted of around 250 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.

IOS is one of the most complex pieces of software in the industry, with around 20 million lines of source code. The nature of Cisco's product line means that there are several variants for the different hardware platforms, all of which are under concurrent development leading to dozens of distinct software releases every year. Managing this parallel 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 over fifteen patents (filed and issued). He has a passion for algorithms and networking, and remains an active software developer for his own interest. He 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.
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.
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 they pose in this regard.
Data Networking: design, implementation and use of network communication protocols including the Internet and others; network routing protocols; integration of voice and data networks.
Telecommunications: in depth knowledge of telecommunications technology and the telecommunications environment, and specialist knowledge of satellite technology.
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.
Intellectual Property: John has extensive involvement in patents and related aspects of intellectual property. At Cisco he supervises the patent process in the area of IP routing, which results 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 speaks some German and Japanese as well. He is a native English speaker.
Working cultures: John has lived or worked in the UK, the US, Belgium, France and Germany. He currently manages a group in Japan and takes a keen interest in the Japanese culture and language.

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, which developed components of IOS. During this time he grew the organisation from 28 people to over 80. Under his leadership the group was assigned responsibility for key areas of technology such as IPv6 and the IOS router packet forwarding system (CEF). The group now reports to John in his present role, and continues to have a very high reputation within Cisco.
1998 - 1999	CTO and VP Engineering (under contract from Q3 Consulting) for TPS Labs GmbH, Munich, Germany. TPS was a German-financed startup in the field of Customer Relationship Management, with an innovative product (TPS-Oceans) in use at Compaq, Vokswagen and elsewhere. John ran the software development and strategy group, about 40 people. The company was later acquired by MGM-EDV, which still delivers this software.
1995 - 1999	Founder and CEO of Q3 Consulting, a technology consulting company covering the convergence of computing technology and telcommunications. Q3 grew in four years to an annual turnover which exceeded $1M. 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.
1991 - 1995	Engineering Manager and Technical Director, Telecommunications Business Group, Digital Equipment Corp (DEC). Responsible for an 80 person group developing software for the telecommunications industry, based in Sophia Antipolis, France. His responsibilities included the widely-used TeMIP product for telecommunications network management, and a suite of products for Intelligent Networks.
1987 - 1991	Technical Director, Wide Area Networking, Digital Equipment Corp. Responsible for network protocol architecture for the evolution of DECnet to open standards (TCP/IP and OSI), and for early development of router systems. During this time, John also chaired a major international standards committee, with over 100 members from all major countries.
1974 - 1987	Various technical and management roles in Digital Equipment in networking, operating systems and programming languages.