Israel Cidon

VP, Researcher

Palo Alto, CA, US

I joined VMware Research in March 2017. Before VMware, I was a professor of Elect. Eng. at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Between 2005-2010 I was the dean of the Electrical Engineering Faculty at the Technion.

Between 1985-94 I was the manager of Network Architecture and Algorithms at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, NY, leading several computer networks projects including the first implementations of a packet based triple play network, hardware based router and IBM’s first storage area network. For these works, I received twice the IBM outstanding innovation award. In 1994-5 I founded and managed the high-speed networking group at Sun Microsystems Labs in Mountain View, working on software defined networks for ATM.

In 1982 I co-founded Micronet Ltd., an early vendor of mobile hand held computers for data entry applications (IPO 2007, TLV: MCRNL). In 1998 I co-founded Viola Networks, a vendor of IP networks and VoIP performance diagnostic distributed platform (acquired by Fluke Networks in 2008). In 2000, I co-founded Actona Technologies which pioneered the technology of Wide Area File Systems (WAFS) a major component of WAN optimization. Actona was acquired by Cisco in 2004 and became Cisco WAN optimization product termed WAAS (Wide Area Application Services). In 2012, I co-founded Sookasa, a SaaS security service (acquired by Barracuda Networks in 2016).

I am the co-author of over 170 refereed papers and 38 US patents. My research interests include wireless, SD-WAN and overlay network architectures, distributed systems and on chip networks (NoC).