Before co-founding PLUMgrid, Pere was a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems in the Research and Advanced Development team, where he led innovation in the areas of cloud, security and converged infrastructure. Prior to that, he was responsible for the architecture and technology of network services and their integration with switches and routers for datacenters. Pere also led Cisco’s Service Enabled Network initiative, which contributed some of the early thoughts and ideas behind Software Defined Networks. He sponsored some of the early work around SDN, including the SIGCOMM 2008 OF prototype on Cisco’s flagship Catalyst 6500 platform. During his 12-year tenure at Cisco, Pere led the development and architecture of billion-dollar products in the area of firewalls, L4-L7 load balancing, application delivery and datacenter switching. He has filed multiple patents in the areas of networking, including control plane, data plane, security, load balancing and cloud, and is a frequent speaker at networking technology forums.