Ms. Susan Hares

An internationally recognized leader in commercialized advanced networking technologies and products, she has more than 30 years of experience in designing and deploying routing protocols and architectures. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, and a Masters of Organizational Leadership from Regent University Business School, where she is currently in the Ph.D. Program. She led the technology qualification, development, and strategic planning functions at NextHop Technologies. Prior to launching NextHop Technologies, she spent 13 years at Merit Network Inc. where she most recently directed the Merit GateD Consortium. She was also a Senior Engineer at both Allen- Bradley Corp. and ADP Inc. She then served as the Senior Director in the United States at Huawei Technologies, IPBU's Standards for the Network Product Line. During her tenure, she led a multi-national team of Internet researchers pushing the boundaries of Internet technology in optical, edge of the network SDN, and data center technology. She was previously Director of Networking Solutions at Green Hills Software, where she guided a team to put routing software on a secure OS, and created the basis for a secure data center switch with multiple chassis. She co-chairs the Internet Engineering Task Force? s (IETF's) inter-domain routing group that is standardizing border gateway protocol. She is also a member of the NANOG (North American Network Operators' Group) steering committee. In 2013, she joined ADARA Networks as Vice President of Technology and Strategy, where she is responsible for direction of ADARA's industry-leading software defined networking technology and strategy, participation and contribution to defining SDN standards and collaborating with service providers and technology vendors in the advancement of OpenFlow, Interface to the Routing System (I2RS), Network Functions Virtualization (NVF) and other emerging SDN and virtualization technologies. She is co-author on the BGP specification; used to make the core routing decisions on the Internet, BGP is considered industry-wide to be the most important protocol of the Internet.