Ronak Desai

Ronak Desai is Vice President of ACI Engineering for Cisco’s Data Center Business Group, a team made up of top engineering talent from both small start-ups and large corporations from across the Silicon Valley. The team is responsible for the development and architecture for Cisco’s Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and iNXOS based Nexus 9000 switches. APIC is the unifying point of automation and management for the Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) fabric. The Cisco APIC provides centralized access to all fabric information, optimizes the application lifecycle for scale and performance, and supports flexible application provisioning across physical and virtual resources. ACI is a key component of Cisco’s Intent-Based Networking for the Data Center.

Prior to his current role at Cisco, Ronak served as the Senior Director of Engineering at Insieme Networks, responsible for the development and architecture for the APIC controller. Insieme Networks was acquired by Cisco in December of 2013. Prior to Insieme, Ronak held various engineering roles at Cisco, including Director of Engineering leading NX-OS infrastructure, Fabric Path, VPC, Virtualization on NX-OS. He led MDS Storage virtualization and was an early engineer on SAN-OS (pre-cursor to NX-OS) and served as the technical lead for an earlier Cisco acquisition – Andiamo Systems.

Ronak has been a key contributor in virtualization integrations, OVS strategy and other aspects of policy driven infrastructure, with a specialty in scalable design, and holds 46 technology patents.

Ronak holds a Master of Technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.