A look back at the contributions of Jean Tourrilhes, the first ONF Fellow.
ONF makes a practice of recognizing our outstanding volunteer contributors, at all of our Member Workday meetings, for their efforts to move open SDN forward. During the past two ONF Member Workdays, the organization has bestowed a new and higher-level award than ever before, that of ONF Fellow. The first ONF Fellow title was bestowed on Jean Tourrilhes, researcher with Hewlett Packard Labs, the central research organization for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, in September 2015. Let me tell you a little about Jean.
Jean has played a seminal and pivotal role in the development and progression of the OpenFlow protocol since its early days at Stanford University. When we launched ONF Jean helped take the OpenFlow protocol from university project to industry standard by coordinating the efforts of the numerous parties involved – vendors as well as network operators – who are collectively a creative and hugely talented group but also a bit of a ragtag one. Jean was able to channel their energies into forging an industrial-strength standard by establishing procedures and schedules and by gently applying judgment and wisdom to move the group in one direction and with real-world practicality in mind. As chair of what was called the Extensibility Working Group, Jean set an example for all of ONF in demanding rigor and quality, fairness and openness, in our work and work products. Jean has thus been invaluable to the open SDN movement as a whole, and he deserves all of our gratitude and admiration.
HPE’s Curt Hopkins recently wrote a wonderfully descriptive post about Jean and the ONF fellowship for their Behind the Scenes at Labs blog. I highly recommend giving it a read: http://community.hpe.com/t5/Behind-the-scenes-Labs/Labs-researcher-elected-as-first-ONF-fellow/ba-p/6843799#.Vx_YCPkrKUl
In another post I will tell you about Ben Pfaff, our second ONF Fellow. His story is equally inspiring.
- Dan Pitt, Executive Director
