Company: Talari Networks, Inc., San Jose, CA
Entry Submitted By: Flashpoint Group
Company Description: Talari Networks is improving WAN reliability, capacity and affordability to enable a network that supports the growing demands of mission-critical applications. By aggregating multiple diverse networks into a virtual WAN and continuously adapting traffic based on the availability and real-time quality of the network paths, Talari ensures applications that rely on a WAN are not affected by underlyi
Nomination Category: Information Technology Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Information Technology Executive of the Year

Nomination Title: John Dickey, Chief Technology Officer & Cofounder

1. Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since January 1 2013 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

John Dickey is the co-founder and chief architect for Talari’s patented Adaptive Private Networking (APN) technology. Companies across industries and around the world depend on APN to create reliable Wide Area Networks (WANs) to ensure their network is never affected by outages, quality issues or performance problems.

In May 2013, the latest release of APN was awarded the highly coveted Best of Interop 2013 Award in the “Performance Optimization & Testing” category. And, in March 2014, APN Aware network performance management software was launched to customers. Due to current IT trends such as server virtualization, cloud-based services, mobility and BYOD, and Unified Communications and VoIP, John believes traditional networking needs to be more flexible and easier to change. WANs specifically have not been responsive to company priorities, changing network demand and actual network conditions.

APN is a giant leap forward, driven by John's vision of next generation networks and the need to create flexible, scalable and reliable WANs. John recently conceived and drove the development of APN Aware, a complementary solution to its flagship APN operating software, which brings valuable information together into a centralized location, giving IT teams a holistic and unified view of real-time and historical reporting on the quality of every individual link on a WAN. This allows them to identify and fix network problems more quickly and achieve higher availability and quality of the network. While the APN software makes intelligent, real-time decisions protecting and improving the performance of applications, the APN Aware solution empowers IT administrators to make intelligent strategic decisions though monitoring, managing and purchasing of WAN resources. Aware also empowers network managers with granular historical and real-time statistics in the form of reports, graphs and movies about their company's network performance over time, which they can use to enforce, and sometimes renegotiate, SLA (Service Level Agreement) contracts with their service providers.

John has co-authored eight patents related to Talari’s breakthrough APN technology and has an additional 29 patents pending for its innovation bringing more WAN reliability, performance predictability and bandwidth efficiency (i.e., cost savings) to main offices, branch offices and SOHO/home office environments. From a management perspective, John is highly inspired by the German apprentice model of paid-on-the-job training with constant nurturing for craftsmanship and excellence when creating his team. In particular, John is committed to hiring veterans and to this day will interview any veteran that submits a resume. These veterans plus composers, teachers, artists and others are now highly skilled network engineers and product designers for Talari.

John and three of his four children have a form of high functioning autism and John has always been highly sensitive to and understanding of the unique gifts of each individual’s mind, whether it is neuro-typical or not. John and his wife Tara are active in the autism community in North Carolina, and John has actively provided opportunities for teenagers with HFA to work as interns at Talari, providing critical early work experience in a place that is unique in how it welcomes and admires the diversity of the mind.

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Before co-founding Talari Networks, John Dickey was senior director of software engineering at Applied Microcircuits (AMCC), where he led the architecture, design, and development of a broad array of switching and routing protocol software implementations for embedded systems. John joined AMCC upon its acquisition of MMC Networks, the pioneering maker of network-optimized processors (NPUs). He was also the founding Chair of the Network Processing Forum industry standards organization's Software Working Group and holds patents in multiple areas of networking technology. Prior to MMC, John held a variety of engineering and management positions at IBM and was distinguished as an Advisory Engineer. John earned a degree cum laude in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh.