This presentation will cover the most recent efforts in the area of OAM standardization at the IETF including L2VPN, L3VPN, Pseudowires and MPLS, as well as cast some light on where the future direction of standards in this area are headed. The discussion will also touch on the details of some of the existing approaches being built upon these standards such as the Embedded OAM/managmenet solutions being developed by by Cisco Systems.

Bio:
Tom works at Cisco Systems where he is the technical leader of MPLS network management and OAM development. He leads a team of that design and develops MIBs and other OAM and management tools for Cisco's routing and switching platforms. He also works on other network management-related activities at Cisco such as GMPLS, L2/L3 VPNs, Traffic Engineering, Pseudo-wire Emulation, and SNMP in general. He is co-author of all but one of the MPLS and GMPLS, and PWE3 IETF MIBs, as well as numerous other IETF protocol and architecture documents. Tom has filed several patents for network management technology.

He received his BSCS from The University of New Hampshire in 1993, and a MSc from The University of Massachusetts in Lowell in 2000, where he has been an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science since then. He teaches courses in the topic of data communications. He is the technical editor of Enabling VPN Aware Network With MPLS (Prentice-Hall Publishers, 2001), and author of MPLS Network Management: Tools and Techniques (Morgan-Kaufman, 2002). The anticipated publication date of Tom's second book entitled, "MPLS Operations and Management" is late in 2004.