Ravindra (Ravi) Rao has been in the IT industry for over 30 years. During this time, he has worked extensively on application development and architectures, and data center architectures, as well as on the operational side of applications and data centers. He has also worked to design and implement data center and service provider networks. Prior to joining Extreme Networks, he held roles at Unisys Corporation, SUN Microsystems, Cisco Systems, VMware., Verizon, Equinix and Brocade Systems. He has spent the last 8-10 years in data center automation and has been working on integrating toolchains into a common user experience. He holds several patents on service provider and data center network automation.