Dear colleagues and friends,

I’ve arrived at a point in my journey where I’ve decided to shift the balance of things in which I invest my energy. At the end of the current quarter I’ll bring my time as an always-on industry analyst to a close and step forward energetically into a new phase.

Looking back, over the last 40 years, I’ve had the good fortune to work in depth on many of the innovations that now help our digitally powered lives to be as productive and creative as they are:.

• High-performance computing and transaction processing at IBM
• Development of the IP (and related) protocols at BBN
• Refinements to IP and development of tag switching and MPLS at Cisco
• Emergence of traffic engineering in MPLS and its close cousin tagged VLANs at Juniper
• Evolution of virtual computing and its SDN enablers at Juniper, ongoing into ACG
• Extensive exploration of cloud-native computing and distributed multi-clouds in many environments at ACG
• Fascinating work on the emergence of deep learning, training and deployment of AI models and integrating AI into digitally powered operations in many sectors (a journey just beginning)

There’s more to the list, it could go on, but it’s easy to see the trajectory. What a great ride it’s been!

I send deep and heartfelt thanks to those of you with whom I’ve worked closely and hard on what makes an innovation successful and gets it ready to use. There’s little more rewarding in work than realizing you’re onto a great new idea and putting its pieces together to bring it to life and create value.

To those of you carrying on in your journeys, I offer enthusiastic encouragement and best wishes for success. Keep dreaming and driving, stay alert, focus hard on creating value. There’s so much good work to be done, so many areas in which we know there’s progress to be made even if we aren’t certain of the end points.

For me though it’s time to broaden the mix, enjoy even more time with family and friends, see parts of the world I haven’t gotten to yet, engage in some areas where I’m inspired to contribute but haven’t had a real chance to before (clean energy and industry, STEM education, and support for human rights among them). And I retain enough fascination with AI-powered digital solutions that I may end up doing a special project or two down the road in that realm (tbd).

In the meantime, thanks a million, keep dreaming and inventing and collaborating to get results. Thank you for your congratulation messages. Who knows maybe we’ll run into each other along the way.

All the best,

PJ