Darien is an SDN professional working for a vendor-neutral SDN services company aptly titled: SDN Essentials. He has been working in networking for nearly a decade on service provider, data center, and enterprise networks. He earned a Master's degree in network engineering from UC Santa Cruz and a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He also holds three JNCIE certifications and is equally passionate about both the 'software' and 'networking' parts of SDN.