1996 – 2007
Cabletron and Enterasys
Where the career began, and the enterprise LAN was learned from the ground up.
The longest single thread in this history runs through one company and its successor. Cabletron Systems, a leading networking equipment vendor based in Rochester, New Hampshire, was the first employer, starting in 1996. When Cabletron reorganized into four companies in 2000, the line carried forward as Enterasys Networks, and the relationship resumed there from 2005. Together these span the formative decade of enterprise networking expertise.
The corporate lineage
Cabletron, 1996 to 2000
Over four and a half years, the role moved through the full arc of vendor engineering: field engineering and post-sales support, systems engineering and pre-sales, and, from 1997, certified instruction. The subject was the enterprise LAN and WAN of the era: switches and routers, Wi-Fi and WLAN, network management, NAC and UAC, and stateful-inspection firewalls. This was where the discipline of solution design, implementation, auditing, troubleshooting, and escalation management was first practiced, and where teaching first entered the work.
Enterasys, 2005 to 2007
Returning to the lineage as a services and support manager, the focus was the Secure Routing product line, with Enterasys as the regional focal point for Brazil. The work combined high-level customer support, complex troubleshooting, and escalation management with localized product management. The technical surface had grown to include network management, NAC and UAC, intrusion detection and prevention, and SIEM, across enterprise switching and routing. Enterasys was later acquired by Extreme Networks in 2013, closing a circle that connects this early work to a platform still taught today.
Certifications
Cabletron Systems Engineer (CSE), 1999. Enterasys Systems Engineer (ESE), 2000 and 2007. Enterasys Certified Internetworking Engineer (ECIE), 2007.