As part of the IETF-In-India blog series, we decided to do an interview with Mr Dhurv Dhody who has been very actively participating in IETF for last few years.
Dhruv Dhody has 12 years of experience in Data-com Networking domain. He is currently leading a team working on research, standards and proof of concepts for various SDN and SDN transition projects (PCE as central controller, Segment Routing, ONOS, Openstack etc). He has worked on various protocols and technologies mainly in the Routing and MPLS TE area. He has represented Huawei-India at various external forums (IETF, IEEE, etc), published 3 RFC, 8 WG drafts, 14 Patents and various White Papers.
Bharat: Thanks a lot Dhruv for taking some time out to respond to these questions. Let me start with something I have been really curious to know. How did you come to know about IETF?
Dhruv: I came to know about it when I read my first RFC, almost 12 years back as I had to implement the VPN drafts for Huawei. I became really fascinated about the RFCs and IETF processes.
Bharat: Twelve years is a long time. So what motivated you to keep participating in IETF?
Dhruv: During initial time, what really excited me was to find gaps in the current standards and propose ideas on how to resolve them. More recently, I have been participating in IETF to learn and collaborate with others to generate new ideas. Seeing your ideas solving a problem gives a huge amount of satisfaction. I was lucky to be well supported by Huawei.
Bharat: Any specific experience of IETF you would like to share with us?
Dhruv: IETF uses NomCom to select IETF leadership. I was also a part of NomCom a few years back. It was quite a fulfilling experience.
Bharat: What do you think India should do to get more participation in IETF?
Dhruv: All companies based in India should push their engineers to participate and attend IETF. People can start participating with mailing list then remote participation and attending meetings. We can also set up remote hubs (similar to what the latin America did during IETF meetings). We need support from organizations with government support/funding – Dosti etc
Bharat: Very well said. Couple of weeks back, I wrote a blog post about Contributing-In-IETF – Where to start in DSCI Blog. I really liked the idea of remote hubs.
Bharat: How has your company helped you in your participation in IETF?
Dhruv: Funding, pushing us towards innovation and generation of new ideas, work in collaborations with others for open source and open standards, have been some of the ways in which IETF has helped us.
Bharat: Thank you Dhruv for your time today. You are an inspiration to so many of us. We wish you the very best for all your future endeavours.