Andy Bechtolsheim received a MS in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1976 where he designed and implemented the Networking Controller for the CM* Multiprocessor, perhaps the first microprocessor based compute cluster. He was a PhD student in computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University from 1977 to 1982 where as a student he designed and implemented the Stanford University Network or Sun Workstation, which led to the founding of Sun Microsystems.

Andy was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems together with Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla, and Scott McNealy. From 1982 until 1995, Andy was Vice-President of Technology at Sun, leading the development of Sun’s workstations, including the very popular SPARCstation product family.

From 1995 to 1996, Andy was CEO and President of Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet Switching startup company he co-founded that Cisco acquired in September of 1996.

From 1996 to 2003 Andy was Vice President of Engineering and later General Manager for the Gigabit Systems Business Unit at Cisco System and was responsible for the development of the Catalyst 4000/4500 Gigabit Switch family, which became the highest volume modular Ethernet switching platform in history.

In 2004 Andy returned to Sun as Senior VP and Chief Architect for the Network Systems Group where he is now responsible for the architecture of the AMD Opteron server family being developed at Sun.

Andy’s professional activities include the design and architecture of high-performance workstations, servers, and network switches that have resulted in commercial sales of over $25B. Andy has also been a leading advocate for open systems standards and has participated in the standardization process for IEEE802.3 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

He has been honored with a Fulbright scholarship, a German National Merit Foundation scholarship, the Stanford Enterpreneur Company of the year award, the Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.