SDN can stand for:

Pradeep Sindhu is the Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer/ Vice Chairman of the Board of the Directors of Juniper Networks Inc. He was also the CEO of the company until 1996. Sindhu is considered a technical visionary in the field of high performance and networked computing.

Sindhu holds a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering (1974) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, M.S. in Electrical Engineering (1976) from the University of Hawaii, and a Ph.D (1982) in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University where he studied under Bob Sproull.

Sindhu had worked at the Computer Science Lab of Xerox PARC for 11 years. Sindhu worked on design tools for very-large-scale integration(VLSI) of integrated circuits and high-speed interconnects for shared memory multiprocessors.

Sindhu founded Juniper Networks along with Dennis Ferguson, and Bjorn Liencres in February 1996 in California. The company was subsequently reincorporated in Delaware on March 1998 in and went public on the 25th of June, 1999.

Scott Shenker is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He is also the head of the Networking Group and the Vice President of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. He received his Sc.B. in Physics from Brown University in 1978, and his PhD in Physics from University of Chicago in 1983. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE. He is brother of string theorist Stephen Shenker.

In 1995, Shenker, contributed to the field of energy-efficient processor scheduling, co-authoring a paper on deadline-based scheduling with Frances Yao and Alan Demers.

In 2002, Scott Shenker received the SIGCOMM Award in recognition of his "contributions to Internet design and architecture, to fostering research collaboration, and as a role model for commitment and intellectual rigor in networking research".

In 2006, he received the IEEE Internet Award "For contributions towards an understanding of resource sharing on the Internet."

Nicholas William McKeown, better known as Nick McKeown, is an English-American expert in computer networking. His career includes both education and starting companies in Silicon Valley.

Nick McKeown was born April 7, 1963 in Bedford, England.^{[citation needed]} He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Leeds in 1986. From 1986 through 1989 he worked for Hewlett-Packard Labs, in their network and communications research group in Bristol, England. He moved to the United States in 1989 and earned both his master's degree in 1992 and PhD in 1995 from the University of California at Berkeley. During Spring 1995, he worked briefly for Cisco Systems where he helped design their GSR 12000 router. His PhD thesis was on "Scheduling Cells in an Input-Queued Cell Switch", with advisor Professor Jean Walrand. He joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1995 as assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science. In 1997 McKeown co-founded Abrizio Inc. with Anders Swahn, where he was CTO. Abrizio was acquired by PMC-Sierra in 1999 for stock shares worth $400 million. He was promoted to associate professor in 2002. He was co-founder in 2003 (with Sundar Iyer) and CEO of Nemo Systems, which Cisco Systems bought for $12.5 million cash in 2005. He became faculty director of the Clean Slate Program in 2006, and was promoted to full professor in 2010.