About Bill

I've spent more than 25 years building networks and the teams that design them. My career started at Sun Microsystems as a staff network consultant, where I designed and deployed what was then the largest data center at Sun. Since then I've worked on every side of the table: field engineer, engineering leader, product specialist, and the person ultimately responsible for making the network run.

At Extreme Networks I built and led a worldwide sales engineering organization of more than 300 engineers, and later ran wireless product strategy. At Infoblox I was SE Manager for the Western US. I built that team from scratch while carrying my own territory, and I personally sold and installed DNS, DHCP and IPAM deployments for enterprise customers. I went on to serve as President ofDeepDive Networking, a professional services firm focused entirely on Infoblox, where I led enterprise migrations from Microsoft DNS/DHCP and BIND to Infoblox. I was also a contracted instructor for Infoblox's corporate training program, delivering its official DNS, DHCP and IPAM curriculum to a large number of enterprise IT teams.

At F5 I was the major-accounts SE for Microsoft and F5's global subject-matter lead for DNS and GTM. At Juniper Networks I joined the Apstra team, where I co-developed the Terraform provider for Apstra and a Go SDK for its REST API.

Most recently I led network engineering for a multi-gigawatt AI and HPC data center campus, building the network from the ground up: an Apstra-managed EVPN-VXLAN fabric deployed entirely with Terraform, automated Infoblox DDI, a Mist-managed out-of-band network, and diverse-path dark fiber back to the metro. Read the case study.

How I work now

Today I work directly with organizations that need senior, hands-on network expertise without hiring a full-time architect. My core focus is Juniper (SRX firewalls, EX and QFX switching, and MX and M series routing) and the automation around it: Apstra, Terraform and infrastructure as code. Some clients need a VPN that won't come up fixed this week. Others need a data center fabric designed and automated, or a team brought up to speed on DDI.

I'm based in Chewelah, Washington, and work remotely with clients across the US, traveling on-site when a project needs it.