
Israel Cidon is a chaired professor and a former dean of Electrical Engineering at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. He is currently a visiting professor at Stanford University. Israel was also involved in technology startups and companies.
In 2012, Israel co-founded Sookasa that enables corporates to use, secure and manage consumer cloud storage services. In 2000, he co-founded Actona Technologies that pioneered the fields of Wide Area File Systems (WAFS) and WAN optimization. Actona was acquired by Cisco in 2004 and is the source of Cisco, Wide Area Application Services (WAAS). In 1998 he co-founded Viola Networks, the provider of Netally, a distributed active network testing suite that was acquired by Fluke Networks in 2008. In 1981 he co-founded Micronet, an early vendor of mobile computers (Israeli IPO 2006).
In 1985-94 he was a research member and the manager of the Network Architecture and Algorithms group at IBM Research in NY, leading the first implementations of triple-play packet network and metropolitan optical resilient packet rings (was also the technology behind IBM’s first storage area network). He received the IBM outstanding innovation award in 1989 and 1993. In 1994-5 he started and lead high-speed networking at Sun Labs, Mountain View., working on open network control architectures.
His academic research covers aspects of data networks including mobility, wireless, Internet and Network on Chip (NoC). He is a co-author of over 170 refereed papers and 27 US patents.