Hello from Prague, where the IETF will be next week. Acting on a request, I did some statistical massaging of the Internet Draft directory and the IETF meeting site, to see what Cisco was working on in IETF 93 [http://www.ietf.org/meeting/93/index.html ].
The IETF community is fairly large and sprawling - and frequently hidden in various ways. In the Internet Draft directory, I find a total of 2780 different email addresses. At Cisco, for every person who is writing drafts in the IETF (all 256 of them, at this writing), we probably have a team of ten more that she or he is working with and a larger community of interest; if that holds elsewhere, the IETF community might easily be on the order of 30,000 people worldwide. These people obviously include vendors like Cisco; it also includes many of our customers, the operators that run networks of various descriptions from backbone transit to broadband access and mobile networks, and some of the larger enterprise and academic campus and research networks. As such, it also includes academics, researchers, and frankly anyone else touched by the Internet. It also includes regulators, who come to learn about the network and its technology (The Internet Society Fellowship to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Programme | Internet Society).
A subset of them show up in meetings like this one, three times a year, to work through the nitty-gritty issues of standards and ancillary documentation embodied in RFCs. At this meeting, per the IETF web site, about 1500-1700 will congregate in Prague next week. The one continent not represented directly will be Antarctica. Of those, at least 120 will come from Cisco, and probably more.
As of July 17, there are 2194 posted Internet Drafts. Cisco employees contributed to 548 of them. Of the 2194, 602 are new drafts since March, when we last met; 113 of those new drafts came from Cisco employees. The IETF has 134 working groups (http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/) organized into seven areas, and the IRTF has 9 Active IRTF research groups. As one might imagine, managing that organization requires a small army of people. Cisco employees are part of that, with 25 people filling 32 positions - working group chairs, IESG, IAB, and the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group.
What Working and Research Groups? What are we doing there? Cisco employees contribute to 85 working groups and five research groups. Counting Internet Drafts contributed to working groups, we have a few broad areas, and a number of lesser interests. As shown in the graphic, these are largely in BGP and enterprise routing, IPv6 and IPv6 services such as segment routing, network management and OAM, traffic engineering including MPLS, and technologies related to conferencing - voice, video, SIP, and so on. We also look pretty hard at security issues, QoS, and traffic management. In essence, where you find our customers, you'll find us. You'll also find us looking ahead to the technologies we think they will need next, often shoulder to shoulder.
