Michael Howard co-founded market research firm Infonetics Research in 1990, and today is recognized worldwide as one of the industry’s leading experts in emerging markets, network operator trends, and user buying patterns. Nicknamed the “Ethernet pope,” Michael leverages 40 years of communications industry experience to author research on carrier Ethernet, cloud access, software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), carrier routers and switches, mobile backhaul, OpenFlow, and packet-optical transport. Before founding Infonetics, Michael was an IT Director at Tymshare/Tymnet, where he created network accounting, and led the First Interstate Bank project that developed the world's first pre-Internet in-home banking system. Prior to that, shortly after majoring in Mathematics at University of California Berkeley, Michael worked for Systems Development Corporation on operating systems and programming language compilers for ARPAnet, which later became the Internet.