Rémi Després

Rémi Després (born January 16, 1943) is a French engineer and entrepreneur known for his contributions on data networking.

Education In 1961–1963, Rémi Després attended École Polytechnique of Paris, of which he holds an Engineer degree.

At UC Berkeley, he received a master's degree in 1967, and a Ph.D degree in 1969, both in the EECS Department.

Career From 1963 to 1971 at CNET and UC Berkeley, he specialized in programming languages and time-sharing operating systems.

From 1971 to 1980, Rémi Després was in charge of R&D of the French PTT on packet switching. He was one of the leading "innovators who worked across the boundaries of computers and communications" in the 1970s. As such, he introduced the concept of "graceful saturated operation", which was referenced by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in their seminal 1974 paper on internetworking, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication". He formalized the concept of virtual circuits, and validated it on the RCP experimental network with his team at CNET. He then successfully submitted for the X.25 Recommendation of CCITT, the standard of public data networks of the 1970s–1980s. He was the first Chief Technical Officer in charge of the French TRANSPAC network whose X.25 service has been operational from 1978 to 2011.

After working one year for Cap Gemini Sogeti, and four years for SESA, in 1985 Rémi Després founded the LAN and Frame-Relay-products enterprise RCE, a company acquired in 1996 by the CS Group. In 1998, he founded a second startup, StreamCore SA, specialised in quality of service management in TCP/IP, the Internet technology. When Streamcore SA was terminated in 2003, its StreamGroomer products were taken over by a new company, Streamcore Systems SA.