WSU alumnus to speak on Silicon Valley success WSU alumnus to speak on Silicon Valley success

WSU's College of Engineering is hosting "Path to Entrepreneurship," a guest lecture by Khalid Raza, a WSU alum and the founder of Viptela, a Silicon Valley startup providing innovative solutions to computer networking challenges. The lecture will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 8, in the RSC's Shirley Beggs Ballroom. It is free and open to the public. The subtitle of his lecture is "Wichita State University to Silicon Valley Success: Embracing Risk for Entrepreneurial Triumph."

Raza received his master's in industrial engineering from Wichita State in 1992. He is a former Distinguished Engineer at Cisco known for his expertise and widely regarded as a visionary in routing protocols.

In a career spanning more than 20 years, Khalid has played an instrumental role in architecting networks for Global Tier-1 carriers and Fortune 100 companies, and defining innovative grid solutions for the healthcare industry.

He has been awarded the pinnacle of Cisco certifications: Cisco Certified Architect and Cisco Certified Design Expert. Most recently, Hewlett-Packard honored him as a Distinguished Technologist. He created the vision for the company's Next-Generation Datacenter and Wide Area Network architectures.

Raza holds patents in Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and is the author of a book titled "Large-Scale IP Network Solutions."