He first applied his experience to large-scale consumer products and services following Cisco's acquisition of the Scientific Atlanta set-top box business, and subsequently as Chief Executive Officer of Skype Technologies. He published a number of IETF RFCs and holds a number of patents. On Bates was appointed to CEO of Genesys.īates was born in 1967 in West London. He came from humble beginnings, raised in Teddington by his hairdresser mother and stepfather who worked as a builder. Like many Silicon Valley CEOs before him, he never finished university. At 19, he dropped out of his mechanical engineering program at South Bank Polytechnic. īates’ first job was at the University of London as a network operator in the computer center where he worked from 1986 to 1992.

During his time at the university, his commute was one hour by train each way. He capitalized on this commute time by teaching himself the C programming language and by learning UNIX through DEC manuals. Bates was fortunate to be involved in the early days of the Internet running the Arpanet gateways between the U.S. academic network JANET from the academic Coloured Book protocols to TCP/IP, helping to create the JANET IP Service (JIPS). He left the University of London Computer Centre in 1992 to work in Amsterdam on a Réseaux Associés pour la Recherche Européenne (RARE)-funded project as part of the RIPE NCC, an organization responsible for establishing the Europe IP registry and a number of operational standards for European networking. In 1994, he moved to Virginia, which at the time was considered the nexus of the Internet.

He worked on the strategy and operation for the Internet MCI IP backbone.īates joined Cisco in 1996.

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