Prof. Cidon comes to the Institute from VMware Research, where he served as Vice President and led research on high-performance, geo-distributed networks spanning IoT, data centers, and public clouds. His work aimed to enable and optimize modern distributed applications. 

Prior to VMware, Prof. Cidon was a chaired professor at The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. As a faculty member, he published over 180 peer-reviewed papers. His research contributions include new architectures for wireless and wireline networks, multi-cloud overlay networks and networks on chip for which he was nominated to an IEEE fellow. He held the position of Dean of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion from 2006-2010. 

As part of his industrial collaborations, Prof. Cidon also held leadership positions with other industrial research centers, the IBM T.J. Watson Research center in New York, and Sun Microsystems labs at Mountain View. He has co-founded several pioneering technology companies. These include Micronet Ltd., an early innovator in mobile data entry; Actona Technologies, which developed foundational technology for WAN optimization; Viola Networks for network quality testing and diagnosis; and Sookasa, a SaaS security platform. Prof. Cidon has been the co-author of over 70 US patents covering his industrial activities. 

Prof. Cidon earned both his bachelor’s (summa cum laude) and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at the Technion, and returned to join the faculty in 1990.