John Baekelmans is Senior Director and Chief Technology Officer for Cisco's Smart+Connected Communities (S+CC) program. In that capacity he also leads Product Management.

Since June 2008, John is responsible for the management and the roadmap of the global Smart+Connected Communities Solutions. In that role he not only creates technology solutions, he also aligns them with the business opportunities in that high growth area for Cisco. During most of 2010 John has been living and working out of Korea to ensure overall deployment success for Cisco's first S+CC project.

Prior to his current CTO role, John was the CTO at a Belgian start-up called fifthplay where he co-authored European patents EP2099199 and EP2048852. Fifthplay's core business is the aggregation of e-Services of their market partners for consumers in the home. Prior to fifthplay, John spent 11 years at Cisco where he held various directorial leadership positions within the engineering, technical support services and the mergers and acquisitions business units. He led Cisco's autonomic computing and self-healing efforts and has co-authored US patents 7117113, 7080141, 7509415. Before Cisco, John designed, implemented and operated large PBX-networks at Siemens.

John obtained a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Antwerp, Belgium and he is Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert #1705. In his spare time, he is engaged in Belgium's National fast response rescue team to assist in global disasters. He currently lives in London and has a 14 year old son.