Patrice Bellagamba has been in the networking industry for more than 25 years and has spent more than 10 years in engineering development. He is a consulting engineer and a recognized expert in IP and MPLS technologies. He is one of the influencers in the development of MPLS and has led MPLS techtorials at Networkers in Europe since its inception. He is also the inventor of the Embedded Event Manager (EEM) semaphore concept and is the designer of the VPLS-based solutions that this book describes. Patrice holds an engineering degree from the E´cole Supérieure d'Electricité, one of France's prestigious Grandes E´coles and a top institution in the field of electrical and computer engineering. He has written several Cisco white papers on the use of MPLS technology.