Technical Steering Committee

Aayush leads the technology research and development organization at Reliance Jio.

As part of this role, he is leading the effort on Openstack integration and network automation using ONAP. He is also heading the core network transformation project at Jio, which involves 5G architectural evolution.

He is an open source enthusiast, and likes designing and developing software hands-on.

Alla is a Director of Technology, Strategy and Standardization at Amdocs. She has over 20 years of varied experience in Telecommunication Standards development lead, in Technology Strategy and in System Architecture from Alcatel, Motorola, Intel, Marvell and Allot Communications. Alla has wide experience of leading standardization work in 3GPP, IETF, ETSI NFV, BBF, ETSI MEC, being a Rapporteur and a leading contributor of numerous work items in the areas of 5G, Policy Control and Charging, NFV, SDN, Service function chaining, Control-User Plane split and Congestion management. She has served on the Program Committees of several conferences (e.g. IEEE ICC and IEEE CSCN), published at top research venues and holds multiple patents. Her current interest is related to network evolution domain with focus on NFV and SDN areas both in Standardization and Open Source domains. Alla holds a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University and MSc in Technology Management from New York University.

Amir joined Cloudify as a Director for Solution Architecture – in the CTO Office. He is working on a number of NFV projects with various partners in the Bay Area. Prior to joining Cloudify, Amir held product management leadership roles at Polycom and Cisco. Amir has more than 24 years of networking experience – spanning both high-end routing, broadband access, and enterprise networking.

Chris Donley serves as Senior Director, Open Source Ecosystems at Huawei. He is providing open source leadership in several Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network function Virtualization (NfV) initiatives, including Open-O and OPNFV. He previously served as Director, Virtualization and Network Evolution at CableLabs. Chris has been involved in many standards and open source organizations. He currently serves as the Open-O TSC chair and the OPNFV Certification and Compliance Chair. He previously served on the OPNFV Board of Directors and Open Daylight Advisory Council. He also chaired the OPNFV Strategic Planning Committee and served as MEF Certification Committee Co-Chair. Chris received a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Dartmouth College and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Colorado. He holds Cisco CCIE and (ISC)2 CISSP certifications, and has been granted 14 US patents.

David Sauvageau is the Senior Manager of Network Service Orchestration and Automation platforms at Bell Canada. His current objective is to drive internal innovation and accelerate the SDN/NFV journey through the architecture, implementation and operations of open network automation software. He has been working for over a decade as a strategist, IT architect and software engineer in many OSS automation domains. He holds a bachelor of software engineering and a master of business administration.

Dhananjay Pavgi heads Center of Excellence (CoE) for OSS2.0 in Tech Mahindra Ltd. His vision for OSS2.0 goes much beyond ETSI MANO reference architecture as he envisions “Composite or Hybrid” networks to be inevitable for CSPs for considerable time duration. He is an established Thought Leader in Telecommunications OSS domain. He carries over 20 years of experience in Telecom Networks, EMS/NMS/OSS and BSS. Dhananjay was a part of TMF OSS/J SQM Expert Group and has participated in panel discussions, speaking sessions at leading industry events.

Eric Debeau has a solid 20 years experience in the telecommunications area with a particular focus on IT techniques adoption in networks and OSS domains. Through his broad experience as network architect and platform development (IMS/VoIP, network API), he is recognized as a member of the Orange expert Community in charge of future network evolutions. He is currently leading a team working on the core network evolution leveraging IT techniques mainly covering NFV, Orchestration and network data analytics. His team is very open-source focused and launched innovative platform for emerging countries (Emerginov) and is now strongly involved in OPNFV, ONAP, OpenStack and ACUMOS. Eric is very involved in various open-source communities and he is responsible for coordinating the Orange contributions to ONAP project. He has contributed to various open-source communities, published various technical papers and holds several patents. In addition to his professional activities, he is also an open data evangelist and a very active OpenStreetMap contributor and organizes many events around open data promotion.

Frank Brockners is Distinguished Engineer in Cisco’s Chief Technology and Architecture Office, driving software and architecture development for software defined devices. Frank holds a diploma degree in Electrical Engineering (Aachen University) and a PhD/Dr degree in Information Science (University of Cologne).

Jason is a software architect at IBM, focused on distributed architectures across the convergence of enterprise applications and network services, with a particular fascination on designing highly available, reliable, and resilient software architectures.

Lingli Deng is a Project Manager at China Mobile Research Institute. She obtained her Doctor’s degree in Computer Application Technology from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences and joined China Mobile in 2009. She is a core member of the Novonet project which drives SDN/NFV strategy for China Mobile, and is working on evaluation and introduction of data plane acceleration technology, running the Novonet Testing Lab and planning the SDN/NFV trial network for the company. She has been leading the OPNFV DPACC and OPEN-O NFV-O projects. She is currently serving on the OPNFV Board and OPEN-O TSC for China Mobile.

Dr. Mazin Gilbert is the Vice President of Advanced Technology at AT&T Labs. He leads AT&T’s research and advanced technology of its software-defined network. In this role, Mazin oversees advancements in networking and IP network management, big data, video technologies, artificial intelligence, information systems and visualization, algorithms and optimization, and scalable, reliable software platforms. Mazin was previously the Assistant Vice President of Intelligence Services and Platform Research, where he and his team were responsible for using AT&T’s data and machine learning capabilities to build services that can transform the way we do things today. Mazin holds 154 U.S. patents in communication and multimedia processing and has published over 100 technical papers in human-machine communication. He is the author of the book titled, “Artificial Neural Networks for Speech Analysis/Synthesis.” With more than three decades of experience under his belt, Mazin has worked in the industry at AT&T Labs and previously Bell Labs, BBC and British Telecom. He’s also worked in academia at Rutgers University, Princeton University and Liverpool University. He became an IEEE Fellow in 2012. Mazin earned a bachelor’s and a doctoral degree, with first-class honors, in electrical engineering from the University of Liverpool. He also earned an MBA for Executives from the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania. Outside of his technology career, Mazin is an entrepreneur owning six limited liability companies specializing in commercial and residential real estate and the dental industry. He also serves on a number of industrial boards including the International Computer Science Institute. In his free time, Mazin loves to spend time with his daughters and is an avid runner.

Murat is an Enterprise Architect at Turk Telekom Group with more than 10 years of BSS/OSS experience in Telco. He focused on ONAP transformation within the Turk Telekom Group.

Rajesh Gadiyar is the Sr. Director of Architecture & Systems Engineering in the Network Platforms Group at Intel. He is focused on driving a scalable and efficient architecture for next generation communications platforms. He leads the architecture efforts to accelerate Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Since joining Intel in 2000, he has held several positions in Engineering, Professional Services, Strategic Planning and Architecture. Prior to joining Intel, he led various engineering teams at Trillium Digital Systems and Wipro Ltd. He brings several years of experience in networking products, architecture, protocols, standards and software development for Voice over IP, cellular, broadband, mobile telephony and data networks. He represents Intel in standard committees such as ATIS TOPS council and TIA and is a TSC member of the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) initiative under Linux Foundation. He is a regular speaker at industry events and forums. Rajesh has a B.S. in Electronics and Telecommunications engineering from National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Ranny Haiby is a Principal System Architect in the Nokia CloudBand platform group. Ranny is dealing with transitioning network functions to the cloud and is constantly seeking creative ways to make this experience smoother. He has been involved in NFV for several years, leveraging his twenty year experience from previous roles in his carrier in various telecom equipment vendors and startup companies. Ranny is always striving to think out of the box in order to make the impossible happen.

Stephen has more than 20 years of experience in the telecommunication industry and has been on the front edge of several industry transformations with network functions including the evolution towards virtual network functions. This has involved several years collaborating with the industry in ITU-T, 3GPP, ETSI and IETF (including rapporteur and chairing roles), together with customers and partners as well as the related systemization and system evolution to introduce the technology change. Currently Stephen is an a lead architect working with the network, operational and business automating and programmability, bring a mix of both the network function and automation needs.

Susana is an experienced technology strategist with more than 25 years of involvement in the telecommunications industry. Skilled in network architectures for NFV and SDN, 5G, 4G, 3G, QoS, Policy Control, M2M and IPTV, she is involved in different standards committees and leading the Vodafone team for engagement in ONAP. Susana is currently a Senior Manager responsible for network architecture and industry standards development in Vodafone Group.

Xiaojun XIE is the technical director of IT R&D center in Guangzhou Research Institute of China Telecom. For past several years, he has been working to bring Microservices and DevOps principles to BSS/OSS of the operator, focusing on service design, service orchestration and distributed systems tracing.

Xinhui Li is senior architect at VMware, focusing on NFV and integration of OpenStack with Cloud Management enterprise products. She is currently serving as the ONAP TSC (Technique Steering Committee) member representing VMware. She once served as vote member of OPENO TSC and director of Women Who Code organization in China. She is a core developer of OpenStack community, interested at design and optimization of distributed systems, mostly in the Cloud computing and big data fields. She got her Master degree from Computing Institute, China Science of Academy in 2016. At the same year, she joined IBM China Research – distributed computing department and won once director innovation award. In 2011, She joined VMware R&D – Cloud Management BU and won once EPIC award for community contribution. She has 13 international patents, published 3 technical documents, and 5 papers on international PIC top/target academy journal and conferences.

Zhaoxing is a Principal Architect in the Central Research Institute at ZTE with more than 10 years of experience in Telecom industry, based in Chendu. He is technical lead for ZTE OPEN-O AND ONAP efforts. He likes coding, and traveling with his family in his spare time.