Roy Chua is Founder and Principal at AvidThink, an independent research and advisory service formed in 2018 out of SDxCentral's research group. Prior to co-founding SDxCentral and running its research and product teams, Roy was a management consultant working with both Fortune 500 and startup technology companies on go-to-market and product consulting.  As an early proponent of the software-defined infrastructure movement, Roy is a frequent speaker at technology events in the telco and cloud space and a regular contributor to leading online publications. A graduate of UC Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science program and MIT's Sloan School of Business, Roy has 20+ years of experience in telco and enterprise cloud computing, networking and security, including founding several Silicon Valley startups.

Tongtong Wang is deterministic network expert in Huawei Wired Network Research Department.Her current research focus is on network performance guarantee and optimization, and is Huawei standard representative in IEEE TSN WG and the editor of IEEE P802.1 DF TSN profiles for Service Provider Networks.

Carsten Rossenhoevel is Managing Director and Co-Founder of EANTC AG (European Advanced Networking Test Center). Based in Berlin, Germany, EANTC is a test lab specializing in telecommunication technologies and offers vendor-neutral network testing services for manufacturers, service providers, and enterprise customers.  In this role, Carsten has over 20 years of experience in telecommunication networks testing and is responsible for EANTC's business development and marketing.  His technical areas of expertise include Network Functions Virtualization and transport network solutions.

Philip Klatte joined F5 Networks in 2018, and as a Senior Product Manager for Service Provider, leads development of our cloud-native products.  Prior to F5, he worked for AT&T and Openet Telcom ( a vendor to AT&T). Phil has held technical and non-technical roles, including operations, support, professional service, technical sales, product management, architecture and sales.  Phil focuses mostly on the network side, including launching the first ever (worldwide) virtualized network functions (vPCRF at AT&T in 2011/2012), as well as work in IT (launch of the first major microservice at AT&T in billing/mediation).

Aaron Partouche has been with Colt for height years, and is now part of the Innovation team since last year. He recently had the opportunity to work on Market Incubation activities related to 5G & Edge for vertical market.  As part of Innovation team, Aaron is responsible for developing new proposal and go to market model to strengthen Colt’s value proposition in the next 2 years.  Previously, Aaron had different roles inside the Marketing & Portfolio organization at Colt: new Joint Value Proposition and marketing initiatives with strategic partners and led Product Marketing for the Dark Fibre and Optical portfolio. He also consolidated several alliances with metropolitan stakeholders to move toward the connected city concept.  Before joining Colt, Aaron held various positions in major mobile technology companies, where he spent nearly 12 years building mobile network analytics solution services. He also participated in the largest roll out of high speed mobile networks in China, South-Korea and Europe. Aaron graduated from Telecom SudParis.

Paul Meyers is Senior Product Manager within Nokia's (and previously Alcatel and Alcatel-Lucent's) IP Division since 2005, focussing the last years on Mobile Anyhaul and 5G.  Before joining this team, he was active within Alcatel for several years (starting from 1994) as Supply Chain project engineer looking into advanced planning systems and reverse logistics and from 2000 on as Marketing Manager and Business Consultant for data products (ATM & IP).  Paul holds an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Louvain (KUL) and a Masters degree in Economics.

Jérémie Leguay is Chief Expert for routing algorithms and Director of the Datacom Dijkstra Lab at Huawei Technologies. He received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Pierre & Marie Curie University (Paris, France).   From 2007 to 2014, he conducted research and led the Networking Lab at Thales Communications & Security where he developed activities on sensor networks, mobile networks and software-defined networks for mission-critical networked systems.   In 2014, he joined at Huawei Technologies as leader of the network and traffic optimization team. His current research activities cover the planning and control of IP networks using optimization and machine learning tools. He is Senior Member of IEEE and frequently involved in conference TPCs (e.g., CloudNet, IM, NOMS, NetSoft, ICC, Globecom).   He has filed 30+ patents and published 100+ papers in leading conferences (e..g, Infocom, Networking) and Journals (e.g., JSAC, ToN).

Robert Friskney is part of Ciena’s global solution architecture team, working on 4G/5G mobile, with a particular focus on network slicing.   Robert joined Ciena via the Nortel MEN acquisition in 2009. From graduation, he started working in fixed line copper access technologies, SIP VoIP and MPLS before changing to photonic networking for his academic research work. Going back into IP/Ethernet to co-invent PBB-TE (802.1Qay), he then drove the network management solution for this technology and eventually all IP/Ethernet. He shifted to a broader architecture role shaping Ciena’s IP/Optical convergence before handing that off to production, then moved to his current pursuit of mobile networking.   Robert holds twenty four patents, an MA in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, UK and an MSc in Telecommunications and EngD in Electronic Engineering, both from the University of London, UK.

Krzysztof Grzegorz Szarkowicz is a Solution Architect at Juniper Networks, concentrating on mobile transport solutions, and has been working with the networking industry 20+ years, delivering projects at many operators world-wide.  Before joining Juniper Networks in 2007, he worked with Hewlett Packard Labs, Telia Research, Ericsson, and Cisco. During that time he gained valuable hands-on experience at various aspects of networking, culminating in gaining CCIE-SP and JNCIE-SP certifications.  He is co-author of the O’Reilly book “MPLS in the SDN Era", by Antonio Sánchez-Monge and Krzysztof Grzegorz Szarkowicz, as well as “Day One: Configuring Segment Routing with Junos” by Julian Lucek and Krzysztof Grzegorz Szarkowicz. At present, he is active contributing member of O-RAN WG9 (Open X-haul Transport) co-authoring WG9's architectural documents.

Subhankar Pal is Senior Director and Global Innovation Leader for Intelligent Networks program in Capgemini Engineering. He has 21+ years of experience in telecommunication & IT industry.   Subhankar also leads the service assurance development group in Open-Source MANO. As global lead for innovation in Capgemini Engineering, Subhankar drives innovation in areas of machine learning and cloud native technologies for 5G and beyond networks.  Prior to joining Capgemini, he worked at Nokia Networks and C-DOT.

Marc is a senior Consulting Engineer at Nokia Deepfield, advising operators across Europe with the planning and implementation of Networks based DDOS Protection and Analytics solutions driven by AI.   Marc has over 25 years of experience in the Networking Industry, working for Nortel and BT before joining Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia) in 2008.

Hendrik Scholz is the Head of Strategy for 128 Technology EMEA at Juniper. Before joining Juniper as part of the 128 Technology acquisition he was the global product manager for the Acme Packet network monitoring products.   In total Hendrik gathered 20 years of experience in the VoIP infrastructure and networking space. He is the holder of various patents in the area of communications technology and studied in Germany and Australia.

Alvaro Valcarce is head of the department on wireless AI/ML at Nokia Bell Labs France. His research interests include the application of machine learning techniques to problems in RRM, L2 and above for the development of 6G technologies.

Rajiv Shah is a principal data scientist a Snorkel.AI, where his primary focus is on enabling teams to achieve success with AI. Previously, he led data science enablement efforts across hundreds of data scientists at DataRobot. He was also a part of data science teams at Caterpillar and State Farm.   Rajiv is a widely recognized speaker on AI, published research papers, and received patents in many domains, including sports analytics, deep learning, and interpretability. He received a Ph.D. and a J.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Laurent Ciavaglia is Senior Researcher and Standardization Specialist in the Autonomous Networks Research & Innovation Department at Rakuten Mobile.  Previously, Laurent was with Nokia inventing future network automation technologies with focus on intent-driven, zero-touch and artificial intelligence techniques.   Laurent is an experienced standards contributor as editor and co-author of multiple specifications in the IETF, IRTF and ETSI in the fields of telemetry, zero-touch networking, intent-based networking, autonomic networking, closed-loop operation and coordination, and integration of machine learning and machine reasoning functionalities in networking environments.   Laurent serves as co-chair of the IRTF Network Management Research Group (NRMG) and participates in standardization activities related to network and service automation in IETF and ETSI.   Laurent is also of IEEE ComS Standards Liaison Officer of the IEEE Network Intelligence ETI (Emerging Technical Initiative) and an active member of the IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee on Network Operation and Management (CNOM), chair of the CNOM Autonomous Networking Technologies Special Interest Group, after having served as CNOM vice-chair in 2017-2019.   Laurent has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE SDN initiative Softwarization newsletter from 2016 to 2019, and regularly serve as reviewer for IEEE conferences, journals and magazines. Laurent also has a good experience in organizing multiple special issues as guest editor, international workshops and industry events. Laurent participates regularly to the Organizing and Technical Committees of IEEE CNOM and ComSoc conferences in various roles.   Laurent has co-authored 70+ articles in referenced journals and conferences, including more than 30 keynote talks, invited papers, expert panels and tutorials.

Since October 2011 Diego R. Lopez is in charge of Technology Exploration at the Global CTO Unit, within Telefónica I+D. His responsibilities are related to the definition and coordination of research projects in the areas of new networking technologies and network infrastructures. He is directly involved in activities related to network virtualization, core optimization, AAA, traffic analysis, and infrastructure security.   He is actively participating in the ETSI ISG on Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), chairing its Technical Steering Committee. He is acting as representative of Telefónica in bodies related to network technologies, like the ONF and the BBF, and contributing to several working groups inside IETF.Diego have been appointed by the European Commission as member of the High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data e-Infrastructures (HLEG-SDI).   He received his MS from the University of Granada in 1985, and his PhD degree from the University of Seville in 2001. Since 1985 he have worked for several private and public organisations, developing and deploying communication services.   From 2000 to 2011 he was responsible for the Middleware Area of RedIRIS, the Spanish National Research and Educational Network. As part of these tasks he actively participate in national and international working groups and projects, and he have collaborated in several versions of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group White Paper, under the auspices of the EU Presidency, in areas related to security and digital identity services.   His current areas of interest are network middleware and network intelligence, virtualization of network architectures, control and signaling protocols, infrastructural and mediation service, and new network architectures and services  Specialities: NFV and Software Networks. Internet middleware. Federated architectures. Directories (LDAP). Identity management systems: SAML, OpenID, OAuth. PKI. Internet security. RESTful services. RDF. SDN: OpenFlow

Since 2013 Iren Berk Ozalp is working for Turk Telekom in various departments and positions covering network performance management systems, fault management systems and currently is the manager for customer experience and sla management systems.  Apart from his OSS domain responsibilities he is responsible for AI in Operations program which aims predictive maintenance and anomaly detection for network operations. AI in Operations program developed 20 different scenarios on fixed, broadband and mobile domain in different technologies with a success and won first prize in IDC awards for Machine Learning category.  Prior to joining Turk Telekom Iren Berk was working for Ericsson and graduated from Middle East Technical University with a Bachelor’s Degree on Computer Engineering

Amir Zmora is CEO & Co-founder of flexiWAN, the world’s first Open Source SD-WAN & SASE.  Before starting flexiWAN, Amir was CEO & Co-founder of SwitchRTC, a Real-time, interactive WebRTC based video CDN and B2B/B2C collaboration solution acquired by YouNow. Among his previous positions, Amir was VP Products & Marketing for the Technology Business Unit of RADVISION, an Avaya company.

As Director of Product Management, Karim is leading the 6WIND product roadmap definition and cultivating the product’s vision and product solutions in accordance with the company business strategy.

Sylvain oversees Ekinops’ Marketing and Access Product Strategy. As such, he is responsible for the coordination of Global Marketing activities and Access Product Strategy, specifically focusing on developing the Virtualization and SD-WAN strategy.   Prior to this, Sylvain held various positions at InfoVista, as VP of R&D, VP Product Management, and, most recently, as SVP of Product Strategy for the Enterprise Market, leading product innovation and alliances activities. Notably, he initiated the InfoVista SD-WAN Strategy (Ipanema SD-WAN).   Sylvain holds a Master’s degree in Network and System Engineering from the Engineering School of Information and Digital Technologies (EFREI) in Paris, France.

Prior to DriveNets, Lx held several technical roles in Cisco, Juniper and Ciena with a focus on large scale service provider IP core networks.

Pavan Kurapati is the Chief Architect for Global Service Providers in Juniper. In his current role., Pavan leads a team of Architects in SP GTM team with a focus on emerging technologies such as 5G, AIOps, Telco Cloud, distributed network architectures etc. Pavan has ~22 years of experience in telecom sector.  Pavan has been with Juniper since 2009 and worked with large service providers in deploying access, metro, core and telco cloud solutions. Pavan has masters in Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley.

Marco is currently the VP of Product and Services for F5 Distributed Cloud (based on technology from F5, Volterra, and Shape). He has more than 20 years of experience in designing, building and operating Internet and IP infrastructures.  Prior to F5/Volterra, Marco was a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks supporting the world's largest Service Providers and Enterprise customers. He's contributed to IETF and numerous networking related technology and operator associations.

Luigi Iannone is currently a research engineer at Huawei France and leader of the IP Team, in Paris, since 2020. He was previously Associate Professor at Telecom Paris Engineering school in Paris from 2012.   Before that he was Senior Research Scientist at Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs), in Berlin, between September 2008 and April 2012. He worked as post-doc researcher at Université catholique de Louvain (UCL - Belgium) in 2007/2008. From 2002 to 2007 he worked at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI - France), first as Ph.D. candidate until 2006, when he has got his Ph.D. in Computer Science, and later as post-doc. Before that, he got a degree in Computer Engineering from the Università degli Studi di Pisa (Italy). His current research interests include intra- and inter- domain routing, Future Internet architectures, Software Defined Networks, Security and Privacy in network protocols.  He is currently co-chairing the LISP Working Group at the IETF.

Jeff Tantsura has been in the networking space for 25+ years and has authored/contributed to many RFC's and patents, worked in both, SP and vendor environments.   He is co-chair of IETF Routing Working Group, chartered to work on New Network Architectures and Technologies, including protocol independent YANG models and Next Gen Routing Protocols as well as co-chair of RIFT (Routing in Fat Trees) Working Group chartered to work on the new routing protocol that specifically addresses Fat Tree topologies typically seen in the Data Center environment.   Currently, Jeff is Sr. Principal Network Architect Azure Networking at Microsoft, working on the Next Gen DC architectures as well as ML/AI networking.

Nina Bargisen is director of service provider marketing at Kentik, the network observability company. She has more than 20 years of experience as an active member of the global internet community.  At Kentik, she focuses on supporting the company’s service provider users, drawing from her long experience as a peering coordinator and network planner/engineer. Nina has served on program committees and IXP boards, she is an active industry speaker, and she is co-chair of RIPE’s MAT Working Group.  Prior to Kentik, Nina built the network for Subspace and played an instrumental role in securing the delivery of Netflix streaming traffic.

Wenqin Shao, Cooperation Manager of datacom product line, curates various research projects jointly with the EU academia.   Joined Huawei since 2021, he has a PhD in network measurements, and was a software engineer

Burkhard is the team leader of the IP consulting systems engineering group for Central and Eastern Europe of the Nokia IP division. He has almost 30 years of experience in the communications and networking industry, working in various positions in Pre-Sales, Technical-Sales and Product Marketing at Cabletron, Infonet and Nortel before joining Alcatel-Lucent in 2008 which became Nokia in 2016.   In his role he is supporting the regional sales teams in all aspects of the IP product range of Nokia, including SDN/NFV and Data Center topics.   Burkhard holds a MSc. from the advanced technical college of Fulda.

Amir Zmora is CEO & Co-founder of flexiWAN, the world’s first Open Source SD-WAN & SASE.  Before starting flexiWAN, Amir was CEO & Co-founder of SwitchRTC, a Real-time, interactive WebRTC based video CDN and B2B/B2C collaboration solution acquired by YouNow. Among his previous positions, Amir was VP Products & Marketing for the Technology Business Unit of RADVISION, an Avaya company.

Mariana Agache is VP of Managed Services at F5, responsible for enabling service providers to develop and sell Managed Services based on F5’s products and services.   Mariana joined F5 three years ago after more than 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry with leadership roles at Ciena and Nortel.   She holds an MBA from the University of Ottawa, Canada, a Masters in Computer Science from Carleton University and she attended Executive Education at Harvard Business School. She lives in Ottawa, Canada with her family.

Amir Zmora is CEO & Co-founder of flexiWAN, the world’s first Open Source SD-WAN & SASE.  Before starting flexiWAN, Amir was CEO & Co-founder of SwitchRTC, a Real-time, interactive WebRTC based video CDN and B2B/B2C collaboration solution acquired by YouNow. Among his previous positions, Amir was VP Products & Marketing for the Technology Business Unit of RADVISION, an Avaya company.

Rajesh Mongia is an Associate Vice President, Next Generation WAN Connectivity Services at Tata Communications London. Rajesh Mongia, is an IT professional with more than 18 years’ experience in the telecommunications and IT industry, particularly in product management, product development, business development, presales consulting for Internet WAN, IP VPN, Ethernet, SDWAN, SASE, VNF, Cloud Connectivity services.   Before joining Tata Communications, Rajesh has worked for Bharti Airtel, New Delhi, Sify Technologies, Chennai and was holding key positions in solution engineering, product development and management roles.   Rajesh holds a Bachelor degree in Electrical (Eng.) from Punjab University and M.B.A in Telecom Management from the Symbiosis University, Pune.

Ritesh Mukherjee is an accomplished leader with a focus on global communications and technology. Ritesh leads enterprise networking as Senior Vice President and General Manager at Inseego. He is responsible for transforming networks and services with 5G, SDN/NFV, SASE, SD-WAN, cloud, and IoT technologies.   Ritesh was previously Vice President at Reliance Jio managing a global portfolio of market-leading innovative enterprise solutions. He was also Vice President of Product Management at 128 Technology (acquired by Juniper Networks) leading SD-WAN and cloud development, and Manager, Product Management at Cisco leading the software operating systems group. Ritesh has engineered some of the largest deployments of enterprise networks for leading businesses globally.   Ritesh holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Concordia University, Montreal.

Burkhard is the team leader of the IP consulting systems engineering group for Central and Eastern Europe of the Nokia IP division. He has almost 30 years of experience in the communications and networking industry, working in various positions in Pre-Sales, Technical-Sales and Product Marketing at Cabletron, Infonet and Nortel before joining Alcatel-Lucent in 2008 which became Nokia in 2016.   In his role he is supporting the regional sales teams in all aspects of the IP product range of Nokia, including SDN/NFV and Data Center topics.   Burkhard holds a MSc. from the advanced technical college of Fulda.

Pavan Kurapati is the Chief Architect for Global Service Providers in Juniper. In his current role., Pavan leads a team of Architects in SP GTM team with a focus on emerging technologies such as 5G, AIOps, Telco Cloud, distributed network architectures etc. Pavan has ~22 years of experience in telecom sector.  Pavan has been with Juniper since 2009 and worked with large service providers in deploying access, metro, core and telco cloud solutions. Pavan has masters in Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley.

Hector Avalos has 30 years of experience in the computing, networking and telecommunications industries. He currently holds the position of VP EMEA at Versa Networks.   His current activities are focused on SASE & SDWAN solutions for Service Providers and Enterprises.   Prior to Versa Networks, Hector worked at Ericsson, Juniper Networks, 3Com and Proteon. Hector holds a Master of Computing Science from ‘UDLA’ Mexico.

Stefano Wosz is part of Aethra Telecommunications / A TLC S.r.l. since July 2012, and is responsible for the Technical Marketing and Product Management Team since August 2021.   Stefano is involved in product strategy and positioning, product features and functionalities design together with market research and competitive analysis.  Stefano has previously been Product Manager for the uCPE / NFV Product Lines and the Fiber-to-the-Distribution Point (FTTdp) Product Lines, taking care of lab / field trials and managing customer relationships, planning, product management, marketing and communication, as well as standards and regulatory activities.

Wang Ping , Expert of Data Communication Product Mgmt Europe Group, work in huawei for more than 10 years. Mr. Wang Ping has been working in the communications field for more than 10 years, especially in carrier WAN and SD-WAN services, and has an in-depth understanding of the latest industry trends and technologies.  Lead Huawei's SD-WAN R&D team in the SD-WAN project of European carriers and continuously conduct joint innovation with carriers to build product competitiveness.

Hector Avalos has 30 years of experience in the computing, networking and telecommunications industries. He currently holds the position of VP EMEA at Versa Networks.   His current activities are focused on SASE & SDWAN solutions for Service Providers and Enterprises.   Prior to Versa Networks, Hector worked at Ericsson, Juniper Networks, 3Com and Proteon. Hector holds a Master of Computing Science from ‘UDLA’ Mexico.

A Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks. She has decades of experience in routing protocols and network design. She has co-authored and contributed to many IETF RFCs and internet drafts in the EVPN area.   She also holds several patents in the routing protocol area. Prior to Juniper, Wen was a principal software engineer at 3Com.