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.

Paweł Świerszcz has over two decades of experience in the IT and telecommunications sectors, leveraging his extensive background in IT and system development to bridge the gap between these two worlds.  His expertise lies in modern, virtualized networks, network slicing, autonomous networks, and intelligent telecommunications.  Currently serving as a business architect, Paweł focuses on propelling the telecommunications industry into the modern era, developing software solutions that enable operators to stay at the forefront of technology and derive maximum benefits from it.

Patrice Brissette is a Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect of EVPN & Service Overlay Technologies at Cisco Systems, specializing in Web and Service Providers port-folio.   With 25 years of R&D experience in the telecommunications industry, he has worked with large customers and marketing teams on strategic product development and architectures.   He is an active member of IETF and other standards organizations, using his expertise to drive innovation and push the boundaries of the industry.

Guofeng Qian is the Metro IP Protocol expert at Huawei Datacom. He has 22+ years experience in Datacom R&D and Network Solution design.  He was the chief architect of metro area network，and also was the chief planner of metro area network. Now he is response for Metro area network protocol planning and innovation , research for the next generation Metro area network architecture and protocol.

John McKinnon currently serves as Vice President of Software Engineering for the Navigator Network Control Suite at Ciena Corporation. In this role, he is responsible for overseeing the design, development, verification, and support of the complete portfolio of Ciena’s SDN network management software solutions, intelligent applications, and network design tools.   John has held various senior software design, product management and business development positions in his 40 years tenure at Standard Telecommunications plc, Bell-Northern Research, Nortel Networks and now Ciena. This included software leadership roles in Transmission Networks, Optical Networks, Data Networks and eBusiness product groups covering all aspects of element, network, service management tools and applications.   Mr McKinnon holds a Bachelor of Science (Engineering) from University College London, UK and is a Chartered Engineer with the IEE.

Mr. Wu Zhengguang, graduated from Miami University with a Master Degree, is currently the marketing director of transport network NM&Controller products in ZTE Corporation.   He has long been engaged in NMS and SDN controller development, key technology research and market expending. He focuses on the research on SDN, autonomous network, AI/ML applications in wired network area.

Sharada Yeluri is a Senior Director of Engineering at Juniper Networks. She is the project leader for ultra-high density routing chips for routing, switching, and datacenters.   A graduate of Arizona State University and The Stanford School of Business, Sharada started her Juniper career 23 years ago as a staff engineer. After which she moved into chip design and has been an integral part of Juniper’s silicon team ever since.

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.

Denice Tuinhof received her M.Sc degree in Artificial Intelligence in 2020 and her M.Sc for information science in 2019. She conducted research at Singapore University of Technology & Design and published papers with Hong Kong University and Empirical College London.   Currently she works as Senior AI Architect at KPN on the strategy and vision of the company. She also works on the solution architecture of closed loop automation with the support of AI.

Subhankar Pal is Senior Director and Global Innovation leader for the Intelligent Networks program in Capgemini Engineering. He has 23 years of experience in the telecommunication industry.  His responsibilities include technology product incubation, product strategy, and roadmap development, consulting & service offer definition for telecommunication and related markets. His interest areas include autonomous networks, optimization, and sustainability using cloud-native principles and AI for 5G and beyond networks.

In his current role, Jérôme drives DDoS security research & competence development at Nokia, as part of its Deepfield portfolio of network security & analytics.   Based out of Paris, he joined the company’s Mobile Networks organization in 2005 in Malaysia; and he since covered a variety of sales & pre-sales responsibilities in the Asia-Pacific region, before returning to Europe in 2023.   Jérôme graduated with a Master’s degree from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées in Lyon, France.

Jan Straznicky has over 25 years of experience in networking & telecommunications and is currently the Senior Director of Product Line Management at Ciena. In this role, he leads the team defining Ciena’s IP Networking Software Strategy and product roadmaps for Ciena’s IP Network Operating System (SAOS 10.x), Subscriber Management/BNG (Benu Acquisition) and Enterprise Cloud Edge (Vyatta Acquisition). Ciena’s SAOS 10.x IP Network Operating System runs across the entire portfolio of Routing platforms.   Prior to joining Ciena, Jan spent 16 years with Nokia (via Alcatel-Lucent) in various roles spanning Customer Engineering Support, Solutions Engineering and Consulting Engineering. His final role was Senior Director of Consulting Engineer in the IP Business Division responsible for the team driving Technical Business Development for Nokia’s IP products across the North American Mobile Operator segment. Jan’s has spent his career applying the broad concepts of IP networking to build deployable and successful end-to-end solutions for customers.   Jan has a B.Eng from Carleton University and an MBA from Queen’s University.

Daniel is a Technical Director at Bell Canada involved in research and development of disruptive technologies transforming the Telco space and Bell Canada’s network and services.   He is currently working on the edge cloud strategy and cloud-native transformation leveraging optimized CP/UP separation and advances in network and hardware programming. He is involved in various open source community projects such as FD.io, Network Service Mesh and P4.org. He is also a participating member at the IETF and BBF, co-authoring and collaborating on various drafts for SPRING based service-programming and SFC.

Kashif Islam is a Principal Telecommunication Architect in Red Hat’s consulting organization and help service providers transform their existing mobile infrastructure into next-generation cloud-native 5G networks   Kashif is a 20+ year veteran in the IT industry and has architected several complex, large-scale networks for some of the biggest wireline and mobile service providers across the world. He is also an O-RAN alliance contributor and co-authored O-RAN xHaul Packet Switched Architectures and Solutions specification. Kashif has also co-authored a book titled "A Network Architect's Guide to 5G”, which is the first book to cover mobile core, RAN, and transport technology fundamentals and network design details.   Kashif is Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and a double CCIE (#14300) in Data Centers and Routing/Switching Technologies. He holds a Bachelor degree from Sir Syed University (Pakistan), as well as a Master of Engineering in Internetworking degree from Dalhousie University, Canada.

Alain Violland has 30 years of experience in the data communication industry. He joined Adtran in 2012 and currently holds the position of business development director for access and aggregation solutions. He has been involved in early programs related to digital transformation, shifting from traditional network functions towards network functions virtualization and edge cloud computing. Over the past seven years, he has led multiple universal CPE and edge cloud virtualization projects for both operators and enterprises. Alain is a specialist in network telecommunication infrastructures and services, with experience at Cabletron Systems, Nortel Networks, Riverstone Networks, ECI, ADVA and Adtran.  He holds an engineering degree in computer science from ESIAL (Ecole Sup+AOk-rieure d'Informatique et Applications de Lorraine, France).

Etienne Roux began to work on routers at the GÉANT2 NOC, he continued his carrier at Bouygues Telecom and finally came at Orange. He works in the RBCI (AS3215) engineering team since 2011 and is focus on the backhaul and services for ISP and customers.  Beside his work at Orange, he is also the deputy mayor of his village in charge of youth, school and library.

Data Communication Intelligent Operations & Management CTO at Huawei. Areas of passion & expertise include Internet traffic monitoring, accounting, performance, fault, configuration.   Benoit's area of focus network automation with YANG as the data model-driven management enabler, and telemetry as a feedback loop to solve the closed loop automation and the Autonomous Driving Network (ADN) challenges.

Shelly Cadora is a principal engineer at Cisco Systems with over 20 years of experience in enterprise and mass-scale networking. Her expertise spans a wide range of topics, from service assurance and telemetry to network design and programmability.  She is an engaging, award-winning speaker who has presented at many industry conferences. In parallel with her networking career, she has earned a Master’s degree in Applied Physics and a PhD in Modern Literature, both from Stanford University.

Christian Schmutzer is Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems and has been with the company since 1998. Early on primarily worked on the design and deployment of large service provider backbones.   Since 2013 working on Packet/Optical network architectures, future product definition and technology innovation. Including their standardisation at IETF and deployment with lead customers.

Carsten Rossenhövel 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.

Jahanzeb Baqai is currently the Director of Product Line Management at Ciena. In this role, it is his responsibility to define strategies for IP transport. He also oversees product line management, RSP, and IP transport teams.   Before taking on the role as Director of Product Line Management, Jahanzeb was the Director of Strategy and Solutions at Ciena, where he helped identify and define next-generation solutions involving hardware and software products from across Ciena’s portfolio.   Jahanzeb holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from San Jose State University.

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.

Nancy has over 20 years of experience developing ASICs for the telecommunications industry. She is currently a distinguished engineer at Juniper Networks involved in architecture for their next generation networking ASIC.

Mustapha Aissaoui is a Product Manager in the Service Router Product Group of the IP Networks Division at Nokia. He holds an Electrical Engineering Diploma from Polytechnic School of Algiers and a MASc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa.   Mustapha Aissaoui has been in the Product Management role since 2004 and is responsible for the MPLS and Segment Routing features in the SR OS based routers. He is also the lead PLM for the SR-OS based PCEP and other SDN features of the NSP PCE controller.  Mustapha Aissaoui is an active participant of the IETF MPLS, PCE, and SPRING working groups. He is a co-author and a major contributor to many drafts in these working groups.

Jin Minwei joined Huawei in 2004, from 2006 to 2016, he was responsible for designing high-level solutions for routers in global carrier networks, from 2017 to 2019, he worked in Huawei Europe Research Center, responsible for solution innovation for European carrier transformation, during this period, he experienced the whole process of global carrier network migration from traditional networks to future networks.   He also led the design of the CloudMetro solution and introduced new technologies such as segment routing and telemetry into operators' metro and 5G bearer networks. Since 2019, he has been responsible for researching next-generation technologies and designing product solutions for Huawei routers.

Cheng Weiqiang has nearly 20 years of experience in IP network research and development. He is currently mainly responsible for the technical research, standardization, and deployment planning of IP wide area networks and data center networks.

Passionate about technology since he was a child, in 1997, while still a student, together with his mathematics and philosophy professors and some classmates, he created a state-of-the-art computer room, with one of the first high-speed lines, a CDN 256 run directly from primary Telco Room by SIP (Now Telecom Italia), and sets up a data processing center with web and mail server.   After high school, he enrolled in the degree course in Telecommunications Engineering in Florence. Riccardo's dream has always been to create an open, scalable, secure and shareable network; in fact Riccardo in the first years of university, to amortize the high costs of the first ADSL lines, shared the network with the neighbours. During his university studies, he meets Simone and coincidentally Simone, in Quarrata (a little city near Florence), shares the connection with his friends; it is precisely this coincidence that prompts them to transform, together, a passion into business (hence the "noi" translated into English in US which closes the name Si (Simone) Ri (Riccardo) US). In 2007 they founded Sirius Technology in Simone's garage in Quarrata and began to create the Toscana radio network.   Since 2016 they have also extended coverage in Sardinia starting from the "Nugoro amada", Riccardo's birthplace, creating a new generation radio and fiber network in Sardinia. Using artificial intelligence and IOT sensor technologies aided by new generation protocols on IPv6, they have built an intelligent infrastructure capable of predicting, with the trend of the perturbation, the degradation of the links or the saturation of the radio and fiber optic links and anticipate the traffic engineering, conveying the priority traffic on privileged segments through the use of the SRv6 protocol. Not only WiFi, Sirius has a business unit for the design of fiber access networks and has started to wire entire industrial areas and towns in both Sardinia and Tuscany.

Stephen heads Spirent’s market strategy organization developing strategy, helping to define market positioning, future growth opportunities, new innovative solutions and market leading disruptive technologies. Stephen also leads Spirent’s strategic initiatives for 5G and future networks and represents Spirent on a number of Industry and Government advisory boards.   With over 24 years’ experience in telecommunications Stephen has been at the cutting edge of next generation technologies and has worked across the industry with service providers, network equipment manufacturers and start-ups, helping them drive innovation and transformation. Stephen is an ardent believer in connected technology and strives to challenge, blur and break down the silos which prevent innovation and business success.

Xu Huan joined Huawei in 2005 and has more than 18 years of experience in the IP field. Served as the European IP Solution Sales Director from 2013 to 2022. With comprehensive and in-depth understanding of IP technologies, as a software engineer, R&D project manager, senior product manager, head of the router product portfolio and lifecycle management team etc.

Yuanwen (Daisy) Sun has 20 years of experience in networking and test measurement. She has worked on different technologies in network infrastructure area, with expertise in routing/switching, MPLS/VPN, SDN, Access and 5G.   Daisy currently focuses on 5G O-RAN and time synchronization and is an active member in the O-RAN community.

Dennis Hagarty is an experienced specialist working in the mobile space for 30 years and for the last 14 years has focused on timing and synchronization.   In his current role, Dennis is the interface between Cisco engineering, field sales teams, and the Cisco customer community for all matters related to timing and synchronization for Provider Connectivity business unit and other Cisco entities.   He also closely follows standards bodies such as the synchronization group at the ITU-T (Q13/SG15) and is also the lead author of the first available major book on the topic: "Synchronizing 5G Mobile Networks" (Cisco Press).   Dennis has a skill for breaking down complex topics to help people understand and gain knowledge, he loves to share his knowledge to help others.

Robert is the L3 and Advanced IP Apps PLM for Ciena’s SDN controller & NMS/EMS, Navigator Network Control Suite (formerly known as MCP).   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 was then a prime in 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, and spent some years directing the company’s 5G mobile solution before returning to the management space for his current role.   Robert holds twenty four patents, an MA in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, UK and an MSc in Telecommunications and EngD in Photonic control planes, both from the University of London, UK.

Silvia is Director of Software and Standards at ETSI, where she is responsible for Software Development Groups and open source initiatives in support of standardization. Among others, she has helped setup projects such as Open Source MANO, TeraFlowSDN, OpenSlice and OpenCAPIF.   Before that, she was Technical Expert in the ETSI Centre for Testing and Interoperability where she provided technical expertise on open source, interoperability testing and proofs of concept (PoC) to standardization groups working on network transformation (NFV, MEC, ZSM).   Prior to this position, Silvia was Lead Member of the Technical Staff at Ulticom, where she was responsible for the design and development of software based carrier grade solutions enabling mobile services. Before that, she worked in the domain of Operations Support Systems (OSS) and Network Management for HP and Thales.

Krishnan Thirukonda is a Principal Engineer with Cisco Systems currently focusing on Large Scale network automation and analytics technologies. Krishnan has extensive background in network automation, and is a networking veteran with previous experience in routing, mpls and IPv6 technologies as well as Cisco data center and virtualization solutions.

He has 16+ years' experience in network design, research and standards. His specialty is in Routing, MPLS/VPN, SDN and Segment Routing, etc.   He is now the secretary of IETF IDR working group. He has 12 published RFCs and many in-progress IETF drafts. He also has 80+ patents in packet networking.

Jeffrey (Zhaohui) Zhang is a Distinguished Engineer in Juniper Networks' routing protocols team. He has worked on routing technologies for over 30 years, from OSPF/BGP/LDP/RSVP, MPLS-TE, MPLS/BGP-enabled services, to Multicast (PIM/MVPN/EVPN), VPLS/EVPN, RIFT, Segment Routing, and Mobile User Plane.  Jeffrey Zhang is an active IETF participant who co-chairs the RIFT and BESS WGs in the IETF.