Janne Mikola, Product Manager, Telia SD-WAN

Janne Mikola is the Common Product Manager of Telia’s SD-WAN services, that are available from Telia Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark and are sold and deployed globally. Janne was the very first technical developer working on Telia’s SD-WAN services and claims to be the first person in the whole Telia Company to ever have deployed an SDN capable switch and an SDN controller some 10 years ago. Since the launch of Telia SD-WAN in 2017 Janne has been acting as the Product Manager for the said service, responsible for its technical development and internationalization.

Janne is a Master of Science in Computer Science from Tampere University and wrote his master’s thesis on SDN when the concept was emerging in the industry. His career started with 4 years as a software developer after which he joined Telia and started looking at networks professionally, and has been doing so now for 9 years. Janne sees APIs, programmability, virtualization and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) with tools like Ansible as the most important current principles in the field of networking, but has grown increasingly interested in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence as enablers in creating unforeseen services. Janne has been playing with mostly with Machine Learning in Elasticsearch and OpenAI, literally playing in the case of OpenAI as he was interviewed in June 2022 at Wargamer.com about his breakthrough session of playing Dungeons & Dragons with the OpenAI. At times Janne likes to appear in academia, giving guest lectures on the topics of SDN and NFV.