Roy Chua is co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at SDxCentral, a leading B2B technology media company focused on providing independent, trusted, news coverage and cutting-edge research on software-defined infrastructure.   Roy has 20+ years of experience in enterprise SaaS, cloud computing, networking and security, and has co-founded companies in the networking, security and identity management space. In addition, Roy has held executive roles at early software-defined infrastructure companies, and enterprise SaaS companies.

Jason is a Cloud NFV Subject Matter Expert at Nokia. He provides consultation on Nokia's Virtual Networks Orchestration (VNO) solution deploying SD-WAN and DC services to provide end-to-end packet flow while also interconnecting and deploying Value-Added Services. Prior to working in orchestration, Jason was a leader in VNF CSAR design. This experience has allowed Jason to have a unique full perspective of NFV management and orchestration.   Jason is also a strong believer in open communities. He was a mentor and speaker at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. He co-organized the first official OpenStack Days in Canada and continues to be a part of the OpenStack Canada community.   Jason was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada. He graduated from the University of Ottawa with the highest standing in Electrical Engineering.

Manish Aggarwal is a Assistant Vice President – Technology, in Aricent, a global design and engineering company, and has 18 years of industry experience in Datacom & Telecom Domain.   In Aricent, he is working as Solution Architect and his responsibilities include technology consulting, solution creation & service offering definition in area of SDN, NFV, Cloud & DevOps. He has extensive experience on Openstack, ONOS, CORD, OpenDayLight, OpenContrail and SDWAN. He also has significant knowledge and experience in architecture, product development and integration services for different kind of Switching / Routing Solutions in Access, Aggregation & Core networks.   He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Delhi College of Engineering, Delhi.

Hector Avalos has over 25 years of experience in the computing, networking and telecommunications industries. He currently holds the position of VP EMEA Sales and Business Development at Versa Networks. His current activities are focused on “virtual CPE”, “Software-Defined WAN” and “Software-Defined Security” solutions for Service Providers and Enterprises.   Prior to Versa, Hector worked 4 years at Ericsson as “Head of technology, architectures, solutions and strategy”, and 9 years at Juniper Networks as “Technical Director”.   Hector possesses a BSc. in Computing Science from ‘UDLA’ Mexico.

Nithin Michael is the CTO and co-­Founder of MODE. MODE is a commercial implementation of Nithin’s graduate work at Cornell with advisor, and now MODE co-founder, Kevin Tang.  Nithin received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics from Cornell University.

Claudio Scola heads the Product Management team for CenturyLink and is responsible for go-to-market strategy and planning for network based services.   Claudio has over 25 years’ experience in the international telecommunications industry, spending the last 16 years bringing new products and services to market and growing them into key revenue streams for the business.   Prior to joining CenturyLink, Claudio served in various product related roles for Tata Communications, Level 3, Easynet, Interoute and Cable & Wireless, bringing Internet and network services to the international enterprise and wholesale market with particular experience in the European managed network services.  Claudio is British and based in CenturyLink’s EMEA regional headquarters in London.  

Nicolas is a Consulting Engineer at Juniper Networks. He has 12 years experience in networking. He has been working primarily on routing topics and last 4 years extensively working on SDN and SD-WAN projects

Laurent Zimmerli studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He graduated with an MSc ETH degree in Computer Science. His master's thesis about «Rating Autonomous Systems» won the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Internet Monitoring and Protection (ICIMP) in 2009. During his studies, he participated in a development program by Nouvelle Planète in Madagascar and worked at UBS Investment Bank in the area of IT risk management.   After graduating, he joined Open Systems AG in 2008, where he joined the development team before taking on various functions in Professional Services and Customer Management as a Technical Account Manager, Key Account Manager and Vice President Customer Management. In mid-2016 Laurent Zimmerli became Vice President Product Marketing and a member of the Extended Executive Board.

Graduated of Telecom Lille, Christophe Rup started his career in 2001 at Dimension Data, before joining Netasq in 2002, first as a Support Engineer, then as a Training Engineer, before taking over the responsibility of pre-sales team in 2009. He had held this position for 4 years before joining Barracuda Networks.

Ronen Shpirer is responsible for Communication Service Providers (CSPs) and Cloud solutions marketing for Fortinet in EMEA. Ronen has over 20 years of international pre-sales and marketing experience in networkingand security in the CSP markets and enterprise markets.   Prior to joining Fortinet, he worked for a number of leading networking and VAS companies including Motorola, Cisco Systems, Bay Networks, and Comverse.   Ronen Shpirer holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Tel Aviv University. Mr. Shpirer is based at Fortinet’s EMEA headquarters in Sophia Antipolis, France.

Marius started his career as an MCSE and moved through scripting and internet design to finally settle on the networking portion of IT where his focus was Security. This is where he has spent the majority of his 20+ year career and what he is passionate about.  He spent time in the industry working for Training companies, Service Providers and Major Vendors in this space. For the last 8 years Marius was and is focused on L3 and L3 concepts and specifically around WAN edge automation.   In the last 2 years he has moved his focus to specifically SDWAN and the impact on the future of the Branch.

Mike is a senior analyst in 451 Research’s Applied Infrastructure and Dev Ops team covering enterprise networking. He has extensive experience reviewing and writing about enterprise remote access, security and network infrastructure products as well as consulting with enterprise IT, equipment and software vendors, and service providers.   Prior to joining 451 Research, he was with GlobalData as Research Director with the Global IT Technology & Software team covering the Enterprise Networking and Data Center Technology markets. Mike was with TechWeb for over 15 years finishing as Editor of Network Computing. He was Lead Analyst with InformationWeek Analytics, Senior Technology Editor with Network Computing and Executive Editor for Secure Enterprise. He has spoken at several conferences including Interop, SD-WAN Summit, MPLS + SDN + NFV World Congress, SDN NFV World Congress, as well as to local groups. He served as the chair for Interop's Data Center and Storage tracks. He also teaches a network security graduate course at Syracuse University. Prior to Network Computing, Mike was an independent consultant.   Mike teaches a graduate course in network security at Syracuse University’s Information Science and Technology which presents a technical and theoretical overview of network security strategies and technologies and how network security can fit into an organizations overall IT architecture.   Mike graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelors of Information Science and Technology.

Nithin Michael is the CTO and co-­Founder of MODE. MODE is a commercial implementation of Nithin’s graduate work at Cornell with advisor, and now MODE co-founder, Kevin Tang.  Nithin received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics from Cornell University.

Steve Garson is a leading expert on SD-WAN and Managed Security Infrastructure for global enterprise networks.   He is a regular contributor to the widely read NetworkWorld - Ask the WAN Expert column.

Derek has more than 20 years of technology product marketing, product management and business development experience with a focus on high-performance enterprise and service provider networking systems. He is Vice President of Product Marketing at Silver Peak where he leads product positioning and messaging for service provider and enterprise SD-WAN and WAN Optimization solution offerings.   Prior to Silver Peak, Derek was vice president of product line management at Extreme Networks where he led the team responsible for product strategy and the roadmap for the company’s wireless and wired enterprise and data center networking products, SDN platforms and network management and security solutions. Before joining Extreme, Derek was vice president of product management for SS8 Networks, a supplier of communications security analytics solutions. Prior to SS8, he served as vice president of Marketing for ConSentry Networks where he drove all aspects of product strategy and marketing for policy-based LAN switches and appliances. At Woven Systems as vice president of marketing, he launched the company out of stealth mode along with its first product, a 144-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fabric data center switch targeted to cloud providers and large enterprises.   Previously, Derek was senior director of product management at Brocade Communications, where he defined and launched several fibre channel product lines including Brocade’s first SAN director. Prior to Brocade, he was senior group manager of product management for ATM and Frame Relay product lines at Stratacom and Cisco Systems.   Derek holds a BSEE from Stanford University and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

Mr. Quartier oversees InfoVista’s global product management, product marketing and strategic alliances activities. Since joining the company in 2002, he has held a number of other positions in R&D and product management. Mr. Quartier’s prior industry experience encompasses various engineering, sales engineering and product management roles, including head of product management at TraceOne, a global leader in collaborative and SaaS solutions for the private label and branded goods industry.   He previously co-founded and served as the Chief Technical Officer at Clariteam, a managed service provider supporting quality of service and performance analysis of businesses’ IT systems, and sales engineer at ARCHE Communications, a market-leading French value-added reseller of ICT and network solutions to public and private sector organizations and communications service providers. Mr. Quartier received a master’s degree in network and system engineering from the Engineering School of Information and Digital Technologies (EFREI) in Paris, France.

Sanjay is VP and General Manager of the VeloCloud Business Unit in the Networking and Security business at VMware, after the acquisition of VeloCloud by VMware in December 2017. Prior to VMware, Sanjay was the CEO and co-founder of VeloCloud Networks.   Earlier, Sanjay ran publicly traded OnMobile Global, serving as its President and COO. Sanjay was at Citrix as VP of the Application Networking business through the acquisition of Caymas Systems where he was President and CEO. In the past, Sanjay has served in executive roles at Webvan (Vice President of Engineering and Business Development) and at Hewlett-Packard where ran the Internet Infrastructure Division as VP & GM prior to his departure in 1999.   He holds an MS in the Management of Technology from Stanford University, an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Mr. Raymond Yu joined Huawei USA in October, 2011 as Senior Solution Director for Carrier IP Solution sales. His most recent responsibilities include product management and competitive positioning of SD-WAN solutions, supporting GTM strategies and major opportunities with global key customers. Previously he was leading the Network Transformation team of Huawei Global Solution Elite Team (GSET) America Branch to drive innovations helping carriers in their network and cloud transformation from 2014 to late 2017.   Prior to Huawei, he spent 16 years with Cisco Systems in various capacity including R&D and product marketing for edge routing and switching, Unified Communications, mobile signaling, backhaul and securities. He’s one of earliest CCIE holders since late 90s.

As director in the MEF's Office of the CTO, Daniel is responsible for the development and implementation of a range of strategic MEF programs that are central to MEF's transformation to an agile-process oriented standards development organization. These innovative programs - including the MEF Software Developer Community, MEFnet global implementation platform, and MEF Reference Implementations - enable MEF's 210+ member companies to implement draft and published service orchestration and definitions work in code, and to make available standardized open APIs that accelerate the availability of highly agile, assured and orchestrated services for today's hyper-connected world.   Daniel has been involved in the networking industry for 25 years holding a variety of positions in RAD Data Communications, as well as co-founding Resolute Networks where he held executive positions. Representing Resolute in the MEF, Daniel served for 3 years as MEF Global Marketing Co-Chair and was elected three times to the MEF Board of Directors. Since 2010, Daniel has been a senior member of the MEF staff.

Nicolas Ribault is Senior Product manager at Keysight. He is the product owner and development manager for active monitoring solutions within Ixia group. Nicolas has 20 years of experience in High Tech industry and has been lead innovator for network performance monitoring products with Ixia for the last 10 years.   Before his focus on performance monitoring solutions, Nicolas has held several positions as solution architect and consultant for voice over IP, cellular networks and IP networking.

Mark has been in enterprise and service provider networking for over 25 years. He is responsible for solutions and services that enable Citrix SD-WAN as a managed service.

Ritesh Mukherjee is Vice President of Product Management leading technology strategy at 128 Technology. His expertise includes routing/switching, data center, cloud, SDN/NFV, and IoT.   Prior to 128 Technology, Ritesh was Director, Network Solutions at Huawei leading their Technical Solutions Team.  Prior to that he was Manager, Product Management at Cisco responsible for LISP, Multicast, Routing, and other technologies across IOS, NX-OS, and IOS-XR.  Ritesh holds a PhD in Computer Science from Concordia University, Montreal.

Linda has been working in Networking industry for over 20 years, Prior to Huawei she had worked for Cisco, Fujitsu and Nortel. Her recent work includes technologies for optimally & securely interconnecting enterprises branch offices with dynamic workloads & applications instantiated in third party cloud data centers.   • Lead SD-WAN solutions for Hybrid Cloud interconnection, especially on intelligent & secure integration of SD-WAN with provider VPNs so that enterprises can leverage their existing VPNs to optimize the reach to dynamic workloads instantiated in Hybrid Cloud DCs.   • Co-chair of IETF I2NSF (Interface to Network Security Functions) WG. I2NSF WG is to standardize interface for clients to dynamically specify/monitor/verify their security policies, providing a tool to achieve Software Defined Security Services, especially for enterprises with workloads in 3rd party Cloud DCs   • Lead Network Security initiative for securing workloads hosted in hybrid cloud data centers   • Chairing ONUG (Open Network User Group) Software Defined Security Services Working Group. Actively contributing to ONUG community   • IETF OpArea Directorate, IETF Gen-Art Area Directorate. Authors of many RFCs in IETF Routing, Internet, and OpArea   • Active contributor to MEF Cloud Service Architecture project