Asaf is a seasoned engineering professional focusing on Networking and Cloud architecture, with over 15 years of experience in the Telecommunications market, having held various positions at different Telco equipment vendors.  Asaf leads the product management team for Nokia’s CloudBand Network Director, which addresses the NFVO piece in the MANO puzzle.

Jonathan is responsible for making ECI's elastic network solutions thought-provoking to ECI’s customers and the industry at large. Previously Jonathan was Vice President Architecture Marketing at Nortel Networks, and Vice President Business Development at Xtellus, an optical swtching startup.  He served on the Board of Directors of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions and the Multiservice Switching Forum. Jonathan has a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from McGill University.

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.

Nav Chander is responsible for leading service provider marketing, positioning Silver Peak as a key enabling channel for service providers to expand managed service offerings, become more customer centric and identify new revenue streams.   Prior to joining Silver Peak Chander served as the research manager for enterprise, telecommunications and networking at IDC where he led the managed network services and worldwide networking infrastructure research programs.   Nav has had extensive years of experience in driving new products at leading telecom, networking and managed service vendors throughout his career.

Tony Sarathchandra is Director of Product Management at Juniper Networks where he leads Cloud Services, SD-WAN and NFV/SDN solutions across the company’s product portfolio. In this role, he’s responsible for defining overall solution strategy, roadmap and delivery timelines based on customer requirements across both key service provide and enterprise customer segments.   Prior to Juniper Tony has held product management, product marketing and business development roles at Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks spanning over 16+ years. Tony holds a Bachelors in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Queensland, Australia.

Stefan Olofsson is the Director of System Engineering at Viptela EMEA. He has spent more than 20 years in the networking field, primarily working with Provider Backbones, MPLS, IPv6, High Availability, Security and Voice technologies.  Prior to joining Viptela he spent 17 years at Cisco working in both sales and engineering capacities.

Mr.Wim Henderickx is Director Network Consulting Engineering & PLM – Technology in the ION Division at Nokia, based in Belgium. Mr. Henderickx provides senior level consulting on advanced IP solutions for Service provider and Enterprise customers around: Cloud Networking (SDN/NFV), Triple Play, Mobile, IOT, etc.  He has over 20 years’ experience in the communications and networking industry, and is a regular speaker at technical conferences all over the world. He is active in a number of SDO’s like IETF, BBF, openStack, etc.   Mr. Henderickx holds a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering, Data Communications and a Masters degree in Economy and is a Bellabs Fellow.

Javier Antich Romaguera,

Javier Antich is an experienced Networking Industry professional with 20 years of experience. He has spent the last 12 years at Juniper Networks on different systems engineering and architect positions.  Currently he is Product Line Manager in the JUNOS team at Juniper Development and Innovation (JDI), focused on Automation, Programmability, Telemetry & Analytics.   Previous to that, he experienced the raise on the Carrier Ethernet market at Riverstone Networks. He is passionate about networking technologies, economy and Ironman triathlons.   He holds a Masters Degree on Telecommunications by the ETSIT at the Polytechnic University in Valencia, and Executive MBA at the Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Eric Carmès is a Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of 6WIND. In this capacity, he drives the corporate strategy and growth. Under his leadership, 6WIND was the very first company to understand the impact of multicore architectures on networking software industry and became within three years the undisputed leader for multicore packet processing software. Eric was previously 6WIND’s Chief Operating Officer, responsible for driving the company’s technology vision and directing its Quality Assurance programs. Eric’s leadership in the design of innovative networking architectures has been instrumental in the company being awarded eight patents. With more than 20 years’ experience in IP standards and architectures, he is an expert in current and next-generation IP technologies and protocols.   Prior to founding 6WIND, Eric was Head of the Network Department at Thales (previously Thomson-CSF), having also previously served at Dassault Electronique. He managed large teams of advanced R&D engineers, gaining solid hardware and software development experience on both professional and military programs. His highly qualified team of developers was responsible for designing and developing IP network architectures and COTS technologies for stringent military programs.   Eric holds Master of Science degrees from both INSA (University for Applied Sciences) and ESE (Electrical Engineering University).

Rajesh Rajamani,

Rajesh Rajamani is the Director of Marketing, Service Provider Networks and NFV, where he is responsible for developing Spirent’s End-to-End Test Methodology for the Service Provider SDN and NFV domains.   Rajesh has worked in the telecoms industry for over 20 years and prior to joining Spirent, Rajesh has worked in various technical and marketing roles at CenturyLink, Redback & Nortel.  Rajesh attended Duke University in Durham, NC where he obtained a Master’s degree in Business Administration.

Hongbo Zhao is a senior research engineer from Network Research Dept., Huawei. He joined Huawei in the middle of 2016 and works in the field of SDN/NFV, the hardware acceleration currently.   Prior to that, he served as the operation and R&D officer in an SDN startup more than 3 years, being skilled in FPGA-based prototyping and solutions.   Hongbo holds a Master degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University.

Sue leads the marketing of SDN/NFV at Netcracker, a forward-looking software company wholly owned by NEC Corporation. She brings over 20 years of experience in the telecoms industry, spanning a variety of roles across many parts of the business.   Previously, Sue led the marketing activities at Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent for IMS/VoLTE, CloudBand NFV management as well as IPTV and broadband access solutions. She also led a business development team in EMEA focused on next-generation IP networks.

Yves Hertoghs is Lead NSX Systems Engineer at VMware EMEA. In this role, he is providing technical consultancy to customers and demonstrating the technological benefits of using NSX, the VMware Network Virtualization offering. Among these customers are several Cloud and Communication Service Providers. One of his main responsibilities is to illustrate the added value of network virtualization for the customer. On top of that, he examines the potential advantages of the NSX technology in various industries.   NSX is a relatively new technology. As a technology evangelist, Yves regularly provides support to other departments and projects within VMware EMEA. Yves is an expert in the fields of network virtualization and Software Defined Networking. His background and expertise - including various patents listed on his name - enable Yves to better position VMware’s solution in the customers’ existing end-to-end network infrastructure.   Yves has joined VMware in 2015, after 20 years of experience as a network specialist in the IT sector. Prior to joining VMware, Yves worked at Cisco Systems since 1996, most recently as a Distinguished Consulting Engineer specialized in, among others, LAN Switching, Ethernet, and datacenter technology.   Yves has graduated as a Master in Computer Sciences at Artesis Hogeschool, part of the University of Antwerp. He is actively involved in the Broadband Forum, a consortium of service providers as well as hardware and software vendors. In his free time, Yves likes to play the guitar, on and off stage, and to write his own music.

Prayson Pate is ADVA Optical Networking’s chief technology officer for the Ensemble division and is an evangelist for network functions virtualization (NFV).   He speaks at industry events and writes posts and articles to inform, educate and entertain, mostly about NFV with plenty of innovation for good measure.   Prayson has contributed to standards bodies such as the MEF and IETF. He is a named inventor on nine patents.

Marco Rodrigues is a Distinguished Engineer, currently heading the Contrail Solutions Team in the CTO office at Juniper Networks.

As CTO, Nicolas leads Qosmos' technology strategy, driving the company's initiatives in open and virtualized networks. He contributes to standards bodies such as ONF SDN, ETSI NFV and IETF SFC, and Open Source Projects centred around Network Virtualization.   Nicolas has spent over 20 years in the telecommunications and information systems field. Early in his career, he was instrumental in creating HP’s OpenCall business. Then as the R&D manager of Inovatel, the advanced research organization of SFR, Nicolas led several innovative projects highlighting the impact of internet technologies on Mobile Operators.   Nicolas was also CTO and founder of Volubill (2001), a company building a Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) product for the Mobile Network Market. Volubill was a spinoff of the work he led as R&D Manager of Cegetel’s Internet research lab.   Nicolas holds several patents relating to Mobile Data Charging. Nicolas has an engineering degree from the French schools Ecole Polytechnique and Les Mines de Paris.

Raanan Tzemach is the Vice President of Product, Marketing and Professional Services for Telco Systems. Raanan brings to Telco Systems broad experience in the telecommunications, security, and software industries.   Before joining Telco Systems Raanan headed Products and Marketing for Cisco's Self-Optimizing Networks (SON) business unit, where he drove significant growth in both sales and the product portfolio.   In prior positions, Raanan served as VP of Amdocs EMEA Managed Services (GSS), VP & Business Unit Manager of Discretix (Sansa Security), VP Advanced Services and Internet at Cellcom (mobile operator) and in multiple engineering and R&D roles in the Israel Defense Forces.

Dr. Luyuan Fang is Distinguished Engineer, Architect at eBay, currently focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) for networking.   From 2013 to 2016,Luyuan was Principal Network Engineer at Microsoft Azure, where she led the innovation of Hierarchical SDN architecture for hyper-scale (millions of end-points) Cloud/Data Center (DC) networks; she developed host-based IPv6 Security features in Azure SDN DevOps team; and she prototyped optical fault detection tool using Azure IoT and ML. From 2006 to 2013, Luyuan worked at Cisco as Principal Engineer in SP Routing, DC, SDN, NFV.   From 1998 to 2006, Luyuan was Principal MTS at AT&T Labs, where she played a key architect role in building AT&T’s IP/MPLS Backbone and MPLS/BGP VPN Services. Prior to networking, Dr. Fang also held several research positions in AI, Deep Learning in Australia, Canada, and US, where she built Neural Networks for pattern recognition, applied to speech, hand written character recognition, image compression, and smart network management tools. Her Ph.D. work was “Design of Computational Neuron Networks”.   Luyuan holds several patents and pending patents in computer networking. She has co-authored 14 IETF RFCs for Internet Standards. She is a frequent speaker in prominent Global Networking Conferences in SDN, NFV, and MPLS. She has over 100 publications, including IEEE/ACM articles, conf. papers and industrial speeches.

Joe Marsella is Chief Technology Officer for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Ciena, responsible for aligning Ciena’s product portfolio to the business challenges and opportunities of customers in the region.   Joe has more than 20 years of experience in the software and telecommunications industry, having been with Ciena since 1997. He has vast expertise in packet and optical networking, including detailed knowledge on software defined networks (SDN), network functions virtualisation (NFV), photonics, DWDM, OTN, Carrier Ethernet and Control Planes. Prior to his appointment as CTO EMEA he served as Senior Director Product Management (PLM) SDN Portfolio at Ciena, responsible for the cross product software strategy of Ciena’s Agility software portfolio.   He has also had served as Senior Director Strategic Solutions, Director Product Management (PLM) – Switching, and Senior Director Product Management (PLM) – Transport, at Ciena. In these roles he provided expertise and direction in key vertical markets, helped develop the global packet optical switching business, as well as product line management for Ciena’s global metro and core optical Transport portfolio.   Prior to joining Ciena, Joe was a principal member technical staff at Siemens where he led software integration for Siemens’s Cable Telephony Product (CoAxiom) and the software interface into partner development company Scientific Atlanta (now Cisco).   Joe has a Master of Science (MSc) degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Purdue University.

Kumar Reddy is Senior Director in charge of SP Network Software and Automation architecture. He is responsible for driving new software technology and products around IOS-XR.

Dr. Haoyu Song is a senior principal network architect at Huawei Technology. He is a thought leader and early practitioner on the next generation programmable smart data plane and its application for network analytics.   He is a distinguished researcher and renowned expert in the field of high performance networking algorithm and architecture. He has published numerous research papers and patents which produce significant impact to the industry and Huawei’s product line. He has been actively participating and contributing in standard and open source organizations such as IETF, ONF, IEEE, and P4.   He received his doctoral degree in computer engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. Before joining Huawei, he was a research MTS with Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent.

Kohei Shiomoto is Senior Manager of Communication & Traffic Service Quality Project, NTT Network Technology Laboratories, NTT, Tokyo, Japan.   He joined the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), Tokyo, Japan in April 1989. He has been engaged in R&D of high-speed networking including ATM, IP, (G)MPLS, and IP+Optical networking in NTT labs. From August 1996 to September 1997 he was a visiting scholar at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA. From April 2006 to June 2011, he lead the IP Optical Networking Research Group in NTT Network Service Systems Laboratories. He is active in standardization of GMPLS in the IETF. Since July 2011, he has been leading the traffic engineering research group in NTT Service Integration Laboratories. Since July 2012, he has been leading Communication & Traffic Service Quality Project of NTT Network Technology Laboratories, NTT, Tokyo, Japan.   He received the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D degrees in information and computer sciences from Osaka University, Osaka in 1987 1989, and 1998, respectively. He is a Fellow of IEICE, a Senior Member of IEEE, and a member of ACM.

John is a Distinguished Engineering at Cisco, focussed on network and technology transformation; defining what network architectures will look like post the transformation to cloud-based services, virtualisation, SDx, NFV, IOT and Big Data Analytics.