Deeply engaged in strategy, innovation and engineering projects (incl. leading roles in cross-functional programs) within the DT group, Manuel coordinates Software-Defined Networking standards & collaborative community activities.   He is involved in the SDN movement since the early days, has driven and contributed to various related standardization activities, and serves in leadership positions at the Broadband Forum and the Open Networking Foundation.   He is co-initiator and leader of the 5G Convergence project stream within the BBF Wireless-Wireline-Convergence Work Area. In the past, he was also active in other standards developing organizations incl. the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Deeply engaged in strategy, innovation and engineering projects (incl. leading roles in cross-functional programs) within the DT group, Manuel coordinates Software-Defined Networking standards & collaborative community activities.   He is involved in the SDN movement since the early days, has driven and contributed to various related standardization activities, and serves in leadership positions at the Broadband Forum and the Open Networking Foundation.   He is co-initiator and leader of the 5G Convergence project stream within the BBF Wireless-Wireline-Convergence Work Area. In the past, he was also active in other standards developing organizations incl. the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Andrew G. Malis is a Distinguished Engineer at Huawei Technologies. He specializes in product and network architecture and future evolution; standards leadership (internal and external to the company); customer consultation; and SDN, NFV, IP, MPLS, Ethernet, and other telecom and data networking protocols. Previously, he has held senior engineering positions at Verizon, Tellabs, Cascade Communications, BBN, and other industry-leading organizations.   He also holds standards leadership positions as Services Area Director and Technical Council Member at the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and as a Working Group co-chair and a member of the Routing Directorate in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). He has held leadership roles in other standards organizations, including board memberships and president/chairman.   He has written and contributed to many technology standards, including having authored a number of IETF RFCs, and has spoken and chaired at numerous industry conferences.

David is a Senior Architect at Cisco. In this capacity he has responsibility for various aspects of Cisco's IOS-XR software. He was part of the team that designed distributed BGP for the Cisco CRS-1, and also worked for many years on Carrier Ethernet OAM and L2 protocols. David is now helping drive Cisco's moves to improve software disaggregation and manageability.   David has been an active participant in MEF (and other SDOs) for nearly 10 years, initially working on Service OAM and Carrier Ethernet service attributes, and more recently as the Co-chair of the MEF Services Committee. In this role he is helping drive MEF's transformation from Carrier Ethernet to the full range of MEF 3.0 Services including L1, Ethernet, IP, SD-WAN and cloud services. He is also the editor of MEF's IP Service Attributes project, which will soon publish MEF's first services specification beyond Ethernet.   David has a Master's degree in Mathematics and Computation from the University of Oxford, and is the author of 4 software patents relating to networking technology.

Emerson is a veteran in the network infrastructure industry with deep expertise in a broad set of technologies. He started his career as a Systems Engineer at Cisco over 18 years and since then he worked with many technologies including Optical Transport, IP/MPLS and more recently SDN, NFV, Orchestration systems.   He’s very passionate about moving the Service Provider industry ahead and his main mission is to drive the adoption of state of the art technologies and innovative network architectures.   Since 2009 he leads MEF’s marketing group for Latin America and Caribbean as co-chair and in 2015 he was honoured with the Distinguished Systems Engineer title, the highest rank in Cisco’s Systems Engineering organization, as a recognition for his technical excellence and his impact in the industry.

Youcef Ayad is Business Connectivity Services professional with over 20 years' experience in the telecom industry in the Nordics whereof 5 years with Telia Carrier, managing a cross border Ethernet product covering Europe, North America and Asia. In 2009, he initiated the new Mobile Backhaul service that was instrumental for Telia Company launch of the world’s first commercial 4G/LTE Network and now deployed in all the Nordics and Baltics.  Youcef joined in 2016 the Business Networking Team part of Commercial Enterprise MNC at Telia Company Global Services & Operations. He is now business owner and managing development program for Next Gen Carrier Ethernet services in the Nordics, Baltics and Globally. Last year, this program launched the world’s first 4G Access for CE2.0 services and winning the MEF17 PoC Award silver position for the Agile SD-WAN PoC in Orlando.   Youcef is co-chairing the MEF Nordics regional marketing committee and he received the MEF Member Recognition Award 2017 in the category: “Outstanding Contributor Award” for Marketing Committee Regional Leadership - Nordics and organization of Nordics seminars. He is a MEF Certified Carrier Ethernet Professional as he obtained the MEF-CECP 2.0 certification.   Mr. Ayad graduated at the Royal Institute of Technology “KTH” in Stockholm in Scientific Computing and Engineering and studied Computer Engineering program at the University of Technology in Lulea, Sweden.

Rami has over 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. In his current role at NEC/Netcracker, Rami oversees SDN/NFV solutions to enable large-scale digital transformations by unlocking the opportunities of the cloud, virtualization, and the 5G mobile ecosystem. Rami is also a member of the Board of Directors of MEF where he co-chairs the Global Marketing & Education Committee as well as the 5G Focus Group.   Previously, Rami held various senior-level positions in architecture, product strategy, and business development at Telco Systems, DragonWave, Axerra Networks, Carrier Access, and Paragon Networks.   Rami holds an MS in Computer Science and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Haven.

Charles is a developer evangelist with a passion for open source and standards. His open source journey began in 1999 as a founding member of Vovida Networks, where he developed some of the industry’s first open source Voice over IP (VoIP) protocol stacks and applications.   Now at Cisco, Charles is a recognized champion of open source, standards, and interoperability. In 2015, he introduced open source hackathons into IETF and MEF, revolutionizing the way these SDOs operate and uniting open source software with standards to maximize the pace and relevance of both.   Charles also co-chairs MEF’s Application Committee, chartered to enable applications to dynamically interact with the network such that application-level quality of experience, security, and performance requirements are best met by the underlying network infrastructure.

Bartosz Michalik is a Technical Architect at Amartus, a certified MEF engineer, and the 2017 MEF-CECP of the Year award winner. Bartosz graduated in Computer Science from Poznan University of Technology in 2006, and holds a PhD in Computer Science, Software Architecture from Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven.   Prior to joining Amartus, Bartosz worked as a software engineer and architect in a number of IT companies. Bartosz has over 12 years of experience in the software development and consulting industry. Currently, he mainly focuses on building technical expertise around software-centric networks, network virtualization, open source networking and MEF standardization and APIs.

Abel Tong is Sr. Director of Solutions Marketing for Ciena’s Blue Planet Division. He is responsible for helping Ciena customers to transform networks through the application of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), to deliver value and create new services, and to simplify network operations.   Abel has over 15 years of networking and telecommunications systems experience. Abel is also a long-time contributor to the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF). Abel has been a part of MEF’s Project UNITE, an industry wide collaborative initiative bringing standards development organizations together to create the building blocks for Lifecycle Service Orchestration and Third Network.   Abel is also a member of Open Daylight and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF).

Rami has over 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. In his current role at NEC/Netcracker, Rami oversees SDN/NFV solutions to enable large-scale digital transformations by unlocking the opportunities of the cloud, virtualization, and the 5G mobile ecosystem. Rami is also a member of the Board of Directors of MEF where he co-chairs the Global Marketing & Education Committee as well as the 5G Focus Group.   Previously, Rami held various senior-level positions in architecture, product strategy, and business development at Telco Systems, DragonWave, Axerra Networks, Carrier Access, and Paragon Networks.   Rami holds an MS in Computer Science and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Haven.