Geoff manages all strategic global marketing efforts within the Broadband Forum, with a focus on new, innovative, and disruptive technologies. Before joining the Broadband Forum, Geoff was Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Calix, responsible for the Calix brand and company messaging worldwide. Prior to his 14 year career at Calix, Geoff was Director of Marketing Services at Motorola/Next Level Communications, and has held senior marketing, strategy, and operational roles at The McKenna Group, KPMG Consulting, and Oracle Corporation.   Geoff is also currently founder and principal of Modulus Marketing Advisors, a strategy consulting firm that helps both communications solutions/equipment vendors as well as service providers transform promising product and service innovations into market success.   Geoff holds an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA, as well as a BA from UCLA.

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 (NFV) and transport network solutions (MPLS; SDN; Carrier Ethernet).   Before joining EANTC, he studied Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin and worked as a Software Engineer as well as Consultant in the financial services and media sector. In 1999 he founded EANTC together with Gabriele Schrenk and Herbert Almus.

Geoff manages all strategic global marketing efforts within the Broadband Forum, with a focus on new, innovative, and disruptive technologies. Before joining the Broadband Forum, Geoff was Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Calix, responsible for the Calix brand and company messaging worldwide. Prior to his 14 year career at Calix, Geoff was Director of Marketing Services at Motorola/Next Level Communications, and has held senior marketing, strategy, and operational roles at The McKenna Group, KPMG Consulting, and Oracle Corporation.   Geoff is also currently founder and principal of Modulus Marketing Advisors, a strategy consulting firm that helps both communications solutions/equipment vendors as well as service providers transform promising product and service innovations into market success.   Geoff holds an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA, as well as a BA from UCLA.

BIO: Yves Hertoghs is a Principal Systems Engineer at VMware EMEA, where he is providing technical consultancy to customers including Service Providers & demonstrating the technological and business benefits of NSX, the VMware Network Virtualization offering.   Yves leads projects within & outside VMware, including a role as Project Stream Leader at the Broadband Forum. Yves has joined VMware in 2015, after 20 years of experience as a network specialist in the IT sector in companies such as Cisco.

Charles is a developer advocate in the Cisco DevNet team 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 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 currently co-chairs MEF’s Application Committee, which is standardizing an SD-WAN service definition to accelerate deployment and adoption of MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services orchestrated across a global ecosystem of automated networks.

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.

Johan started in the research division of Alcatel. Since then he held several positions with an end-to-end solution-focus. He also worked as a business consultant in the IP division, being responsible for IP & Ethernet business data services and cloud services. Currently, he is responsible for business development for Nokia/Nuage’s SD-WAN solution as well as for the evolution of business services including SDN and NFV.  He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Antwerp, Belgium as well as several telecom patents. He has been a speaker at numerous conferences and is active as MEF EMEA marketing co-chair.

Gint Atkinson is Vice President Network Strategy and Architecture and leads the transformation for SES’s 5G, virtualization, cloud, and network platform architectures that unify multiple satellite constellations and deliver 5G services from the edge to the cloud.  Prior to SES he was head of technology for Colt where he pioneered and launched the first large scale SDN, SD-WAN, and global Datacenter Interconnect services in 2012 offering on-demand elastic terabit services across 100 datacenters in Asia Pacific.  Gint has worked in the networking, mobile, and emerging media industries over 32 years as a serial entrepreneur and innovator for start-ups and large service providers including T-Mobile, NTT DOCOMO, AT&T, KDDI, Virgin Media and others where he has led the development and first to market launch of industry changing technologies and services.

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.

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.

Marc Cohn is a Solutions & Technical Strategist at Spirent, where he is qualifying opportunities for SDN, NFV, and Automation that leverage Spirent’s core competencies. Marc has been a thought leader for the open SDN/NFV movement, holding senior leadership roles in the Open Networking Foundation, ETSI NFV ISG, and open source networking projects including OPEN-O, OpenDaylight, and PNDA. He has also held senior executive roles for innovative NFV/SDN market leaders including EnterpriseWeb, the Linux Foundation, and ClearPath Networks, along with Product Management/Marketing leadership roles at Ciena, Amdocs, and Lucent Technologies.   Marc has been privileged to serve as editor for the industry's most important SDN/NFV publications including the original ONF SDN White Paper, NFV Insider Blog (SDxCentral) on behalf of the ETSI NFV leadership, and the Linux Foundation Harmonization White Paper. Marc earned a MS EE degree from the University of Southern California where he was a Hughes Fellow, and the first Computer Engineering degree granted by the University of Missouri.