Roy Chua is Founder and Principal at AvidThink, an independent research and advisory service formed in 2018 out of SDxCentral's research group. Prior to co-founding SDxCentral and running its research and product teams, Roy was a management consultant working with both Fortune 500 and startup technology companies on go-to-market and product consulting.  As an early proponent of the software-defined infrastructure movement, Roy is a frequent speaker at technology events in the telco and cloud space and a regular contributor to leading online publications. A graduate of UC Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science program and MIT's Sloan School of Business, Roy has 20+ years of experience in telco and enterprise cloud computing, networking and security, including founding several Silicon Valley startups.

25+ years’ experience in developing networking solutions and further advancing networking technology.   Areas of research: Network resiliency and quality assurance by enhancing fault management and performance monitoring methods; Efficient Segment Routing in IPv6 network; Control and user plane separation in disaggregated networking systems; Network slicing for performance-constrained services.   An active contributor to SDOs (IETF, BBF, and MEF): 24 published IETF RFCs; Leader of the Performance, Experience, and Application Testing project stream at BBF; Editor BBF TR-390.2 Performance Measurement from the IP Edge to a Customer Equipment Using STAMP; Co-Editor MEF 66 Service OAM for IP Services; Co-Editor MEF 67 Service Activation Testing for IP Services.  An inventor with 10+ granted patents.   BS in Physics degree from Latvian University (Riga, Latvia).

Peter Thompson became Chief Technical Officer of Predictable Network Solutions in 2012 after several years as Chief Scientist of GoS Networks (formerly U4EA Technologies).   Prior to that he was CEO and one of the founders (together with Neil Davies) of Degree2 Innovations, a company established to commercialize advanced research into network QoS/QoE, undertaken during four years that he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Partnership in Advanced Computing Technology in Bristol, England. Previously he spent eleven years at STMicroelectronics (formerly INMOS), where one of his numerous patents for parallel computing and communications received a corporate World-wide Technical Achievement Award. For five years he was the Subject Editor for VLSI and Architectures of the journal Microprocessors and Microsystems, published by Elsevier. He has degrees in mathematics and physics from the Universities of Warwick and Cambridge, and spent five years doing research in general relativity and quantum theory at the University of Oxford.

Dr Diego R. Lopez joined Telefonica I+D in 2011 as a Senior Technology Expert, and is currently in charge of the Technology Exploration activities within the GCTIO Unit. Before joining Telefónica he spent some years in the academic sector, dedicated to research on network services, and was appointed member of the High-Level Expert Group on Scientific Data Infrastructures by the European Commission.   Diego is currently focused on applied research in network infrastructures, with a special emphasis on virtualization, data-driven management, new architectures, security, and quantum communications. Diego is an ETSI Fellow and chairs the ETSI ISGs ZSM (on network automation) and the NOC of ETSI ISG NFV.  Apart from this, Diego is a more than acceptable Iberian ham carver, and extremely fond of seeking and enjoying comics, and good discussions on any (in)appropriate matter.

Silvia joined ETSI in 2012 as a Technical Expert in the Centre for Testing and Interoperability, where she is in charge of project and community development for open source and collaborative software development groups. Her current responsibilities include taking care of TeraFlowSDN, Open Source MANO (ETSI TFS and OSM) and developing ETSI Software Development groups. Before that, she was responsible for the creation of several PoC Frameworks and Plugtests Programmes (series of interoperability events) for ETSI ISGs working on Network Transformation: NFV, MEC, ZSM.   Prior to this position, Silvia was Lead Member of the Technical Staff at Ulticom, where she was responsible for the design and development of software based carrier grade solutions enabling mobile services. Before that, she worked in the domain of Operations Support Systems (OSS) and Network Management for HP and Thales.

Mr. Christian Toche has joined Huawei Technologies in 2006 and has been in charge of the European Wireless Standards activities until 2017.   Before joining Huawei, Christian spent about 16 years in Nortel doing software development for 2G and 3G solutions and then moved to standards activities.  Christian is now in charge of the ETSI/3GPP overall strategy and industry relationships for Huawei. Christian has been involved in 3GPP from the start and has held various leadership positions in 3GPP over the last 20 years. Christian has been member of the ETSI Board since 2017, and since then has been leading the activities related to the ETR (ETSI Technology Radar). Christian has also been Vice Chair of the ISG ZSM since its creation in 2018.

Julien Maisonneuve works in Nokia corporate standards and was involved in NFV from the onset. He has been chairing the ETSI NFV evolution and ecosystem WG for 6 years.   With a background in distributed systems and IP networks, he was involved in research and worked on fault-tolerance frameworks before turning to standards. He held elected positions in OMG, DVB, ITU-T, OpenIPTVForum, ETSI TISPAN, ETSI NFV and participated in 3GPP, ATIS, GSMA, NGMN. He was a reviewer in more than a dozen European projects.  Today he heads the Nokia delegation to ETSI NFV and IETF.

Stephen Alexander earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.   He honed his skills and launched his career at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, which develops advanced technologies for the U.S. Department of Defense.   In 1994 he joined Ciena, a start-up at the time, as one of its first employees. Before rising to CTO, Alexander managed teams in a variety of areas at Ciena, including Transport and Switching, Data Networking, and Lightwave Systems.   Now he sits on the board of several prominent telecom groups and has won several industry honors, including the IEEE Communications Society Industrial Innovation Award.   When he’s not at Ciena, Alexander, who worked in high school at a TV and radio repair shop, enjoys things that get him outside and working with his hands.

Michael is Vice President and CTO of the Cisco Networking Group leading technical direction, architectural transition, solution architecture and roadmap planning for Cisco’s SP networking portfolio. He drives Cisco’s leadership position in core, edge, aggregation and access routing, mobility, cable, optics and optical networking and automation software solutions in collaboration with partners, customers, internal cross-functional leaders and the industry in reinventing the mass-scale networks of the future.   Prior to rejoining Cisco in February 2018, Michael was co-founder and CTO of Skyport Systems, developing cloud managed, on premise, virtualized compute platforms with security, ease of use, and always-on analytics built in. Before Skyport, Michael served as engineering CTO at Juniper Networks, leading new architectures, embedded software evolution and silicon roadmap development across the router, switch and Wi-Fi portfolios.   Michael has held many senior technical leadership roles at both Cisco and Juniper and was a key contributor to many successful product lines and technology including C7200, C12000, M40, T640, JUNOS, ASR1K and IOS-XE. Michael holds CS and Math degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, is a named inventor on many networking related patents, is a frequent speaker at industry events, and often shares his thoughts through Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs.

Zhenbin Li is in charge of the research and standard promotion work of IP protocols. Before that he had been the Chief IP/MPLS Service Architect and the Chief Architect of SDN controller to be responsible for the service and architecture design of IP software platform and SDN controller.  Zhenbin Li and his team are taking an active part in the IP/MPLS/SDN standardization work in IETF and promote the innovation of SR, BGP/VPN, PCE, SBI/NBI, Telemetry, etc.

Roy Chua is Founder and Principal at AvidThink, an independent research and advisory service formed in 2018 out of SDxCentral's research group. Prior to co-founding SDxCentral and running its research and product teams, Roy was a management consultant working with both Fortune 500 and startup technology companies on go-to-market and product consulting.  As an early proponent of the software-defined infrastructure movement, Roy is a frequent speaker at technology events in the telco and cloud space and a regular contributor to leading online publications. A graduate of UC Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science program and MIT's Sloan School of Business, Roy has 20+ years of experience in telco and enterprise cloud computing, networking and security, including founding several Silicon Valley startups.

Bruno has over 30 years of experience in the telecom industry and joined Nokia (then Alcatel-Lucent) in April 2014.   He’s heading the EMEA Product Line Management team for Nokia’s IP Routing and Network Automation portfolio, including the 7950 XRS, 7750 SR, 7250 IXR, 7220 IXR, 7210 SAS and 7705 SAR families of routers, the Network Services Platform (NSP), the Fabric Services Platform (FSS) and the Deepfield solutions. This industry-leading portfolio provides service providers and large enterprises with a Smart Network Fabric spanning from access to core.  Prior to his current role he was a Technical Lead at Juniper Networks for 14 years, providing guidance to carriers and large enterprises on how to deploy and optimize their IP/MPLS and Carrier Ethernet networks.   He holds an MSc in Telecommunications from the Military Academy in Brussels and made it to Captain in charge of the Belgian Armed Forces’ country-wide data network before leaving and joining BT Belgium as a Design Engineer.  He is based in Antwerp, Belgium.

Nicola Benvenuti is Vice President of Product Line Management at Ciena. He is responsible for strategic investments and development of Ciena’s IP & Optical solutions to continuously stay ahead of evolving global service provider requirements.  In addition to Product Management, Nic’s 25 years of experience includes roles in Network Design, Business Development, System Architecture and Engineering. Nic holds five granted patents in optical networking.

Moran Roth leads the Optics PLM team at Juniper, with responsibility for the optical solutions across all Juniper’s product lines. Before joining Juniper, Moran held several leadership positions in Product Management and Engineering at several Networking companies, most recently, managing the long-haul PLM team at Infinera with focus on the CSP and ICP segments.  He has more than 20 years of experience in the Communication industry in large companies as well as startups. Moran holds an MSc. In Electrical Engineering with specialization in photonics.

Olivier is a part of Juniper’s Automated WAN Solutions Product Line Management team with responsibility for Juniper’s ACX product portfolio.   He has more than 20 years of experience in the Communication industry, active in various roles as pre-sales, sales and product development across multiple geographies and companies.

Christian Schmutzer is Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems and has been with the company since 1998. Early on primarily worked on the design and deployment of large service provider backbones.   Since 2013 working on Packet/Optical network architectures, future product definition and technology innovation. Including their standardisation at IETF and deployment with lead customers.

Carsten Rossenhövel is Managing Director and Co-Founder of EANTC AG (European Advanced Networking Test Center). Based in Berlin, Germany, EANTC is an independent test lab for telecommunication technologies offering vendor-neutral network testing and consultancy services for vendors, service providers, and enterprises.   In this role, Carsten has over 20 years of experience in telecommunication networks testing and is responsible for EANTC's business development. His technical areas of expertise include validation of 5G, Open RAN, and transport technologies.

James Glover is Director of Product Line Management at Ciena. He leads a team focused on IP Strategy and Execution, NOS Evolution for L2/L3 networking and software support for Distributed NFV Infrastructure.   James has over 25 years of experience in the networking and telecommunications industries. Prior to Ciena, James worked at Ericsson for 9 years, both in Europe and North America. He has held various positions in the networking space at Redback Networks, HP, and 3COM. He is currently based in San Jose, California.

Peter Landon is a Director of Product Line Management for the Nokia Network Services Platform, with a focus on multi-layer SDN solutions.  Peter has over 25 years of experience in Product Management and system design including senior roles at Juniper Networks, Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs, and while at BTI Systems, leading the architecture and design of the BTI/Juniper 7800 Series Intelligent Cloud Connect platform.

Vivek is Vice President of Engineering for Colt’s global network. Additionally, he is the Country Head and Managing Director of Colt India. He is an alumnus of Cambridge University completing the Senior Management Programme from Judge business school and executive/leadership coaching.   With 23 years of experience in strategic & operational Leadership profiles of global accountabilities, Vivek leads Colt’s global engineering function that architects, develops and evolves Colt’s core fibre and electronics network in the most efficient and reliable fashion to drive customer satisfaction up and the lowering operating costs.   Vivek has been instrumental in future proofing Colt’s award winning IQ Network to a 400G optimised network with modern orchestration, connecting 1000+ data centres across Europe, Asia & North America, reaching 29,000 buildings via Colt fibre and 158 Cloud PoPs. With strong passion for technology & innovation, Vivek is a modern business leader who believes in constant change and transformation to be ahead of the market. Under his leadership Colt has successfully launched 400G/800G, SDN/NFV, sustainable, efficient and converged network technologies.

Roy Chua is Founder and Principal at AvidThink, an independent research and advisory service formed in 2018 out of SDxCentral's research group. Prior to co-founding SDxCentral and running its research and product teams, Roy was a management consultant working with both Fortune 500 and startup technology companies on go-to-market and product consulting.  As an early proponent of the software-defined infrastructure movement, Roy is a frequent speaker at technology events in the telco and cloud space and a regular contributor to leading online publications. A graduate of UC Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science program and MIT's Sloan School of Business, Roy has 20+ years of experience in telco and enterprise cloud computing, networking and security, including founding several Silicon Valley startups.

Dave Ward is CEO of PacketFabric. Prior to joining PacketFabric, he was the Chief Technology Officer of Engineering, Chief Architect, and SVP at Cisco’s Networking and Security Business where he drove innovation for the company’s entire platform, product and solution portfolio.   He led Cisco’s core innovation programs, unifying and advancing strategic co-innovation partnerships and programs with internal and external customers, partners, developers, academia, standards and open-source groups.   He also led the portfolio trajectory by creating new offerings and technologies inside and outside Cisco’s traditional product portfolio. His engineering teams built numerous hardware and software products as well as industry solutions, including automation, orchestration, workflow engineering, 5G cloud networking, and IoT-based solutions for smart cities, retail, transportation, healthcare, media and entertainment. He also led architectural governance, technology strategy and development, patent strategy and university research for the company.   During his tenure at Cisco, he held the prestigious title of Cisco Fellow. He has served on the Boards of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, Advanced Imaging Society, Linux Foundation, Linux Foundation Networking, ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector, Governmental Advisory boards and Open Networking Foundation. He is a tireless advocate for the environment and conservation. He has been in several documentaries.

Michael is Vice President and CTO of the Cisco Networking Group leading technical direction, architectural transition, solution architecture and roadmap planning for Cisco’s SP networking portfolio. He drives Cisco’s leadership position in core, edge, aggregation and access routing, mobility, cable, optics and optical networking and automation software solutions in collaboration with partners, customers, internal cross-functional leaders and the industry in reinventing the mass-scale networks of the future.   Prior to rejoining Cisco in February 2018, Michael was co-founder and CTO of Skyport Systems, developing cloud managed, on premise, virtualized compute platforms with security, ease of use, and always-on analytics built in. Before Skyport, Michael served as engineering CTO at Juniper Networks, leading new architectures, embedded software evolution and silicon roadmap development across the router, switch and Wi-Fi portfolios.   Michael has held many senior technical leadership roles at both Cisco and Juniper and was a key contributor to many successful product lines and technology including C7200, C12000, M40, T640, JUNOS, ASR1K and IOS-XE. Michael holds CS and Math degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, is a named inventor on many networking related patents, is a frequent speaker at industry events, and often shares his thoughts through Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs.

Rafael Francis has over 24 years of experience in networking & telecommunications and is currently the Sr. Director of Solution PLM at Ciena where he leads a team defining next-generation solutions & strategy including 5G.   Prior to joining Ciena he was the VP of Product Management for Cyan Inc. where he was responsible for Cyan’s Z-Series packet-optical portfolio and Blue Planet SDN software including its initial launch.   Prior to joining Cyan, he also held product management leadership positions at ECI Telecom, Laurel Networks, and FORE Systems. His knowledge and contributions in next-generation networking and its business applications have also been demonstrated through various conference speaking engagements and articles. Rafael has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.

Bruno has over 30 years of experience in the telecom industry and joined Nokia (then Alcatel-Lucent) in April 2014.   He’s heading the EMEA Product Line Management team for Nokia’s IP Routing and Network Automation portfolio, including the 7950 XRS, 7750 SR, 7250 IXR, 7220 IXR, 7210 SAS and 7705 SAR families of routers, the Network Services Platform (NSP), the Fabric Services Platform (FSS) and the Deepfield solutions. This industry-leading portfolio provides service providers and large enterprises with a Smart Network Fabric spanning from access to core.  Prior to his current role he was a Technical Lead at Juniper Networks for 14 years, providing guidance to carriers and large enterprises on how to deploy and optimize their IP/MPLS and Carrier Ethernet networks.   He holds an MSc in Telecommunications from the Military Academy in Brussels and made it to Captain in charge of the Belgian Armed Forces’ country-wide data network before leaving and joining BT Belgium as a Design Engineer.  He is based in Antwerp, Belgium.