George Tchaparian - President and CEO, Edgecore Networks

George is a seasoned technology executive who brings more than 30 years of industry experience to Edgecore Networks Corporation's networking business serving data center, service provider and enterprise customers. George is also the GM for Accton Group's Open Networking Business and the Vice Chair of Open Compute Project (OCP) Taiwan. Prior to leading Edgecore Networks, George served as SVP of R&D for Accton Technology Corporation. Under his Management, Accton established leadership in the open networking industry, developing the first OCP networking products and establishing partnerships with industry leading network operators, open software ecosystem and visionaries, and silicon leaders. 

Edgecore Networks Corporation, under George’s leadership, transformed itself to become the industry leader in Open Networking and supplying networking hardware for OCP, TIP, and ONF solutions and Edgecore Networks also acting as the catalyst to bridge these Open Communities together.

George also held many senior management positions at Hewlett –Packard Corporation for more than 25 years, leading HP R&D, Mfg. and BD teams and establishing HP overseas R&D design centers.

Priorities as a board member:

George will continue to champion his, Edgecore’s rigor, and the commitment to help ONF in the SDN, NFV and Open Source movement.  By working very closely with his peer board members, industry leading service providers WW,  and with ONF, TIP and OCP communities, George will continue to offer innovative, desegregated and first to market open platforms and open source solutions to meet customer expectations. 

George believes that, with the ONF Strategic Initiatives and support, his team will be able to accelerate and expand the roll out of SDN-enabled open network solutions through proven reference designs, which are easy to internalize, install and maintain, and help increase the adoption through market awareness, customer testimonials, and independent system integration and testing in many use cases - such as:  Broadband Access, Edge Computing, Mobile Backhaul and Edge Switching.  

George is passionate regarding this movement and sees it imperative in transforming the current networking industry by  providing the needed open HW and SW infrastructure, thereby addressing the data and cost explosion management issues, lowering CAPEX and OPEX, providing “more power” and control through SDN and NFV  and increasing service flexibility.  George frequently presents these viewpoints in many industry forums and networking communities.

Eduard Scheiterer: Senior Vice President of Research and Developemnt, ADTRAN

Eduard Scheiterer serves as Senior Vice President of Research and Development for ADTRAN. In this role, he oversees the day-to-day operations of ADTRAN GmbH and manages the company’s Research & Development efforts in Germany. He has played an instrumental role in ADTRAN’s growth and development as a global company, helping to grow International revenue to more than 43 percent of total revenue.

Eduard joined ADTRAN in May 2012 following ADTRAN's acquisition of Nokia Siemens Network's (NSN’s) Broadband Access Business. Before joining ADTRAN, Eduard was Head of Broadband Access for NSN and held several senior management roles at NSN and Siemens. He holds a Master of Science degree and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Telecommunication from the Technical University.

Priorities as a board member:

As a board member, Eduard will help the ONF to maintain a leadership role as the industry embraces open, programmable networks. ADTRAN was one of the first companies to promote and implement network virtualization, software-defined networks, and network disaggregation. As head of global R&D, Eduard played a significant role in these efforts.

As an ONF board member, Eduard will unify the vision of the ONF and that of leading service providers. This will ensure that these efforts succeed and the vision of ONF is achieved. In the near term, he would like to focus on moving toward additional deployable and scalable solutions for service providers. With the demand for connectivity at an all-time high, service providers must not only find ways to unleash more bandwidth but deploy new services faster and more economically than ever before. This is where the benefits of open, programmable, scalable networks can be felt most.

Most of all, Eduard would like to develop a truly collaborative effort with other ONF members and the service provider community to foster an open development environment that can unleash the benefits of new technology across the membership and the industry.