Victor Bahl: Technical Fellow and CTO Azure for Operators, Microsoft
Victor Bahl is a technical fellow and chief technology officer of Azure for Operators in Microsoft’s cloud & artificial intelligence engineering division. Prior to this, he was the founding director of networking research in Microsoft and a member of the senior leadership team in Microsoft Research. With over 30 years of industry experience. Dr. Bahl advises Microsoft’s CEO and senior leadership team on long-term strategy related to 5G, edge computing, cloud infrastructures, networked systems, mobile computing & wireless systems. He is the original inventor of the edge computing architecture and thought leader behind Microsoft’s edge computing products. He is also the architect of the strategy that led to the creation of Azure for Operators business.
Dr. Bahl has delivered numerous foundational technologies to Azure, XBOX and Windows that span industry shaping new datacenter architectures, new networking protocols and optimizations, new network management systems and new consumer experiences. He ha and his technical contribution and advocacy of dynamic spectrum access led to the United States FCC opening up 180 MHz of spectrum for unlicensed use. He has published over 125 papers with over 57,000 citations; he is the author/co-author of 175 patents, and for his professional and research leadership has received numerous prestigious awards including four lifetime achievement awards. He is the founder/co-founder of ACM SIGMOBILE, MobiSys, GetMobile and several other important conferences and journals. Dr. Bahl is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.
Priorities as a board member:
Victor’s strategic thinking and entrepreneurial spirit along with his understanding of setting up some the most important trends in the industry and the scientific community will help ONF win the thought leadership and get wins for the many technologies we are developing. He will help translate technical ideas in vRAN, SONET and programmable switches, Core and NFVs, SD-WAN etc. into concreting actionable projects that address the needs of the telecommunication operator. Victor will work on shaping ONF projects to incorporate ML/AI technologies towards self-optimizing and self-management behaviors. He did similar things in Microsoft, moving the company into cloud by infusing technology and talent into product groups creating Azure networking and more recently edge computing and now the new telecommunications business, where he serves as CTO. He will apply his knowledge and experience of moving research into advanced development into products to ongoing and new the initiatives within ONF. He will help establish collaborations with hyperscalers, ONF members, venture capital community and academic researchers to help create a common open-source infrastructure for the telecommunications and cloud industries based on the latest and newest networking technologies.
Victor will bring his deep technical knowledge of wireless and mobile systems, along with datacenters and edge infrastructures and networking along with services and applications to technologies being developed in ONF. This will make ONF better prepared to influence the mindshare of our target consumers. He will focus on bringing the telecommunication and cloud companies closer, so they adopt each other’s best technologies to create a networking and edge infra-structure that is smart, robust, reliant and to a large extent future proof
Larry Ho – Chairman, Edgecore Networks
Larry Ho serves as the Chairman and head of software engineering of Edgecore Networks. In his role, Larry guides the company’s strategies to provide branded and disaggregated open networking services and solutions to service provider, data center, and enterprise customers. Larry also takes on active roles to position Edgecore’s software solution and service offerings to complement Edgecore’s hardware products. Under his leadership, Edgecore provides the only hardened, deployment ready, and truly open enterprise SONiC distribution that offers customers complete benefits of open source software in the data center and enterprise networking markets. Edgecore is recognized as a key contributor to the SONiC community and is part of SONiC’s leadership steering committee. Edgecore is also a founding member of the DENT open source community in the enterprise market.
Prior to joining Edgecore, Larry has extensive software R&D experience covering various management and leadership roles at Cisco Systems, Oracle and HPE. Larryholds a PhD of Computer Science degree from the University of Michigan and is the holder of various software patents.
Priorities as a board member:
Larry will promote the benefits and values of disaggregation and to align Edgecore’s business with the interests and requirements of our customers and partners in ONF. As the Chairman of Edgecore, Larry will ensure Edgecore’s future product line requirements and development efforts are aligned with ONF’s and its service provider members’ priorities. Larry will help to promote collaborative efforts among end customers, ecosystem of software and system integration partners, and hardware vendors. Such collaboration will enhance the interworking of members in the disaggregated ecosystem, allow ONF members to better develop and deploy functional carrier grade networking solutions. In addition, Larry will leverage his leadership position at the SONiC and DENT communities to bridge future collaborations with ONF.
Alexander Jeffries - CEO, APS Networks
Alexander was key to defining the strategy of APS Networks in becoming focused on open, secure, and programmable hard- and software solutions, closely working and contributing to open communities and frameworks. APS Networks provides its customers with fully programmable product alternatives, making use of programmable chips and FPGAs, whilst focusing on security by design, a secure supply chain and other security features. APS Networks aims at providing enterprise grade open source based and fully supported solutions.
In his previous position Alexander was responsible for specifically designed programmable switches, supporting multi-ASIC environments and time synchronization features, which still do date remain unique in the industry. Alexander organized all P4 trainings in Europe, where more than 250 people participated in face-to-face trainings (pre-Covid). This significantly enhanced the spread of P4 in Europe with many research organizations, service provides, security customers and others of whom many are now using P4 in production.
Alexander has nearly 25 years of industry experience within the IT industry, having worked for numerous software and hardware companies in difference positions and boosts with a global network of contacts to customers and suppliers alike. Alexander is a firm believer that technology must service the user, rather than vise-versa.
Priorities as a board member:
Alexander will use his connections to help contribute to having open standards-based production grade solutions for service providers and other customers alike. Alexander aims at working with other open organizations such as the Open Compute Project (OCP), Telecom Infra Project (TIP), the Linux Foundation (LF) and the BroadBand Forum (BBF) to get the different communities to collaborate more actively together in establishing common open solutions rather than competing projects. There is no need to re-invent the wheel multiple times. Alexander sees collaboration as a fundamentally important way forward to making open networking solutions a real-world alternative.
Further Alexander believes that SD-P4 programmable solutions are the right way forward to provide the ONF members and others with production grade secure alternatives for the BNG, 5G or hybrid applications, which are based open standards and fully supported for mission critical use cases, whilst having enhanced security features. Alexander has a huge network of contacts in academia, service providers and other industries, who can help further develop the ONF projects and actively contribute towards them
Akash Singh, ALBOT
Akash Singh is the CEO of Albot, a leading provider of engineering products to the telecom industry. Prior to Albot, he was CTO of Skry, a company focused on deep learning and blockchain, CTO of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., and was Chief Architect of IBM (where he worked with telecom companies Verizon, Nortel Networks, Alcatel Lucent, Virgin Mobile, Sprint and Airtel to help advance their technologies), and a Director for Wipro where he helped T-Mobile’s engineering division. Dr. Singh holds a Ph.D. in AI from Leeds university. He has published numerous research papers in international journals and has acted as an associate editor for several. He has been honored with a number of industry awards for the advancement of communication technologies.
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