Nominations close on October 30, 2018.
Voting starts November 1st
First round voting closes on November 12.
Runoff election ends November 19.
Current ONF At-Large Board Member is:
Patrick Lopez - VP, networks innovation (Telefónica)
Nominations will be accepted from any member of any ONF company in good standing.
Nominees must meet these requirements:
- Nominees must NOT be from a company already represented on the board. Each member may only have a single representative on the board.
- Nominees must be from a Partner or Collaborating Innovator member
- Nominees must confirm their willingness to serve
- Nominees must be prepared to travel to twice-yearly face-to-face board meetings traditionally held within the United States
- Nominees must be available to participate in additional board meetings held virtually via teleconference
- Nominees will also be required to submit a statement to be shared with the voting community
Nomination Process
Send an email to membership@opennetworking.org
Chih-Lin I, Chief Scientist of Wireless Technologies, China Mobile
Patrick Lopez, VP Networks Innovation, Telefonica
Ron Marquardt, VP of Technology, Innovation and Architecture, Sprint
George Tchaparian, President and CEO, EdgeCore Networks
TBD
Dr Chih-Lin I - Chief Scientist of Wireless Technologies, China Mobile
As Chief Scientist of Wireless Technologies in China Mobile, Dr. Chih-Lin I established and is heading the Green Communications Research Center (GCRC). Under her leadership, GCRC focuses on future RAN architecture design, standardization, prototype development, field trials, and promotion of telecom industry featuring open interface, embedded intelligence, open source and white-box.
“Cloudification” has been ingrained in Dr. I’s philosophy in designing future RAN architecture and seeking solutions. The very first day she established GCRC and launched the 5G key technologies R&D, she has explicitly proposed two key themes: “Green” and “Soft”. While “Green” targets at technologies to achieve energy and resource efficiency, “Soft” emphasizes the agility, flexibility, and elasticity for 5G networks, from core networks to access networks. The program was launched several years before the concept of Network Functions Virtualizations (NFV) was proposed. In fact, Chih-Lin was the one to propose extending the scope of NFV from core to RAN to make telecom networks truly, and fully virtualized.
Under Chih-Lin’s leadership, the team has been continuously leading at the forefront of RAN virtualization and exploiting open source area. Her team has developed and demonstrated the world first PoC of a soft 4G base station on x86 platform, carried out the first field trial of virtualized LTE RAN networks, and set up the open source C-RAN project in Linux Foundation. Chih-Lin has been invited to deliver keynote speeches in many occasions. She is also spearheading major initiatives including 5G, C-RAN, high energy efficiency system architectures, technologies and devices, green energy, and wireless big data for network embedded intelligence. She has led the launch of Wireless AI Alliance (WAIA) and O-RAN (Open RAN) Alliance.
Chih-Lin deeply believes that future wireless networks must embrace the themes of “Open” and “Smart”, which she proposed in 2015. “Smart” indicates embedded intelligence, whereas “Open” has multiple meanings, including open source, open architecture, open interface, and open hardware etc. ONF has been a key leader in the open source, NFV and SDN. On the journey from a “green and soft” towards “open and smart” wireless network, Chih-Lin would like to commit herself working with ONF community, bringing in her rich experience in the past 30 years. She would love to not only help accelerate the trial and commercialization of ONF projects by sharing requirements and deployment practice from China Mobile, but also help ONF to expand its influence, strengthen the collaboration with key industry partners such as LF, TIP, and especially O-RAN. Together, we’ll expedite the necessary transformation of our ecosystem.
Patrick Lopez, VP Networks Innovation, Telefonica
Telefonica is committed to the development and deployment of open technologies in its networks. Networks Functions Virtualization and Software Defined Networks are the cornerstone of the disaggregation and simplification of telco networks. The work done in the ONF is important to foster the necessary transformation of this industry. I apply to the position of member-at-large of the ONF board to represent the innovation team within Telefonica. I have a little over 20 years building, launching and operating telecoms businesses in startups, mid-sized and tier one multinationals in the United States, Spain, Canada, Switzerland, Ireland and France. At Telefonica, the teams I support are responsible for exploring and introducing disruptive business models, technologies and services into the Telefonica group.
My ambition is for the projects developed in ONF to be commercially deployed in a variety of networks, in a modular fashion and for the ONF to be the reference organization for open source SDN, edge computing and access virtualization open development. For this, I propose for the operator members of ONF to provide clear signals in terms of RFx and contracts to innovative vendors, integrators and solution providers of the ONF ecosystem.
Ron Marquardt, Ph.D., Vice President of Technology, Innovation & Architecture, Sprint Corporation
Statement of Interest and Priorities
I am excited by the potential of open source technologies to transform the telecommunications industry, and the role ONF continues to play in that process. For Sprint, the ability to develop and rapidly prototype technical options in software has led to better insight into the limitations of standards (and proposed standards), given us implementor-level knowledge of scaling factors and system bottlenecks, and provided a strong technical foundation for our path to a cloud-native, wholly virtualized future – creating considerable value in an R&D setting alone. But the potential stretches beyond the lab, clearly, and the challenge is to transform the culture and ingrained, collective industry mindset; I strongly feel we need to look at our world through a software lens. ONF participants share this vision, but the broader industry is still laboring to make this transition. Partnering with Intel, we co-developed the C3PO/NGIC code, now in the M-CORD project, to not only provide options for new use cases requiring the flexibility and performance provided, but to demonstrate the value of open source more broadly. I see great value in the ONF’s other major efforts, especially as we look to new edge compute and SDN functionality. What is important however – in addition to writing the code itself – is making the ecosystem around it suitable for production-worthy deployments, where and as needed. As we collectively engage in these projects, I look forward to the opportunity to provide Sprint’s insights and learnings to the Board, and to help shape how the ONF projects of today become the large-scale deployments of the future, to all our benefit.
About Me
As Vice President of Technology, Innovation & Architecture for Sprint, Dr. Marquardt is responsible for Sprint’s long-term technology strategy and architecture for RAN, Core, and Devices, the industry relationships and investments enabling Sprint’s innovation and ecosystem development goals, as well as the company’s advocacy in US and global industry forums and standards bodies. He also represents Sprint at speaking engagements, in press and analyst interviews, and on the governing boards of 5G Americas, ATIS, and NGMN.
Prior to Sprint, Dr. Marquardt was VP of Technology Development at Clearwire Corporation, responsible for that company’s technology strategy as well as the architecture, design, testing, and implementation of its mobile broadband 4G network, devices, and services. He also was CTO at Covad Communications where he led teams responsible for the engineering and network planning of VoIP, wireless, and broadband services across the United States. Prior to that role, he was in various positions at network equipment manufacturers.
Dr. Marquardt has an S.B. in Physics from MIT, an M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech, and is an alumnus of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He also has post-graduate training in cybersecurity and machine learning. He is a co-inventor of more than 20 US & foreign patents and patent applications, primarily in the fields of distributed ledger/blockchain technologies, network function virtualization and secure service architectures enabled by the hardware root of trust in standard compute systems.
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.
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.
Under George’s leadership, Edgecore Networks transformed to become the industry leader in OCP and TIP product offering and active participation in ONF. In the past 4 years, George’s team provided networking products that span from 10G to 400G, with the most diverse and open end-to-end hardware platforms, creation of the richest open software ecosystem partnership, and more than 20 OCP and TIP first to market accepted open networking products and solutions for all market segments; data center, service provider and enterprises.
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.