Open5GCon

Join us on the opening keynote from Chris Wright, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Red Hat, as he sets the agenda for the event and describes what open hybrid cloud strategy means to Red Hat.

Biography: Vishant Vora is the Chief Technology Officer of Vodafone Idea Limited, India’s largest telecom service provider, effective 31st August 2018. A member of the National Leadership Team, Vishant is responsible for networks, IT operations and overall technology strategy. Prior to his present role, Vishant was Director–Technology at Vodafone India where he spearheaded the technology and network infrastructure for the company.

Defined as a strategic thinker and able to operationally execute on agreed plans across complex organizations, Jordan-Smith is also a frequent speaker at key industry events and analyst conferences. He is a dynamic leader and communicator, with the ability to empower, inspire and motivate to exceed team goals and drive positive change. Jordan-Smith has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, and the USA. His current team works to develop, engineer, build, sell, and support next generation software solutions and services that aim to deliver exponential value to and with digital service providers, financial institutions, the healthcare industry, the automotive sector, energy entities, and global systems integrators.

Biography: Arash Ashouriha is SVP Group Technology Innovation, Deutsche Telekom AG. He takes charge of the strategic development and architectural evolution of the technology domains including OSS, alongside technology innovation management, patent management and standardization. In addition, he oversees strategic technology innovation projects such as Cloudfication@DT and Hyperscale Secure Telco (the evolved Terastream).

What is the growth outlook for the 5G market? What new use cases are driving adoption? What technology innovations will impact the market in 2021? Find out the answers to these and more questions in the market analysis session. 

Biography: Jennifer Didoni is the Head of Cloud Portfolio Management for Vodafone Business Cloud and Security business unit. Jennifer manages Vodafone Business’ global portfolio of cloud offerings across small to medium sized businesses, public sector, national and multi-national corporates.  This portfolio covers traditional IT and hosting solutions, SaaS solutions, public cloud partnerships, managed and professional services for cloud, co-creation and low latency applications and Vodafone’s market leading Multi-Access Edge portfolio. Jennifer joined Vodafone in 2009 as the Business Manager for Vodafone’s Global Chief Technology Officer, and she has since held several roles for Vodafone Business in product and portfolio management. In addition to running Vodafone Global Enterprise’s product portfolio, she has also led the IoT Product Management portfolio, launching innovative solutions such as Internet in the Car and Narrowband IoT.

Biography:  Ian is Chief Technologist, Global Service Provider Business at Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source technologies. Ian brings more than 30 years of engineering, business, and telecommunications industry leadership to Red Hat. Acting as a catalyst and trusted advisor, Ian brings together a wealth of industry and open source community insight to help our customers flourish in the digital economy. More recently, Ian was responsible for global service provider architecture at Cisco, leading their SDN/NFV portfolio vision and business transformation strategy. With his extensive background in system engineering, product management, and business development, Ian has proven expertise in helping organizations navigate and succeed in today’s fast-paced competitive environment.

Rakshit Mehta is responsible for industry strategy and solutions for Telco Network Cloud with a focus on 5G & Edge at IBM. He is also responsible to develop IBM's partner ecosystem to serve 5G & Edge use cases. Mr. Mehta provides industry leadership to IBM's participation in O-RAN Alliance which includes building collaboration across IBM Research, customers, and partners. His current focus is on building Telco Network Cloud solutions with network orchestration, service assurance, and closed-loop automation for Communication Service Providers. Mr. Mehta has two decades of experience in the Networking and Telecommunications Industry in various Technical and Business roles. He has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai and a Master's degree in Business Administration from the University of Michigan.

Recognized by Light Reading as one of the industry’s best Female Tech Pioneers in 2018, by capacity Media as the "Best Women in Network Orchestration" in 2019 and with multiple patents to her name, Alla Goldner is the Chair of ONAP Requirements Subcommittee. She also leads all ONAP activities and internal decision-making at Amdocs where her responsibilities include defining and implementing Amdocs’ ONAP strategy, working directly with ONAP members from service providers, vendors and partners, and leading Amdocs’ internal Technical Steering Committee. Additionally, Alla co-leads the Orchestration stream of TIP OCN Project Group. Her current focus is 5G, Zero-Touch operations, NFV and SDN network evolution, and in particular, the technology, strategy, standardization and open-source domains. With close to 25 years of experience in developing technology strategy and system architecture at global companies including Alcatel, Motorola, and Intel, Alla also has extensive experience in leading standardization efforts in 3GPP, IETF, ETSI NFV, BBF, ETSI MEC, ETSI NFV and ETSI ZSM – examples of standards she has created include TDF (Traffic Detection Function) into 3GPP Packet Core Architecture, Network Congestion handling into 3GPP architecture, and also traffic-steering into 3GPP architecture. A key member of the group-defined service-functional chaining in IETF, she is also a leading contributor of multiple work items in the areas of 5G, Policy Control and Charging, NFV, SDN, control-user plane split and congestion management. She has also served on the numerous program committees of several conferences including IEEE ICC and IEEE CSCN, ONS NA, ONS EU. Alla holds an MSc in Technology Management from NYU and a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.

As major service providers in the world transition to becoming truly digital service providers, they need an ecosystem of partners to help them offer new services and improve network efficiencies, with a consistent experience from the edge to the core. Hear from the key industry vendors on how they work together in an open manner to support the industry’s leading companies in their technological transformation.

  Manish is an SDN/NFV/CLOUD network transformation expert and heads the Core and Telco Cloud Solution development practice in Tech Mahindra. A Thought Leader with an excellent mix of technology depth and business acumen, Manish regularly consults with various Telco Organizations globally in realizing their business objectives in their Network Transformation and Cloud Journey.   Before joining Tech Mahindra, Manish founded a startup STS in the 3G/4G Network Simulators area. Before STS, Manish held several positions with Altran, Lucent, Ubiquisys, Infosys. Manish’s early career includes holding the rank of Flight Lieutenant in the Indian Air Force

Susan James is Senior Director, telecommunications strategy at Red Hat. She has worked extensively within Cloud and have owned a number of the network functions and virtualisation platforms at different points in time, and has an MBA and Bachelor of Business from the University of Victoria.

For more than 10 years, Belkacem has helped organizations of all kinds move and scale their IT automation strategy. He’s a regular speaker at events throughout EMEA, and keeps up to date with the latest developments in the industry. Belkacem is currently focused on advising organizations across all industries on how to unleash the power of automation to succeed in their digital transformation journey. 

A Telecom industry Professional having 20+ years of experience in various domains like Telecom and Datacom domain, and in different roles like Engineering, Product Management and Product Owner. Have worked with well known Telecom/Datacom vendors like Parallel Wireless, Cisco, Starent, Huawei & CoSystems. Expertise: 5G, Cloud Native, CUPS, OpenRAN, 5G/LTE/UMTS Core networks, Traffic Steering (Gi-LAN), IoT, GMPLS/MPLS, MPLS-TE, Softswitch, MGCP, Megaco. Have witnessed several different evolutions of Mobile Packet Core solution. Have 3 US Patents (8 more in filing stage) in Mobility. As a Product Manager have managed 5G Packet Core Solution, CUPS Gateway, LTE EPC Gateway products like GGSN, PGW, SGW & SAE-GW. Also handled Tier1 & Tier 2 customers in US, Europe, Japan, Russia, Middle East and India.

Thomas Sennhauser is Chief Technologist and Business Lead for APJ for Networking and communication business based in Singapore. He is responsible to support service providers, network equipment providers and partners in their transformation journey with a focus on Intel’s initiatives related to communications network transformation and 5G wireless technology. Thomas holds Bachelor of Science in Electronic and Software Development from Juventus Zurich and Master of Business Administration from University of St. Gallen Switzerland.

Pål Grønsund is a Senior Research Scientist at Telenor ASA. He holds a PhD in Informatics from the University of Oslo (Norway) on Cognitive Radio and has been a Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Electrical Engineering at UCLA. He is the Coordinator of the EU funded Research & Innovation project 5G-VINNI. He is vice chair in the ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM) project and has standardization experience in ETSI NFV, ZSM and RRS. He has held key responsibilities in Telenor within Technology Strategy, Architecture and Sourcing projects. Important research topics for Pål are 5G, Network Slicing, NFV, SDN, Orchestration, Cognitive Radio and Cloud-RAN.

Federico is an open-source evangelist who believes in its philosophy. Community is the real game-changer.
Over his career, Federico achieved a number of international firsts in the Public Cloud space and he has matured about a decade of experience with OpenStack. Since now many years Federico is fully dedicated to the Telco world, started with the 4G and virtualization, and more recently with 5G and containerization.

Nilay has been working with Spark for more than 8 years. Before taking up the role of Domain Chapter lead in Orchestration and inventory area, he has spent 5 years in Architecture team. He is currently leading Telco Cloud and open source fulfilment implementation at Saprk

Frank Zdarsky is Senior Principal Software Engineer in Red Hat’s Office of the CTO responsible for Edge Computing. He is also a member of Red Hat’s Edge Computing leadership team. Frank’s team of seasoned engineers is developing advanced Edge Computing technologies, working closely with Red Hat’s business, engineering, and field teams as well as contributing to related open source community projects. Frank is serving on the Linux Foundation Edge’s technical advisory council and is a TSC member of the Akraino project.

Prior to this, Frank was leading telco/NFV technology in the Office of the CTO and built a forward deployed engineering team working with Red Hat’s most strategic partners and customers on enabling OpenStack and Kubernetes for telco/NFV use cases. He has also been an active contributor to open source projects such as OpenStack, OpenAirInterface, ONAP, and Akraino.

Azhar is a Chief Technologist, at Red Hat. His role is to work with Telcos worldwide to define new architectures and develop deployment models and strategies for Cloud and Virtualization. Azhar is active in open source communities such as OpenDaylight and OPNFV. Most recently Azhar drove a Virtualized Central Office Architecture as an OPNFV community project demonstrating how Central Offices can be virtualized to drive new cost effective way to deliver Residential, Business and Mobile services Azhar has more than 25 years of experience in the Networking, Telecommunications and Software industry. Prior to Red Hat Azhar, is a 17 year veteran of Cisco Systems where he ran many teams and projects from Software Product Management to Engineering development and Solutions delivery teams. He has 9 Patents and is author of a book - "MPLS and Next-Generation Networks: Foundations for NGN and Enterprise Virtualization"

5G deployments will rely on a fully cloud-native and microservice based architecture to connect massive IoT, low latency or enhanced mobile broadband services, either in centralised data centers or distributed edge computing platform, to mobile devices, to the internet, to other services at the edge, and to operational control system for management & orchestration. As 5G cloud-native and edge computing environment will support business critical applications and services for consumer and enterprise customers, securing these workloads will be critical in order to prevent rogue deployments, malicious code deployments or unauthorised access from the backhaul, IP Core or Management network. This session will take you through the combined security controls recommended by Red Hat and Cisco with the right level of security features for infrastructure, workloads and users in containerised environments.

5G deployments will rely on a fully cloud-native and microservice based architecture to connect massive IoT, low latency or enhanced mobile broadband services, either in centralised data centers or distributed edge computing platform, to mobile devices, to the internet, to other services at the edge, and to operational control system for management & orchestration. As 5G cloud-native and edge computing environment will support business critical applications and services for consumer and enterprise customers, securing these workloads will be critical in order to prevent rogue deployments, malicious code deployments or unauthorised access from the backhaul, IP Core or Management network. This session will take you through the combined security controls recommended by Red Hat and Cisco with the right level of security features for infrastructure, workloads and users in containerised environments.

Hanen Garcia is Telco Solutions Manager driving solutions to support telecommunications service providers during their network transformation journey. He has more than 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry building complex network solutions and value-added services for large telecom operators in Europe. Prior to joining Red Hat, he worked at Ericsson as an innovation specialist designing cutting-edge IoT solutions for mobile networks. Hanen holds an M.Eng. in Innovation Management from the ÉTS in Canada and an M.Eng. in Telecommunications from Polytech in France.

As an industry veteran with more than 25 years of Sales, Business Development and Marketing experience in Data Center and Cloud Networking, Converged Infrastructures and Management. Sonny is responsible for establishing Sales and GTM/RTM strategies. During his extensive 25+ years career, Sonny held executive positions at companies that span from inception to publicly traded including Xylan/Alcatel-Lucent, Accelerated Networks/Calix, Clearmesh Networks, VCE, ServiceMesh/DXC, CliQr/Cisco, HPE and Snaproute/InfoBlox. Sonny also established his own consulting company focused on helping innovative technology startups with seed funding, GTM/RTM strategy and early customer acquisition.

Mike has been involved with leading-edge technologies for more than 30 years, mostly in consultative roles within the telecommunications industry.    Mike’s passion throughout his career has for been maximizing business value from the creative application of emerging technologies.
Mike has helped create Red Hat’s Open Telco model, which involves the transformation of telcos into an open platform for the development and delivery of digital goods and services, enabling them to carve out a more significant role in today’s digital economy.  As AVP of Open Telco Strategies, Mike leads the executive engagement program for the Red Hat Telco BU.  In this role, he consults with telco industry executives regarding strategies to maximize business value from open source innovations and their transformation to the Open Telco model.
Mike was a founder of Agilent Technologies Next Generation Networks Operation, a business unit that developed performance monitoring/OSS solutions for then-emerging VoIP networks.  He became involved with cloud technologies in 2010, working on the "Carrier Cloud" initiative with Bell Labs Innovations.  This initiative foresaw NFV, and envisioned telcos providing cloud services from their network edge - MEC.   Mike became involved with OpenStack when he joined HPE in 2012.  He worked on the Helion OpenStack cloud project, with a focus on the NFV opportunity for telcos.  Mike continued to work in the area of NFV/OpenStack when he joined the Telco Business Unit at Red Hat in 2016.

Orange is one of the largest telecom operators in Europe and Africa working our way to network function virtualization and 5G adoption. We started our Openstack journey during the Havana days and are active contributors to the neutron project. Our kubernetes journey started at version 0.9 when we converted our icehouse openstack to be managed by kubernetes in preparation for 1.0 to go into production, we have been running this pair ever since. Our Openstack on top of Kubernetes is built and rolled out using CI/CD practices to be able to address ever changing market conditions.

Caroline leads Analysys Mason’s wireless research. She contributes to our Next-Generation Wireless Networks, Operator Investment Strategies and Spectrum research programmes and works directly with our research clients to advise them on wireless network trends and market developments. She has been engaged in technology analysis, research and consulting for 30 years, and has focused entirely on mobile and wireless since 2002. As co-founder and research director of Rethink Technology Research, Caroline developed a research base and forecast methodology based around deep contacts with mobile and converged operators worldwide. Her focus is on critical issues and trends related to mobile and wireless infrastructure, particularly operator deployment intentions for 4G, 5G, cloud-RAN and other technologies. She has led research and consulting projects with a wide range of clients, including mobile infrastructure vendors, large and start-up operators, regulators, trade bodies, government agencies and financial institutions. Prior to setting up Rethink, Caroline held various executive positions at VNU Business Publishing, then Europe's largest producer of technology-related B2B reports and publications. She holds an MA from the University of Oxford.

As Global Chief Technology Officer, Marc Price accelerates MATRIXX Software’s worldwide growth through key software and solutions delivery initiatives. He works closely with the MATRIXX executive leadership, engineering and product management teams to drive industry-leading technology into the market and spearheads strategic engagement with key customers and partners.   With almost thirty years of experience in the telecommunications market, Marc has held pivotal roles during the establishment of the real-time charging model, the changing landscape of digital transformation and the move to hybrid clouds and IoT. Prior to joining MATRIXX, he worked for Openet serving as CTO for the Americas where he led initiatives for software development, systems consulting and business development.

Antti Romppanen leads 5G Cloud RAN Solution Integration at Nokia. Antti believes that 5G will greatly benefit from cloud-native radio access, which can be orchestrated and automated end-to-end. With his teams, Antti has been building various new products at Nokia and other companies during the two decades of his career, in different R&D and Product Management leadership roles. In his free time you can probably find Antti either having a walk in the forest, enjoying soccer on- or off-the-field, or taking a friendly beating in the boxing ring. Antti holds a Master’s degree in telecommunications from Aalto University of Helsinki.  

What is the growth outlook for the 5G market? What new use cases are driving adoption? What technology innovations will impact the market in 2021? Find out the answers to these and more questions in the market analysis session. 

Lee Hines is a Chief Strategist with Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s
Communications and Media Solutions group. Lee specializes in
location technology, subscriber management, telecommunications
systems design, and software development.
HPE’s CMS business provides services and software-rich
solutions to Communications and Media companies, combining
HP’s Consulting & Services and specialized IP, software and
relevant industry assets. These innovative CMS solutions are the
driving force behind many of the Communications and Media
industries’ leading players.
Roles during Lee’s 34-year career at HPE have included
establishing the world’s first off-switch call processing Service
Control Point [SCP] platform including the world’s first off-switch
Home Location Register [HLR] and Home Subscriber Server
[HSS]. Lee directed the HPE team responsible for creating the
world’s first compliant solution for the U.S. Federal
Communications Commission enhanced 911 phase 2 mandate.
Lee operates on a global team and interacts with Service
Providers in all world-wide markets. He provides critical business
and technical design skills and today engages in market
convergence trends including the movement to 5G networks and
Multi-Access Edge Computing. Additionally, Lee is providing
solution guidance to other industries that are converging with
telecommunications such as Retail, Automotive, Transportation
and Hospitality.
Lee holds several patents relate to Signal System 7 message
handling, Blockchaining and other system programming
methodologies.

How will 5G impact Industry 4.0? In this session we will have a look at some of the Smart Factory use cases of using 5G to accelerate the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, sensors, edge computing, self-healing networks, and automation. We will discuss the deployment of a "Factory of the Future" use case that uses 5G connectivity, latest AI video analytics, and insights for improved quality control on the manufacturing floor. Speakers: Sanil Nambiar, Technical Lead at IBM, Hue Tran Davis, Head of Market Development and Strategic Partnerships, Factory of the Future at Nvidia, and Frank Zdarsky, Edge Computing Technology & Strategy Lead at Red Hat