As Red Hat chief architect for service providers, Azhar Sayeed is responsible for shaping service provider architectures and solutions with Red Hat OpenStack Platform, SDN, NFV data center orchestration, Red Hat OpenShift and other cloud-native technologies. Prior to joining Red Hat, Azhar spent 17 years at Cisco Systems, Inc., most recently as a Sr. Director of Solutions Engineering. In that role, Azhar developed system architectures and cloud-based solutions, bringing them to market as whole offers for telecommunications companies. He is an active participant and contributor to industry forums and open source communities.

Brandon Larson is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Mavenir’s Multimedia Business Unit. He joined Mavenir from Tango Networks, where he served as their Chief Strategy Officer. He is also a former employee of Mavenir, having previously run the Sales Engineering organization for America’s region where he was instrumental in many key Mavenir projects including the world’s first IMS VoWiFi, VoLTE, and RCS 5.0 service launches.

Brandon has diverse experience having held roles in sales, marketing, product line management, and program management in his previous companies, Nokia and Ciena.

Brandon started his career as a Nuclear Engineering Officer in the United States Navy. He is a graduate of Navy Nuclear Power School and received his nuclear engineer certification from he Department of Naval Reactors. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering with High Honors from Rutgers University.

Charles has extensive IT experience and brings substantial knowledge gained through several successful leadership positions. At Lenovo, he is leading the strategy, product development and go-to-market definition for the DCG Edge & Telco segment. Charles’ team is actively developing, optimizing and supporting Telco solutions ready to be deployed in NFV and 5G infrastructure.

Prior to joining Lenovo, Charles led the global business development activities at Nuage Networks from Nokia. His responsibilities as vice president included establishing a global presence with Telecom Service Providers onboarding their NFV journey. In addition, he set up Nuage’s technology partner program to support collaboration with more than 30 companies.

Prior to joining Nuage, Charles was the SDN Executive at IBM, responsible for global sales and business development. He also led the IBM System Networking business unit in Europe for several years. Charles’ involvement in datacenter networking began with the creation of BLADE Network Technologies (BNT, later acquired by IBM) where he was Vice President and General Manager for EMEA.

With over 22 years of international experience, Charles has a strong background in Software Defined Networking and has been one of the early promoters of the technology. He also participates in many SDN and NFV events, actively engaging customers and developing concrete user cases helping them solve modern datacenter and WAN networking issues.

He earned an MBA from the University of Wales. His undergraduate work at the University of Québec focused on Mathematics and Computer Science. He is a true global executive, having worked in Canada, Germany, and the United States. He is fluent in English and French, and knows basic German.

Christoph Hilz leads the Voice & Messaging organisation at Deutsche Telekom. This includes the Engineering, Validation, Planning and Operation responsibilities for all fixed & mobile platforms in this area. Over his more than 20-year career with Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile, Hilz has held leadership roles in various domains including routing, switching & security.

Throughout his career, Christoph has been tenacious in pursuit of the company’s objectives, and always drives himself and his team to set and achieve daring, innovative goals.

Most recently he has focused on the cloudification and automation of Deutsche Telekom´s voice and messaging infrastructure.

Mathias is VP PLM of the Automated Data Center team in Juniper and responsible for the Telco Cloud solution portfolio. He also works closely with the strategy team on architecture, M&A and venture investments. During his time at Juniper, Mathias was responsible for the Edge Services and Routing portfolio and Technical Marketing Engineering group. He led the broadband portfolio and orchestrated one of the biggest product transitions and the introduction of the Universal Edge products, established the Broadband User Community, and headed the Juniper-Nokia Siemens Networks joint venture.

Prior to Juniper, Mathias held product management positions in Unisphere Networks where he ran the BRAS product line. Before joining Unisphere, Mathias served in engineering, product management and marketing positions at Siemens AG in Germany, Australia and the US and was responsible for introducing the first Internet solutions for Siemens.

Mathias holds a Master of Science in Data Networking from Technical University in Berlin, Germany.

Paul has over 30 years’ experience in data and telecommunications protocols, products and network design – spanning arcane details of SDLC links right up to multi-national cloud IMS architectures.

As Vice President Product Strategy, Paul co-ordinates future direction for Metaswitch portfolio, including IMS, VoLTE and NFV solutions for mobile and fixed operators, with a particular focus on Cloud Native architectures and operational automation. Having previously spent 10 years running our SE team, working closely with carriers of all shapes and sizes and in every market and geographies, he has the in-depth real-world knowledge and experience necessary help service providers of all types fully exploit the ever-accelerating pace of change in Telecoms technology and end-user expectations.

Paul joined Metaswitch in 1986 after studying Mathematics at Cambridge University. He is the author of, or major contributor to, several IETF RFCs, multiple white papers, and patents covering everything from protocols deep in the network to innovative user experiences for multi-modal communications, and is a frequent speaker at conferences on NFV and orchestration. When not at work, he can most often be found sailing around the western coasts of the UK and Ireland.

Rolf leads the Orchestration portfolio at HPE Communications & Media Solutions (CMS) business unit, developing HPEs new OSS for end-to-end Service Orchestration, NFV Orchestration and Edge Orchestration across physical and virtual environments, SDN and applications.

Previously, Rolf was responsible for HPE’s OSS Fulfillment solutions portfolio, covering the end-to-end process from Order Management to Activation. From 2006 to 2009, Rolf led the Communications and Media Solutions business in Switzerland and later Austria. Before, he worked as Master Solution Architect, developing major Fulfillment and Assurance solutions. He has 29 years of industrial experience in the Telecoms and Computing Industry.

Prior joining Hewlett-Packard Consulting, Rolf worked in Swisscom’s Research department; first as OSS engineer and later as the head for the R&D program Operational Processes and Customer Care, where he led both OSS and CRM related consulting, design and implementation projects. Rolf holds an MBA from University of St. Gallen and a Masters in Informatics from ETH Zurich.