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.

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.

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.