LF Networking Governing Board

VP of Cloud for Telecom and Distributed Cloud Edge, Google

Ankur Jain

Chief Architect, Strategy & Programs, Ericsson

Christian Olrog

Open Source Director of Cloudify Network, Huawei

Chuanyu Chen

Chuanyu Chen serves as the Open Source Director of Cloudify Network of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, responsible for the Huawei open source solutions for network automation. Chuanyu Chen graduated from University of Science and Technology Beijing 2006. He joined Huawei in 2008, and served as Development Engineer, Project Leader of Data Communication area, Solution Architect and has rich experience in ICT network infrastructure. From 2016 until now, he has joined open source business, deeply participating in open source projects such as OPEN-O, ONAP, Anuket, CAMARA etc.

Senior Director of Technical Standards at Qualcomm

Douglas Knisely

Distinguished Engineer in the Chief Technology and Architecture Office, Cisco

Frank Brockners

Frank is Distinguished Engineer in Cisco’s Chief Technology and Architecture Office, driving software and architecture development for software defined devices and associated telemetry processing solutions – with a strong focus on open source. He is involved in several projects that reside under the roof of Linux Foundation networking, including ONAP, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, FD.io, and PNDA. He is also very active in the IETF – integrating standards development and open source code development as part of the in-situ OAM effort. Frank holds a diploma degree in Electrical Engineering (Aachen University) and a PhD/Dr degree in Information Science (University of Cologne).

Associate Fellow II, Walmart Global Technology

Frederic Desjarlais

As a Global Tech Platforms technical fellow, Frederic elevates Walmart’s technical prowess by identifying and vetting promising enterprise-scale technology that will positively impact Walmart’s commitment to EDLC.  He was a key influencer and contributor in introducing Kubernetes and a Service Mesh at scale to Walmart before these technologies were widely adopted in the industry.  Frederic also advises on technologies that Walmart contributes back to the open source community such as L3AF.

Prior to his role as a platform architect and technical fellow, Frederic was responsible for building an enterprise-scale telemetry platform and Walmart’s eCommerce product recommendation service.  Before joining Walmart, he held engineering roles at innovative organizations such as: Yahoo! / Yahoo! Labs, Vitria Technology, and Borland Software.

Frederic graduated from Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) with an Honours Degree in Computer Science.

Global Telco Solutions Manager, Red Hat

Hanen Garcia

Hanen Garcia is Global Telco Solutions Manager at Red Hat. He has over 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry, building network solutions and value-added services for large telecom operators. In his current role, he drives solutions to support telecommunications service providers during their network transformation journey. Before joining Red Hat, he worked at Ericsson as an innovation specialist designing cutting-edge solutions for mobile networks, and he worked at Proximus as senior architect for the fixed and mobile network domain. Hanen holds an M.Eng. in innovation management from the ÉTS in Canada and an M.Eng. in telecommunications from Polytech Nancy in France.

Senior Vice President, Global Tech Platforms and Country Head, Walmart Global Tech

Hari Vasudev

As Senior Vice President of Global Tech Platforms and Country Head, Walmart Global Tech, Hari oversees the building and deployment of scalable, leverageable capabilities and systems across the enterprise and externally. With a strong focus on scaling organizational efficiency by enhancing technology, Hari is spearheading teams of highly talented associates across the globe.

Under Hari’s leadership, associates are innovating to create a seamless, omnichannel shopping experience for Walmart’s customers. His hands-on approach and vision for the ‘Future of Retail’ has been instrumental in nurturing a high-performance team. He is also an advocate of a very diverse and inclusive workplace and has undertaken many initiatives to ensure our associates feel empowered to bring their whole, true selves to work every day. Along with Cheryl Ainoa, Hari is the executive co-sponsor for the Walmart Women in Technology charter.

Hari’s previous experience with Yahoo! and Flipkart is testimony to his ability to lead large technology organizations. He shaped the strategy for a supply chain ecosystem at scale during his tenure with Flipkart and built the technology stack for Ekart. At Yahoo! he played a key role in the substantial growth of the center whilst working on a range of end-to-end consumer and platform products.

He has received three patents for – ‘Method & Apparatus for configuring a camera through external means’, ‘Intelligent camera flash system’ and ‘System method and apparatus for portable digital identity’.

Hari holds an M.S. (Computer Science) from Iowa State University and has an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Vice President, Telco Cloud, Core Network & Services

Jérôme Birot

He oversees the virtualization and transformation towards cloud native for both wireless and wireline network functions across TELUS. He is responsible for the strategy, deployment and operations of the telco cloud infrastructure as well as the wireless Core network and wireless/wireline telephony services. With a DevOps structure he drives next generation network technologies and architecture while managing the lifecycle of existing/legacy services.

Treasurer and Head of Software Industry Initiatives, Nokia

Jonne Soininen

Jonne Soininen is Head of Software Industry Initiatives at Nokia in Helsinki. Prior to Nokia, he worked in different positions with Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Renesas Mobile, and Broadcom and has an extensive history in telecommunications ranging over 15 years.

Jonne has a Master of Science in computer science from the University of Helsinki. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at the Aalto University in Finland.

Within the technical community, Jonne has been active in organizations such as 3rd Generation partnership project (3GPP), the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). In the IETF, Jonne has served as the Co-chair of IPv6 Operations (v6ops) and the Network-based Localized Mobility Management (netlmm) Working Groups, and as a member and the chair of the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC). He has also served as the Vice-chair for the ISOC Advisory Council. Locally in Finland, Jonne has been active in the Finnish Internet Forum (FIF) – the Internet Governance Forum in Finland and as a member of the board of the local ISOC chapter.

Jonne has served on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board as the Technical Liaison Group (TLG) liaison in 2010 and since 2013 he is serving as the IETF liaison to the same board.

Chair and General Manager of AI and Intelligent Operation R&D Center, China Mobile

Junlan Feng

Dr. Junlan Feng, Chief Scientist at China Mobile, General Manager of AI and Intelligent Operation R&D Center. Dr. Feng has led R&D of China Mobile on artificial intelligence and big data since September 2013. She had been the architect of IBM Big Data from January 2013.1 to August 2013 and a principal researcher at AT&T Labs Research from August 2001 to January 2013. Dr. Feng received her Ph.D. on Speech Recognition in 2001 from Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is an IEEE senior member, an IEEE speech and language committee member and IEEE industry committee member. She is a reviewer for major data mining, speech, and natural language international conferences and journals. She has chaired and organized multiple conferences in these fields. Dr. Feng has over 50 professional publications and has been granted 33 U.S and international patents.

Head of Product for Google Distributed Cloud Platform, and Automation at Google Cloud

Kandan Kathirvel

Kandan is currently the Head of Product for Google Distributed Cloud Platform, and Automation at Google Cloud, where he is responsible for driving the development and delivery of innovative cloud products in Edge, Data, AI/ML and Cloud-native automation that can help enterprises & telecommunications companies transform their businesses. Kandan has 20+ years of experience in product innovation, building products from scratch, and driving its adoption. Kandan is a strong advocate for open source software based products, founded and led many open source projects and associated products for mass adoption.

• Founded and chaired Nephio, an open-source project hosted by the Linux Foundation. Google Cloud Telecom Network Automation is backed by Nephio.
• Played a key role in the inception of O-RAN RIC and was a major contributor to the O-RAN SC. This led to industry wide innovation and products.
• Co-founded the LF Edge/Akraino project, which is at the forefront of pioneering edge innovations. The blueprints are adopted by many products in Telecom.
• Instrumental role on the OpenStack board, which contributed significantly to its success. AT&T and many telecom on-prem clouds are deployed on Openstack.

Kandan played an instrumental role in transforming AT&T’s cloud strategy and Domain 2.0 initiatives. Spearheaded AT&T’s and industry advancements in Edge Computing, NFV, and SDN. Now spearheading innovation in the Data, AI/ML and Cloud Native automation space.

CTO, Tech Mahindra

Manish Mangal

As the Chief Technology Officer, Manish is driving Tech Mahindra’s network services strategy, solutions portfolio and strategic alliances & partnerships. In his role, he has a unique opportunity to work with CXOs customers and play a key role in shaping the “Networks of the Future” that will be Software-defined, Cloud & AI/ML-enabled, and Highly Automated. He is passionate about 5G and the pervasive impacts it will have on society.

Manish has been associated with the Telecommunications industry for 23 years and worked with global Tier-I operators and OEMs such as Reliance Jio, Sprint, and Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia). During most of his career, he championed corporate-wide large-scale complex technology initiatives from ideation to deployment. Prior to joining Tech Mahindra, Manish worked with Reliance Jio as a Senior Vice President of Network Development & Engineering and the President of Reliance Jio USA, where he played a key role in designing and deployment of world’s largest mobile network.

He is also an inventor of 60 patents and hold MS in Electrical Engineering degree.

LAF TAC Chair, Nokia

Olaf Renner

Olaf Renner works at Nokia as part of their Open Source Program Office (OSPO). He has been in the telecommunications industry for 16 years in various roles in research, standardization and 6 years in open source.

His involvement in open source started in OPNFV and OpenStack focusing on virtual networking and later SDN with Opendaylight to its current evolution in LFN. Besides LFN, Olaf follows container networking related projects in CNCF and supply chain security in OpenSSF.

VP, Technology Development and Planning, Verizon Global Network and Technology

Praveen Atreya

Praveen Atreya is the Vice-President of Technology Development and Planning in Verizon’s Global Network and Technology division. In this role, he is responsible for developing the technology strategy and execution planning for Verizon’s next-gen networks and network-based products, including the Network Cloud and Edge, Cybersecurity, Private Networks and Emerging platforms. He is also responsible for horizontal technology transformation in key areas such as Network automation and Orchestration, Infrastructure standardization, Cyber maturity, API-first and Generative AI adoption/enablement for the organization. Prior to this role, Praveen was the Vice-President of Product Development in Verizon, leading the engineering teams responsible for development, lifecycle-management and innovation for the Verizon Consumer and Business product portfolio – covering Consumer mobile apps, IoT and Security products, Computer Vision and Robotics. Praveen has over 22 years of industry experience in a variety of network and technology roles including innovation and ecosystem development, network operations and performance, new network technology introduction, and implementation and optimization of regional and national network systems.

Silver Member Rep and Co-Founder, Kubermatic

Sebastian Scheele

Sebastian Scheele is co-founder of Kubermatic, a start-up with 60 employees that is the #7 committer to Kubernetes and that is focused on developing open core software solutions for automating Kubernetes operations at scale. Sebastian, a developer himself, has his finger on the pulse of where the Kubernetes landscape is going and is contributing many of his team’s resources to upstream K8s development. As one of the early pioneers in the cloud native ecosystem since 2016, he has helped dozens of telecoms and hundreds of enterprises embrace Kubernetes to solve cutting edge challenges in both cloud and edge computing.

Head of OSS Architecture & Innovation, Deutsche Telekom

Sebastian Zechlin

Sebastian Zechlin is Head of OSS Architecture & Innovation at Deutsche Telekom. He is based in Bonn, Germany.

After graduating in Computer Science from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Sebastian has worked in the telecommunications industry for 15 years. At Deutsche Telekom, Sebastian has held several designer and architect roles in technical implementation projects ranging from access to voice via IMS. Most recently, he was senior architect for Operations Support Systems within the Technology Innovation department. Since 2018 Sebastian leads the OSS Architecture & Innovation department with a focus on Orchestration and SDN / NFV management. Sebastian has been actively involved in international standardization activities at ETSI, 3GPP and IETF.

AVP and Unit Technology Officer, Infosys

Sreekanth Sasidharan

Sreekanth Sasidharan is AVP & Unit Technology Officer for Network, Communication and Media engineering services at Infosys. In this charter, he heads the technology, architecture, innovation and open forum partnerships. He has over 25 years’ experience in telecom industry and had incubated many technologies for Infosys including SDN / NFV, 5G and Edge. Presently, he is focused in bringing AI first strategy for Networks. He is very passionate about open technologies and has working experience with forums like ONF, TIP , LFN and TMF. As an ardent thought leader, he has published 15+ point of views and papers in leading journals like IEEE, Nasscom and CIOL. He has innovated several solutions for Infosys in the areas of Automation, SDN , AI and has 4 granted patents and 5 in pipeline.

China Telecom

Sun Qiong

Sun Qiong has been engaged in IP network technology research, IP network planning and network-related product development of China Telecom for 10 years. She is the author of several IPv6 transition-related RFCs and leads new operation system architecture design for CTNet2025 at China Telecom.

Committer Representative to the Governing Board
Anuket Community

Walter Kozlowski

Walter Kozlowski is the Principal Cloud Architect at Telstra working on their transformation to a containerized, programmable, software-controlled, telco cloud environment. Besides several IT and telco related roles at Telstra, He has also worked for IBM and HP Global Practice. He has a long, active experience in various industry organizations including TMF, ToG, LFN, and GSMA.

Walter’s involvement with LFN began in 2019 as a member of GSMA’s Cloud iNfrastructure Telco Taskforce (CNTT), which eventually merged with LFN’s OPNFV Project to form Anuket. He has served in the combined roles of CNTT/Anuket GitHub committer of many PRs, reviews, and approvals, with the lead roles as Anuket’s Project representative to the LFN TAC and on Anuket’s TSC. Currently he is focused on the Anuket Cloud Infrastructure Reference Model stream of activities.

Walter has a Ph.D. in Mathematics & Information Science and was a Fulbright Scholar at California Institute of Technology. Since 2009, he is certified as The Open Group Distinguished IT Architect and a member of the ToG Certification Board.

VP and Head of Research at the Institute of Advance Technology at SoftBank Corp. and Project Professor at the Global Research Institute at Keio University

Ryuji Wakikawa

Ryuji Wakikawa is the VP and Head of Research Institute of Advanced Technology at SoftBank Corp. and a Project Professor at the Global Research Institute at Keio University, Japan, where he received his Ph.D in 2004. He is leading SoftBank’s R&D efforts for 5G advanced, 6G, HAPS and NTN, AI, quantum technology, as well as autonomous driving and telematics.