LF Networking Governing Board

Vice President of Technology Strategy and Network Cloud, Verizon

Anil Guntupalli

MD & GM: Global Communications Service Provider Industry, Google Cloud

Amol Phadke

AVP, Network Cloud and SDN Platform Integration, AT&T

Catherine Lefevre

Located in Belgium, she is responsible for the software delivery of the Rules-Based Process Automation Platform, the Service Provisioning Platform (Voice, Network/Service Elements, etc.), TDM Network, System Impact Analyzer (RAN OpEx Savings) and AT&T SDN Platform (Application Controller, Policy Framework, Control Loop Automation Platform, Service Design & Creation, Master Service Orchestrator, Portal, Multi-Site State Coordinator Service, Virtual Infrastructure Deployment). She is also focusing on transforming BSS/OSS systems to Microservice Architecture and achieving data powered control loop automation. She leads AT&T Network Common Platform & Services Target State Architecture and drives ONAP/O-RAN (vRAN) SMO strategic alignment.

Catherine received a master’s degree in computer science as well as a qualified teaching degree in computer science in 1996 from the University Of Namur (FUNDP).

She joined AT&T in 2013. During her time with AT&T, she focused on software development best practices and early prototypes and proof of concepts of AT&T’s SDN technology, accelerating AT&T’s ability to move from concept to scaled production development, integrating the DevOps Culture for increased collaboration between the development and operations teams. In 2017, she co-led with AT&T Labs the open sourcing of the ECOMP Platform. She received several awards for her technical depth that provided a unique and significant contribution to AT&T (AT&T Science and Technology Medal; Technology Development President Award in 2016 and 2017).

Catherine is part of AT&T’s EMEA Women’s Network, mentoring young women about careers in STEM.

She is an avid horse rider and photography enthusiast.

Chief Architect, Strategy & Programs, Ericsson

Christian Olrog

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).

AVP - Unit Technology Officer
Infosys

Gnanapriya Chidam-baranathan

Gnanapriya (Priya) Chidambaranathan is Associate Vice President, Unit Technology Officer, Global Head of Technology & Architecture Practice – Communications, Media & Entertainment, Energy, Utilities & Services Business Unit (ECS).

Priya has 29+ years of experience in Telecom & IT. She contributes to unit strategy, drives technology adoption for business solutions across varied programs globally.

She has been driving Digital Transformation, Enterprise Architecture, IT roadmap, Micro Services, Cloud migration, Open Source Adoption, 5G / Edge, 5G Use Cases & Industry solutions, emerging technologies themes like Blockchain solutions, Software Marketplaces, Data Modernization, Legacy & Technology Modernization, Innovation, guiding varied transformation & modernization programs for ECS global clients and part of org level core team.

She recently received ‘Women Icons Asia Technology Award 2022’ by Women Icons Network, Singapore, ‘Top 10 Women Tech Leaders India Award 2022’ by REVA University, RACE & Terra Logic. Previously received ‘Outstanding Achievement’ Award under Disruptor category of “Global Women in Telco & Tech” Awards for 2020 by Capacity Media

Under her guidance & drive, Infosys has won 14 Outstanding Catalyst Team Awards in TM Forum, she  received Individual Recognition Award @ Industry TM Forum, serving as TMF Collaboration Sub-committee member. She had contributed to TMForum OpenAPIs, ODA, Software Marketplace, Edge, 5G, technology reports, reference architectures. She is a speaker in multiple Industry and Technology Forums. She received ‘Best Technical Presentation’ award in SPE. She is a Senior IEEE member, IEEE ComSoc member, Execom member of Bangalore Chapter, IEEE WIE member, Fellow IETE. She has co-authored book on Digital Signal Processing I, II editions published by McGraw Hill, International edition and translated to Mandarin.

Committer Representative to the Governing Board
Orange

Guillaume Lambert

Guillaume Lambert is a Telecommunication Engineer and has been working for Orange since 2003. He has been interested in Open Source and Free Software since he was graduating at ENST Bretagne and he took part to its Linux User Groups and to the “Groupe de Réflexion et d’Animation Autour du Libre” .

During his career at Orange, he was involved in various in-house software developments and deployments, for example on Single-Sign-On platforms based on Liberty Alliance specifications or on IP Networks Monitoring systems relying on Netflow/IPFIX. Guillaume joined Orange Labs transmission department in 2015 and the OpenDaylight Community in 2016. Since then, he has been actively promoting and contributing to it.

He is currently the OpenDaylight TSC chairman and the documentation PTL, and a committer of transportpce and releng/builder projects .
He has been the PTL of the ODL/transportPCE project until 2021 and is occasionally contributing to others projects such as ODL/BGPCEP or ONAP/OOM or LFN/releng.

CTO, Telus

Ibrahim Gideon

As Chief Technology Officer for TELUS, a leading national telecommunications company in Canada, he is responsible for all technology development and strategy, security, service and network architecture, service delivery and operational support systems, as well as service and network convergence, and network infrastructure strategies and evolution. Under his leadership the TELUS wireless broadband network has become one of the best in the world.

Ibrahim serves on the board of the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance, the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions and the Institute for Communication Technology Management. In addition to his industry leadership roles, he has been awarded with IEEE Communications Society’s prestigious Distinguished Industry Leader Award and elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE) for his significant contributions to the field of engineering. Ibrahim has also been named one of the 100 most powerful and influential people in the telecoms industry in Global Telecoms Business magazine’s GTB Power 100.

Ibrahim holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the American University of Beirut, a Master’s in Electronics Engineering from Carleton University and an Honourary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of British Columbia and is passionate about supporting engaged, high-performing teams.

Chief Engineer of Emerging Technology, ZTE

Jie Hu

Jie Hu is Chief Engineer of Emerging Technology in Standard Strategy Team. He is responsible for planning and managing on open source contributions of ZTE System Product.

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.

Sr Principal Community Architect, Red Hat

Lisa Caywood

Lisa Caywood is a Senior Principal Community Architect at Red Hat, focusing on projects and communities of interest to the telco and manufacturing industries. In addition to the LFN Governing Board, she serves as the Red Hat representative on the LF Edge Board and as Vice Chair of the eBPF Foundation. She has a long history with Linux Foundation networking and telco communities, starting with OpenDaylight while with a founding member company, and later serving as Marketing Director for LF Networking and LF Edge while at the Linux Foundation itself.

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.

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.

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.

General Manager of ICT Infrastructure Open Source Business, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd

Xudong Ren

Mr. Ren Xudong（Bill Ren）serves as the General Manager of  ICT Infrastructure Open Source Business at Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, and as the chief liaison officer of Huawei. In this role，he is fully responsible for responsible for the implementation of open source solutions for operators/enterprises in the network automation industry, using open source means to build industrial ecology, expand industrial space, build a healthy and harmonious industrial environment, and support the success of the company’s business.

Bill Ren holds a Bachelor Degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University. Since Joining Huawei in 1998，Bill served as an Intelligent Network Research and Development Engineer, Product Manager and Architect of India Branch, General Manager of Business OSS, Vice President of Network OSS, Vice President of Network OSS Strategy and MKT, Vice President of Solution MKTG, etc. We have accumulated rich experience in R&D, marketing and product management.