Governing Board

Bora Eliacik is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board and the VP of Engineering at Netsia. Bora is an ICT professional with more than 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. Throughout his career, Bora has participated in large-scale software integration and development projects as a project manager, product manager and architect in a wide variety of technologies including call control in fixed and mobile networks, intelligent telecom networks, service delivery platforms, targeted advertising, emerging telecom technologies, content management, and delivery, OTT TV and IPTV, SDN and NFV.

Cole Crawford is CEO and founder of Vapor IO, creators of the Kinetic Edge and the leading provider of tower-connected edge colocation and interconnection services. He was previously the founding executive director of the Open Compute Project and a co-founder of OpenStack. He is a founding board member of the Open19 Foundation and has been a thought leader in data center technology for over a decade. He is leading Vapor IO in developing the largest nationwide edge colocation and interconnection platform at the edge of the cellular network. Cole has been named to Data Economy’s list of The World’s Most Influential Data Economy Leaders and The World’s First Top 50 Edge Computing Influencers.

Dr. Daniel Park is a head of open source group in Samsung where he is responsible for open source strategy, corporate governance and compliance operation, project development and developer relations. He has many experiences in terms of global standard and collaboration including W3C advisory board and working group chair, IETF working group chair, OCF vice president and open source work group chair, and currently his experience is being expanded to open source communities. He received his Ph.D from Kyung Hee University in Computer Engineering.

David Boloker is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board. He is also leading the Business Development activities around IBM’s Edge Computing Initiatives and holds the title of Distinguished Engineer. Previously, he was CTO of IBM’s Emerging Technology group and was responsible for forming IBM’s technical strategy around the emerging areas ranging from Mobile, Cloud Services and Big Data. In that role, he lead a globally distributed IBM team researching new areas in software design and development. As part of his Emerging Technologies work, he was responsible for the commercialization of the Watson machine. David and his team took the system that played Jeopardy and created a multipurpose machine that analyzed information and provides solutions across the industry from healthcare to finance to retail.

Throughout David’s extensive career at IBM, he has held the role of CTO for Java technology, and he’s worked at IBM’s esteemed Thomas J. Watson Research Center as well as the Cambridge Scientific Center doing research in the area of remote distribution and control of hardware and software systems and secure Internet gateways. David has also developed an Internet-based data exploration tool to support development and testing of hypotheses regarding complex genetic and environmental relationships in the development of chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD) in collaboration with COPDGene investigators in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for Advanced Medical Imaging and COPDGene.

Erik Salo is an LF Edge Governing Board Member & The Senior Director of enterprise business development for Seagate Technologies LLC. Erik is responsible for enabling Seagate products and solutions that address the needs of IT4.0 applications and the new generation of IT3.0 private clouds.In his 6 years at Seagate, Erik has worked in product management and participated in several acquisitions including Xyratex, Dothill and Evault.

Prior to joining Seagate, Erik was Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Mission Motors, a San Francisco based high tech firm focusing on cloud software and electronics for the electric vehicle industry. Erik was Chief Strategist for AMD’s computing group, Business Unit leader for AMD’s embedded computing group and Business Unit leader for National Semiconductor’s Information Appliance division. Erik has also held positions as Director of Technical marketing for National Semiconductor and Cyrix Corporations.

Gang Chen is a technical lead at Baidu 5G MEC team. He obtained his Doctor’s degree in Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2008 and joined Baidu in 2017. Before working with Baidu, he was a standard representative in China Mobile. He has work experience on IETF, 3GPP and GSMA for several years. He was also the chairman of GSMA VRirTT WG. He is currently leading Baidu 5G MEC team and focusing on edge computing platform, architecture design as well as AI driving 5G ecosystem

Glenn is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board & The Vice President of Product Management and Strategy for Wind River’s Software Defined Infrastructure business unit. Glenn has held Product Management positions with platform software providers for over 30 years and has been a strong advocate of Open Source. He was a founding member of the Linux Foundation Carrier Grade Linux Workgroup and is currently Wind River’s representative for Open Platform for NFV. Other open source roles include a contributor to the SCOPE Alliance Carrier Grade OS committee and the Vice President of the OpenSAF Foundation. Glenn has been in Product Management positions with Wind River since 2005 and prior to Wind River Glenn held Director of Product Management positions at MontaVista Software and BSDi and Unix Product Management roles at SCO and Texas Instruments.

Hatsumi is the Senior Director of Strategic Planning Unit in Fujitsu Ltd. She is currently responsible for the open source and community strategy, and leading to create 5G era global network & business architecture. Her previous roles included director positions of both Product Planning and Business Management of global photonic business. She was assigned to Texas US for more than 8 years and her main business has been for big carries in US market.

She has BS for Mathematical Statistics, and resides in Kawasaki city, Japan.

Henry is System Software Architect with HP Retail Solutions group developing point of sale systems. Henry has over 30 years of experience developing embedded systems, VOIP gateways, and mobile phones from startups to global companies.

Henry holds a M.S. in Computer Engineering from University of Southern California and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of California San Diego.

Jason is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board. He is also the IoT and Edge Computing CTO at Dell Technologies where he leads a team responsible for market and technology strategy, solution planning and strategic ecosystem development within the Dell Technologies IoT and Edge Computing Solutions Division.

His proven track record as a thought leader in the IoT market is evidenced through his leadership building up the award-winning Dell IoT Solutions Partner Program and establishing the vendor-neutral, open source EdgeX Foundry project to facilitate greater interoperability at the IoT edge. In addition to serving on the board for LF Edge, Jason is active in the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and other key industry efforts focused on IoT and edge computing. He was recognized as one of the Top 100 Industrial IoT influencers of 2018.

Jason has spent his career at both Dell and tech startups in roles spanning CTO, engineering, and marketing. He holds 14 granted and 11 pending US patents.

Jim St. Leger chairs the LF Edge Technical Advisory Council (TAC) and represents the TAC on the LF Edge Governing Board.

Jim is involved in several other open source projects including DPDK where he was on the creation team, LF Networking, Tungsten Fabric, Hyperscan, and more. His career has spanned automotive, aerospace, semiconductor fab equipment, and semiconductor products and has included roles in manufacturing, product engineering, product marketing, and ecosystem and business development. Jim has degrees from RPI and Northwestern University, in the disciplines of mechanical engineering, engineering management, and business administration. His passions are family, fun, education, outdoors, and disability inclusion.

Joel Markham is a Chief Engineer in the Edge Computing & Controls Lab for GE at the Research Center in Niskayuna, NY. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Clarkson University. As part of the center, he focuses on the development of industrial software and networking technologies to enable controls convergence for GE. He is a highly skilled software architect and technologist with a focus on safety-critical real-time embedded systems. Prior to joining GE, he worked on mission critical systems for Lockheed Martin related to autonomous systems. Some of those programs include USMC Cargo UAS, Army’s Autonomous Technologies for Unmanned Air Systems and ONR’s Autonomous Aerial Cargo/Utility System.

Joseph is the Vice General Manager at inwinSTACK. He is responsible for marketing and community development. During the last 10 years, he has been involved with technology innovation as an experienced IT industry evangelist.

Juha Oravainen is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board & the Head of Open Source Software for Cloud at Nokia. He has extensive experience in the telecommunication world after joining Nokia 1994. Juha has had several responsibilities in GSM, 3G, and 4G after moving to open source. Currently, Juha is coordinating Nokia’s open source activities and he is active in open source projects like Akraino, O-RAN Near-RT RIC, OpenStack, OPNFV, OCP, and CNCF.

Keith is the CEO of IOTech. He is an EdgeX Foundry Board Member and the Chair of the Technical Steering Committee.

Kevin is the Sr. Director of Software Ecosystem Development at Arm. In his current role, he is responsible for developing the open source and commercial software ecosystem. In previous roles, Kevin has driven software ecosystem, marketing and product management activity in start up and large enterprise solutions providers, across enterprise and carrier markets.

Kunal Shukla is the CTO for Strategic Accounts at Hewlett Packard Enterprise within the communication, media and entertainment domain. Kunal is currently focused on the technology and business strategy across 5G, Multi-access Edge Computing, IOT, content and media in an edge-centric , cloud enabled and data driven world to deliver next generation differentiated business outcomes to end customers.

Kunal has extensive experience within wireless and wireline access, IMS, network applications, media & content and Cloud/NFV/SDN domain. In his current role, Kunal is responsible for strategically aligning HPE’s entire portfolio with the industry and customer’s current and future architecture for strategic accounts.

Prior to joining HPE, Kunal led the technology strategy and business development for Aricent Inc across North American digital service providers for network transformation. Previously, Kunal also has spent more than a decade at Ericsson where he held a number of leadership roles focusing on Tier 1 North America Wireless and Cable market.

Kunal holds a master’s degree in computer engineering from Florida Atlantic University. Kunal is based on Dallas where he lives with this wife and two young children. Kunal is an avid sports fan and has been coaching his son’s soccer team for last three years.

Martin Bäckström is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board & The Head of Industry Area Datacom. Martin is responsible for leading ICT technology convergence and fostering co-operation between industries in areas such as Software Defined Infrastructure, Virtualization, Cloud, Analytics, Automation, Digitalization, and IoT. Prior to this position, Martin joined Smart and PLDT in Manila in The Philippines as The Chief Technology and Information Advisor for several years. His previous positions in Ericsson include being head of Radio Technology Development, Principal designer for GPRS and Packet PDC, and CTO for Ericsson APAC Innovation. Martin has been actively participating in ICT technology evolutions from 2G, 3G, to 4G and 5G and actively leading engagements related to standardization and open source projects to drive for convergence and harmonization.

Melissa Evers-Hood is the Senior Director of Google Operating Systems within the System Software Products in the Intel Architecture Graphics, and Software group at Intel Corp. Her current responsibilities span Intel’s development on Google technologies and their scale ecosystem partners. Melissa drives Edge initiatives across Intel’s Open Source software development and associated communities. She has worked across the system software stack in open source communities from device, to edge, to cloud leading development in Android, Chrome, Graphics, Media, OpenStack, Cloud Native Computing, StarlingX amongst others. Melissa has served on the board of directors of several organizations and currently is the Governing Board Chair of the LF Edge. Joining Intel 15 yrs ago, Melissa has worked across Engineering, Finance, and Product management. Passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion, as well as a certified coach, Melissa frequently speaks, mentors, and coaches technical leaders internally and externally. Prior to Intel, Melissa worked at Dell and ExxonMobil in engineering and strategy functions.

Melissa resides in Portland, Oregon with husband and three kids. She has her BS and MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.

Coming Soon

Oliver Spatscheck received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1999 at which point he joined AT&T Labs. He was named AT&T fellow in 2013 and is currently the Assistant Vice President for Cloud Strategy, Architecture and Innovation at AT&T. Dr. Spatscheck holds over 120 patents, co-authored a book on Web Caching and Content Distribution and published over 75 articles. He was also the co-inventor of such systems as GS-Tool, IDNS, ARO (https://developer.att.com/application-resource-optimizer) which are used within and outside of AT&T. More information can be found at http://www.spatscheck.com/oliver.

Vice President, Technology & Strategy at Radisys.

Mr. Ren Xudong（Bill Ren）is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board. He also serves as the General Manager of ICT Infrastructure Open Source Business at Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, and as the chief liaison officer of Huawei. He is fully 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. He has accumulated rich experience in R&D, marketing and product management.

Currently based in Frankfurt Germany, Richard currently serves as Chief Technology Officer at OSIsoft, focusing on long term strategic planning, business and technology alignment, strategic partnerships, alliances and research and innovation programs. Looking at today’s challenges, Richard is exploring the benefits of employing operations information technology for societies, communities and industry to better understand and manage their relationship with resources, industries and commerce with the goal of helping these greater systems to thrive.

With a degree in Chemical Engineering from University of California at Berkeley, Richard began his career at OSIsoft in 1990 and has held numerous technical and strategic roles including Chief Software Architect and Director of Engineering.

Rob Hirschfeld is the co-founder of RackN and its open Digital Rebar project. He has been in the cloud and infrastructure space for 20 years and has done everything from working with early ESX betas to serving four terms on the OpenStack Foundation Board and as an executive at Dell. As a co-founder of the Digital Rebar project, Rob help create a new generation of self-service DevOps orchestration to leverage the containers and service-oriented ops. He believes that the technology of running data centers and applications cannot work without also addressing process and people challenges. He trained as an Engineer with from degrees from Duke (BS Mechanical) and LSU (MS Industrial).

Roman is an open source software expert, currently serving on the board of directors for both The Apache Software Foundation and LF Edge. He is a co-founder and the vice president of product and strategy for Zededa, an edge virtualization startup. Throughout his career, Roman has held technical leadership roles at several well-known companies, including Sun Microsystems, Yahoo!, Cloudera and Pivotal Software. He holds a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from St. Petersburg State University.

Saji is a technologist with 25+ years of industry experience. During his distinguished career, he has made outstanding contribution in the areas of Platforms, Data Center, High Performance Compute, Automation & System Integration. He created multiple practices and incubated many new IPs at Wipro, contributing significantly to the value of IT overall.

Wipro’s FluidState Data center was a product that was developed and launched by Saji and was the industry’s first blueprint for converged infrastructure. He also designed and deployed Wipro’s public cloud, which was one of the 1st public clouds to go live in the Indian sub-continent. Modular remote liquid cooled Edge data centers as resilient Edge computing was another recognized product launched by him and was nominated for many global awards.

In his current position he carries the charter to transform Wipro’s infrastructure services offerings to address the requirements of the digital era. He drives the innovation themes Wipro is investing into namely 5G Edge, AI Ops, Blockchain application.

Shahid Khan is Senior Engineering Manager at Qualcomm Corporate R&D. He is currently responsible for driving Telco & Edge products strategy, software architecture, and development of end-to-end platform solutions for ARM SoCs with a focus on Orchestration and NFV/SDN as the key technology enablers of disruptive solutions for emerging markets for Edge computing and 5G/IOT. Previously, Shahid has been responsible for driving open source software ecosystem enablement for Qualcomm’s ARM based server platforms through various community engagements and partnerships.

Tom is Technical Director for NFV at Red Hat where he leads a team of some 25 engineers focusing on the area of Open Source Networking including SDN, NFV, data plane acceleration, Open Daylight and container networking efforts. In addition, Tom works across Red Hat’s products and business to strengthen and sure up its networking technologies around these products by working on M&A, partner and company strategy. Tom continues working as an Apache Committer and as co-Maintainer of The Public Yang Repository on GitHub.

Prior to Red Hat, Tom was a Distinguished Engineer at Brocade where he was The Chief Architect of Open Source in the Software Business Unit. Tom lead teams responsible for building commercial products based on open source, as well as contributions to upstream open source projects such as Open Daylight, OPNFV and OpenStack. Tom is co-chair of the IETF NETMOD Working Group, which is responsible for the standardization of the Yang modeling language as well as Yang models.

Tom is the co-founder and CEO of Dianomic, a major contributor of the LF-Edge project “Fledge”; an open source framework and community for the industrial edge focused on critical operations. Fledge developers build smarter, better, cheaper industrial solutions for: condition-based monitoring, predictive maintenance, smarter machines and situational awareness all integrated with the operator’s existing “brown field” systems.

Tom is a serial computer software and services entrepreneur with broad experience in networking, security, database and cloud-based service offers. Tom and his teams have raised over $400M in funding and had 5 exits totaling more than $3.5B.

VM (aka Vicky) spent most of her twenty-plus years in the tech industry leading software development departments and teams, providing technical management and leadership consulting for small and medium businesses, and helping companies understand, use, release, and contribute to free and open source software in a way that’s good for both their bottom line and for the community. Now, as the Director of Open Source Strategy for Juniper Networks, she leverages her nearly 30 years of free and open source software experience and a strong business background to help Juniper be successful through free and open source software.

She is the author of Forge Your Future with Open Source, the first and only book to detail how to contribute to free and open source software projects. The book is published by The Pragmatic Programmers and is now available at https://fossforge.com.

Vicky has been a moderator and author for opensource.com, an author for Linux Journal, the Vice President of the Open Source Initiative, and is a frequent and popular speaker at free/open source conferences and events. She’s the proud winner of the Perl White Camel Award (2014), the O’Reilly Open Source Award (2016), and two Opensource.com Moderator’s Choice Awards (2018, 2019). She blogs about free/open source, business, and technical management at {anonymous => ‘hash’};.

Lead product Manager at MobiledgeX laying out the infrastructure and virtualization landscape to move immersive and AI applications towards edge. In past Led the technology strategy and architecture for Verizon Internet services platform and was a founding engineer at affirmed networks. Active contributor in Linux and author at IETF. I am very interested in data-path programmability and accelerations which can be open-sourced for community benefit.

Walid Negm is Altran’s Group Chief Innovation Officer and has responsibility for bringing the latest innovations to clients through R&D activity in Altran global centers. He is a member of Altran’s Global Executive Committee. In addition to overseeing Altran’s technology strategy, Walid is responsible for new capability (including Open Source software) development in strategic areas of 5G/Edge, Digital Therapeutics, ADAS/AD and VTOL/ Electrification. Walid launched the Open Source and co-innovation model at Altran accelerating innovation in SDN/NFV, Blockchain and Cyber Security and is currently a member of the Linux Foundation Edge (LF Edge) Governing Board. Previously, Walid was Accenture’s global lead of R&D and helped launched Accenture’s cloud platform and established Accenture’s Washington, DC cyber defense lab. Walid co-founded network security and mobile infrastructure startups and earned his bachelor and master of science in computer engineering from Boston University. He earned his masters of business administration from Georgetown University.

Mr. Yachen Wang is the General Manager of Wireless and IoT Network Center in Tencent. He is mainly leading in Tencent IoT Network, 5G, edge computing, Radio and wireless network related technical research, platform development and network deployment. before Mr. Yachen Wang joined in Tencent, he was the Deputy General Manager of Network Technology and AI R&D Center in China Mobile, President of ONAP, Vice Chair of Linux Networking Fund including ONAP, ODL, OPNFV etc. and Vice-Chairman of ITU-T SG13 IMT-2020/5G Working Party. He has much experience in 4G/5G, NFV/SDN, network evolution, international standardization, and open source etc.

Yoshikatsu Okazaki is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board & the Vice President and Head of NTT Network Technology Laboratories. He received a B.E. and M.E. in applied physics from the University of Tokyo. Since he joined NTT in 1991, he had been engaged in research and development on network systems, network operation and Next Generation Network (NGN), and also worked on network design and planning in NTT WEST Corporation. He is currently working on managing research of future network architecture and technologies as the general manager , the head of NTT Network Technology Laboratories.