Nick Lippis is an authority on corporate computer networking. He has designed some for the largest computer networks in the world. He has advised many Global 2000 firms on network strategy, architecture, equipment, services and implementation including Hughes Aerospace, Barclays Bank, Kaiser Permanente, Eastman Kodak Company, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Liberty Mutual, Schering-Plough, Sprint, WorldCom, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and a wide range of other equipment suppliers and service providers.

Mr. Lippis is uniquely positioned to comment, analyze and observe computer networking industry trends and developments.

Colin Bannon is BT Business’ chief technology officer (CTO), charged with delivering its product
technology strategy and designing solutions enabling strategic outcomes for more than one million
businesses in the UK and 1,000 multinational enterprises in over 180 countries globally.
BT’s customers include world-leading brands, government and financial services organisations, as
well as domestic UK small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) and public sector organisations,
including defence and health. BT also provides wholesale products and services to other
telecommunication companies in the UK and internationally.

Colin is the architect of some of the largest customer network transformations in the world, including
BT’s own enterprise network. In addition, he’s BT Business’ technology lead for partners including
hyperscalers, networking equipment vendors and carrier neutral facility (CNF) providers.
His latest project, Global Fabric, is BT’s new, transformative network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform.
This is a full re-platforming and digitisation of BT’s entire global network footprint, services and
partner integrations for business customers. The industry-disrupting concept was incubated in the
CTO team under Colin and is one of the biggest programmes BT has pursued.

Global Fabric, a fully digitalised, automated, API-first platform, will offer customers near-instant
control to set up, change and scale connectivity services, including Internet, MPLS, Ethernet, Cloud
interconnectivity, DC Interconnect, mobile Interconnect, data sovereignty, DDoS, edge compute that
supports service insertion such as SD-WAN and SASE, SSE, SIP, load balancing, and firewalls.
Colin is active across the telecommunications industry and academia, holding a seat on the Metro
Ethernet Forum (MEF) and lecturing at Warwick University. In addition to his 20 years at BT Group,
including roles such as chief architect, Colin has held engineering leadership and consulting
engineer positions at IBM, Lucent INS and Unisys.

Petek Ergul is Global Head of Service Management at HSBC Chief Technology Office, leading a geographically dispersed global engineering organization. She is accountable for defining and delivering its global transformation, encompassing technology, risk control uplift and organizational strategies; and for managing the relationships with cybersecurity, risk stewards, 2nd line of defence, audit, compliance, and regulatory affairs to ensure compliance across its technologies.

With a career of 20+ years in Mobile Communications and Financial Services industries, Petek is a result-oriented change leader, transforming, building and managing large and complex international technology operations in global infrastructure organizations and in delivering industry leading, scalable, secure and resilient technology solutions and services.

Petek holds an Executive MBA from Bayes Business School in London, a MSc in Broadband and Mobile Communication Networks and BEng in Computer Systems Engineering from University of Kent in Canterbury, the UK.

Chris Sharp has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, with an extensive background in
developing technology strategies in global markets. He has a deep knowledge of the data center sector and is
well positioned to expand technical innovation at Digital Realty.

Most recently, he was responsible for cloud innovation at Equinix, where he led the development of innovative
cloud services solutions and developed new capabilities enabling next-generation, high-performance
exchange, and interconnection solutions, facilitating broad commercial adoption of cloud computing on a
global basis.

Previously, Chris held leadership positions at top network and colocation providers, including Qwest
Communications, MCI/Verizon Business and Reliance Globalcom.