Ernest co-founded ONUG with Nick Lippis after realizing that the user community needed to take control of their own destiny and expedite the network transformation. At the time he was VP of the Internetwork Engineering organization at Fidelity Investments and under his leadership Fidelity hosted the first ONUG in Boston in February 2013.

A 12-year veteran of Fidelity, Ernest was responsible for leading the team that engineered world class network, security, and application delivery services driving value to the customer beyond infrastructure management. Ernest also managed the Network and Voice service portfolio as well as Global Network Operations LAN/WAN teams and has held various technical and leadership roles.

Preetha Vijayakumar is Vice President of Data Center, Network and Collaboration Services in FedEx Services.  She joined FedEx in 2001 as a Technical Analyst, focusing on the management of all Internet facing systems.  In 2013, she entered into management and assumed leadership roles including Manager and Managing Director responsible for the creation and management of platform architecture solutions for providing platform automation across the FedEx enterprise and spearheading FedEx’s cloud native migration journey.

Michael Parks is the Vice President for Core Infrastructure Services and the Regional Vice President for all Dallas Campuses at
USAA. He is responsible for Data Center Management, Data Networks,
Servers, Storage, and Public Cloud infrastructure COE. Michael joined
USAA in 2019 and has over 25 years of experience in IT Enterprise
Infrastructure.

Currently he is leading the efforts to modernize USAA datacenters into a private cloud
capability, refresh campus-based infrastructure with automated controls for compliancy,
and to launch the infrastructure center of excellence for public cloud readiness through
automated safe landed coded services. He also spearheaded the expansion of the Velo
cloud platform, and associated internet circuit infrastructure that enabled the rapid
expansion of all USAA employees to WFH format.

Prior to USAA Michael led the AIG Fort Worth site campus of 750+ employees. Michael’s
specific role was VP of Data Network, Network Security, Collaboration, Call Center
Services, Data Center Services, and Workplace Services. Under his leadership at AIG, a
global enterprise wide re-architecture and re-platform of all the data network, security,
voice, and video platforms was completed. Prior to AIG, Michael lead similar large global
infrastructure transformations at General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell.
In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his wife Jamye, his three daughters, and
two grandsons. Michael is an avid competitor in Ironman competitions. He has completed
five of the six events he has participated in!

Amir Khan is a computer networking visionary who founded and led Viptela’s market-leading, cloud-first, Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) business before the acquisition by Cisco. As prescient as he was in identifying the $8B opportunity for SD-WAN, Amir recognized that network hampered the cloud journey and founded Alkira in 2018 with Atif Khan to reinvent networking for the cloud era. Amir’s vision is to deliver the cloud network as a utility. As CEO/Founder, he has led Alkira’s delivery of the industry’s first on-demand, as-a-service, point and click, unified multi-cloud networking service that enables cloud architects to design, build, and deploy a global multi-cloud network in minutes. Alkira enables enterprises to implement 50% less firewall capacity, and reduce TCO by up to 40%. Before Viptela, Amir held leadership roles at Cisco, Juniper, and Nortel. He holds 4 patents. Amir earned an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mississippi.