Jeremy Rossbach

As the Chief Technical Evangelist for Network Observability by Broadcom, Jeremy is passionate about meeting with customers to identify their IT operational challenges and produce solutions that fit their business and network transformation goals. Prior to joining Broadcom, he spent over 15+ years working in IT, across both public and private sectors, managing data centers for startups, healthcare, financial and federal system integrators. His previous roles as a data center administrator, engineer, architect and manager provided him invaluable insights into the challenges and goals of IT consumers.

Rabia Hammad

Experienced Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology, Software development, and services
industry. Skilled in Wide Area (WAN) Networks SD-WAN, Public Cloud(Azure/AWS), Wireless Technologies, Voice over IP (VolP), Switches, and Unified Communications. Strong sales engineering professional with a Bachelor of Computer Science and 8+ years of highly accomplished experience.

With over two decades of professional experience in Network Engineering, Product Management, and Solutions Engineering, Kunal Thakkar is a seasoned expert with a track record of success in high-level consulting and professional services roles, as well as in managed services. In these roles, he has played a pivotal part in the architecture, rollout, and oversight of sophisticated network and security infrastructures for industry-leading Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies.

Kunal possesses diverse and in-depth technical proficiency that spans several disciplines, including Computer Networks, Cloud, Security, and Application Delivery Architectures.

Kunal holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science with a concentration in Computer Networks and Security from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from M.S. University in India.

Ted Turner

Ted is an industry veteran with over 30 years’ experience in building, operating and scaling production environments. Using DevOps principles he is helping to change monolithic code into smaller manageable components while migrating services out into the Cloud. Making systems observable throughout the microservice creation and cloud migration.

Rick Hamilton is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Blue Planet Software, a division
of Ciena. Mr. Hamilton is responsible for Ciena’s Blue Planet software platform and global services
organization, including consulting and support services for designing, deploying, managing, and
maintaining communications networks.

Hamilton has led Blue Planet Software since its incorporation as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ciena in
2019. Ciena created this separate division to drive added focus on a key element of its Adaptive Network
strategy, and to enable greater business independence, including with respect to Blue Planet’s practices,
go-to-market strategy, customer engagement and commercial model.

Before joining Cisco, Hamilton was Senior Vice President and CIO of The DFS Group (a division of LVMH
Group), a luxury retailer catering to the traveling audience. Previously, he led the Applications and
Technology Services team that serviced 135 stores throughout the United States for Cost Plus World
Market, and he led the applications development team for Discovery Channel’s consumer division.

Hamilton holds a bachelor’s degree in information systems from the University of Phoenix and a master’s
degree in software engineering from Golden Gate University. A licensed commercial pilot and flight
instructor, he also holds an undergraduate degree in aeronautics.

Paul McCluskey is Vice President of Global Enterprise GTM for Blue Planet. His primary focus is building strategic partnerships and new routes to market that create broad value propositions for our joint customers. Paul also owns the Blue Orbit Partner Program which is critical to enabling our ecosystem.

With over 30 years of experience in networking and operations, Paul has an established grasp of the ongoing operational challenges facing service providers and large enterprises.

Prior to joining Blue Planet, Paul served as Vice President of Business Development at Ericsson managing global market development for its OSS solution. He also served as Vice President of Business Development and Marketing at CENX where he ran partner channels and managed the marketing organization.

Paul studied at the Royal Signals Army Apprentice College in Harrogate, United Kingdom where he received a BTEC diploma in Electronics and Communications. He jointly developed the patent for a Method and System for Specifying Planned Changes to a Communications Network.

Sachin has more than 20 years of product management experience managing network and services lifecycle management products. Before Ciena, he was the CEO and Co-founder of IndusIntel, Inc., a silicon valley based startup offering industry 4.0 industrial IoT solutions. Before that, Sachin’s longest career was with Cisco, where he managed Unified Communications services lifecycle management products targeted at enterprises and service provider customers.

Kelly Baig has worked in information technology and networking for over 30 years. Her past experience includes HPE and Aruba, where Kelly helped to introduce the GreenLake for Aruba NaaS solution to the market. Kelly is excited to be part of the Blue Planet Enterprise Automation Suite program at Ciena, working with partners and customers to identify key problems to solve in network lifecycle management.

Steve is responsible for securing customer adoption and growth for a new set of Blue Planet offering, targeting multiple Enterprise verticals. This role will focus on Blue Planet development of Global Distribution, Value Added Resellers (VARs) and Managed Service Provider (MSP) partners operating in all regions. Steve leads a team of director level partner engagement leads and provides direction and support for their in-country channel engagements.

Steve’s background spans 4 decades working with Product vendors & Service firms dealing with large networks in both Service Provider and Enterprise markets. Companies include Nortel, IBM, JDSU, Viavi Solutions, Hitachi and Blue Planet a Ciena Company.

Rabia Hammad

Experienced Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology, Software development, and services
industry. Skilled in Wide Area (WAN) Networks SD-WAN, Public Cloud(Azure/AWS), Wireless Technologies, Voice over IP (VolP), Switches, and Unified Communications. Strong sales engineering professional with a Bachelor of Computer Science and 8+ years of highly accomplished experience.

Josh Hammer is a Field CISO with Oracle. In this role, he works with customers to help them build innovative cloud security architectures and strategies that standardize and accelerate the secure adoption of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).  Before returning to Oracle, he was a Security Partner Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services.  In this role, he works closely with various strategic security partners to build cloud-optimized architecture and develop strategies with business development teams.  Before this, he was a Security Architect in the AWS Professional Services organization, where he helped large enterprises adopt AWS.

Michael Haugh brings over twenty-five years of experience and leads Product Marketing at Gluware. Prior to Gluware, Michael was VP of Product Management at ClearPath Networks. He has previously held roles in System Engineering, Product Management, and Marketing at Ixia and Spirent. Michael also worked at IBM Global Services and AT&T in Network Operations, Network Engineering and as a Design Engineer. Michael, Cisco CCIE #4334, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and holds a B.S. in Engineering from Southern Illinois University.

David Bainbridge is a Senior Director of Software Engineering with a focus on open-source software working as part of Ciena’s office of the CTO. In this role, David participates in developing prototypes, demonstrations, and product integrations that leverage the best practices and trends of the open-source community. Further, David and his team work to understand how these practices and trends can be applied to existing Ciena products as well as help influence product direction to better address the needs of Ciena’s customers.

David’s software architecture and development practice has spanned more than 40 years and covered diverse domains including human-machine interaction, security, distributed systems, AR/VR, simulation, IT operations, network management, and education. David continues to contribute to open-source projects and occasionally presents at industry conferences around the globe.

Koroush Saraf

Koroush Saraf leads product positioning and marketing initiatives for ZPE Systems and brings 20 years of networking and security experience to the team. Koroush served as VP of Product management at Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet bringing to market leading products in SASE, SD-WAN, LTE/5G, SD-Branch and IAM. And now at ZPE we are bringing the same security reliability and simplicity of public cloud to private cloud infrastructure from Datacenter to the edge. Koroush holds a Masters of Electrical Engineering from Stanford & USC.

Rene Neumann

As part of the Solution Engineering group is Rene Neumann working closely with customers and helps delivering the right solutions to ZPE customers.
His IT & data center expertise spans over 20 years, covering a broad range of technologies from Data Center and Infrastructure Management implementations and solutions to Network Management and Automation technologies. Using ZPE’s powerful platform of consolidated devices and intuitive software, Rene continues to improve network architecture for companies across the globe.

Toni de la Fuente is the founder of Prowler Open Source, the tool for enabling AWS security best practices. He has also worked for AWS as a security engineer and consultant. He’s passionate about FLOSS – Free Libre Open Source Software – in general and Information Security, Incident Response, and Digital Forensics in particular. He enjoys everything related to cloud computing and automation. Toni has contributed to several security and Open Source community projects such as Prowler, phpRADmin, the Nagios plugin for Alfresco, and Alfresco BART (backup tool). He’s also contributed to books and courses related to Linux, Monitoring, and AWS Security for PacktPublishing.

Ernest Lefner

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.

Michael Haugh brings over twenty-five years of experience and leads Product Marketing at Gluware. Prior to Gluware, Michael was VP of Product Management at ClearPath Networks. He has previously held roles in System Engineering, Product Management, and Marketing at Ixia and Spirent. Michael also worked at IBM Global Services and AT&T in Network Operations, Network Engineering and as a Design Engineer. Michael, Cisco CCIE #4334, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and holds a B.S. in Engineering from Southern Illinois University.

Dan Baxter

Dan Baxter is a seasoned out-of-band (OOB) professional with more than 20 years of experience in network resilience and management. As Director of Sales Engineering for the Americas at Opengear, he leads the U.S. Sales Engineers and Solution Architects teams. Dan’s extensive career includes senior roles at Cyclades, Avocent and Emerson Network Power. At Opengear, his focus is on helping hyper-scale and enterprise customers find practical applications for OOB solutions, ensuring network resilience, reducing complexity, and delivering tailored advice for NetOps, DevOps, and SD-WAN environments. His commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction makes him a trusted advisor in the rapidly evolving field of network engineering.

Deba Mohanty is VP of Product Management at Selector. He is responsible for product management and marketing at Selector. Deba has over fifteen years of experience in the design, development, and product management of Computer Networking products and data analytics solutions. His experiences include product development and management roles at Intel and Juniper Networks and data-analytics product management roles at AWS (Amazon Web Services).Deba graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Electrical Engineering. He also has a master’s degree in Computer Engineering from Texas A & M University and an MBA from Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.

Jason Gmitter is a seasoned technology professional with over 20 years of experience
designing and deploying enterprise-class data center architectures. His career has been
marked by a progression of customer-focused senior systems engineering roles at
AMD, Cisco, and Microsoft.

Toni de la Fuente is the founder of Prowler Open Source, the tool for enabling AWS security best practices. He has also worked for AWS as a security engineer and consultant. He’s passionate about FLOSS – Free Libre Open Source Software – in general and Information Security, Incident Response, and Digital Forensics in particular. He enjoys everything related to cloud computing and automation. Toni has contributed to several security and Open Source community projects such as Prowler, phpRADmin, the Nagios plugin for Alfresco, and Alfresco BART (backup tool). He’s also contributed to books and courses related to Linux, Monitoring, and AWS Security for PacktPublishing.

Larry Peterson is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at Princeton University, where he served as Chair from 2003-2009. He is a co-author of the best selling networking textbook Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (6e), which is now available as open source on GitHub. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and operation of Internet-scale distributed systems, including the widely used PlanetLab and MeasurementLab platforms. He is currently working on a pilot 5G-enabled edge cloud, called Aether, an open source project of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), where he serves CTO.

Professor Peterson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, the 2010 recipient of the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communication Award, and the 2013 recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Award. He received his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University in 1985.

Dr. Benson is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University.  His group focuses on developing models and designing algorithms and frameworks to improve the performance and availability of computer networks. In particular, his group explores the critical role that network state plays in determining network performance and availability with the state’s inherent semantics and emergent state management techniques by investigating designs and algorithms to more holistically understand and manage this state. More recently, this approach has been applied to addressing the digital divide, improving microservices/clouds, managing software defined networks, and rethinking CDN designs. These designs and systems have been deployed at web scale companies, adopted by opensource systems, and acquired by a large hardware manufacturer.

Larry Peterson is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at Princeton University, where he served as Chair from 2003-2009. He is a co-author of the best selling networking textbook Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (6e), which is now available as open source on GitHub. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and operation of Internet-scale distributed systems, including the widely used PlanetLab and MeasurementLab platforms. He is currently working on a pilot 5G-enabled edge cloud, called Aether, an open source project of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), where he serves CTO.

Professor Peterson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, the 2010 recipient of the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communication Award, and the 2013 recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Award. He received his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University in 1985.

Nick Lippis

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.

Aaron Rinehart

Aaron Rinehart has spent his career solving challenging engineering problems for organizations such as the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Department of Defense (DoD). Rinehart has been a featured speaker at several media outlets and conferences, most notably the National Press Club, RSA, Velocity, and ABC News. Rinehart has been interviewed and quoted in various publications including the Huffington Post, DarkReading, SecurityWeekly, ISMG and MarketWatch.
Aaron has been expanding the possibilities of chaos engineering in its application to other safety-critical portions of the IT domain notably cybersecurity. He began pioneering the application of security in chaos engineering during his tenure as the Chief Security Architect at the largest private healthcare company in the world, UnitedHealth Group (UHG). While at UHG Rinehart released ChaoSlingr, one of the first open source software releases focused on using chaos engineering in cybersecurity to build more resilient systems. Rinehart recently founded a chaos engineering startup called Verica with Casey Rosenthal from Netflix and is the O’Reilly author on the topic as well as a frequent speaker in the space.