Irfan Ghauri

Director of Operations
OpenAir Interface Software Alliance

Irfan is a critical-thinking, diligent business leader who has a reputation of challenging the status quo for innovation and progress. He is a rampart against the dark forces of inertia and fear of change. His tremendously international exposure and diverse educational background and professional experience have helped him develop strategic thinking. Innovation and Entrepreneurship are his key focus.. His current areas of interest and expertise are New Business Models in the changing Telecom arena, and Organizational and Social Change that is coming about due to large scale connectivity and digitalization.

Marc Meunier

Sr. Manager SW Ecosystem Development
Arm

Marc is part of the Software Ecosystem Development team at Arm, managing projects with partners in the field of security and networking.

Douglas Knisely

Principal Engineer
Qualcomm

Doug is a seasoned thought leader in the Wireless Telecommunications Industry and is globally recognized for his experience as a specialist in standardization of radio access technology. Currently Principal Engineer at Qualcomm and Standarization Delegate at several standardization fora representing his organization, he was formerly VP of Technology at Airvana and prior to that a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs. Doug is currently serving as a delegate at the O-RAN Alliance where he is one of the most influential voices encouraging joint efforts towards defining an open Radio Access Network architecture. He brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance especially in standards and all aspects of open source dealing with standardized technology. Doug is board member at the OSA representing QUALCOMM.

Mark Collier

Chief Operating Officer
Open Infrastructure Foundation

Mark has been lucky enough to participate in many disruptive technology shifts, from the introduction of the first GPUs at Dell in the 90s as a product manager, to the digital music/MP3 transition at Musicmatch as Director of Business Development. After Yahoo! acquired Musicmatch, combining the #1 streaming radio service with the #1 digital music app, Mark served as Sr Director, establishing strategic partnerships for one of the first on demand streaming music services. In 2009, Mark joined Rackspace, an early pioneer in cloud computing, as VP of Business Development, focused on building their cloud ecosystem. In 2010, to accelerate the cloud ecosystem's development, Mark co-founded a new open source cloud computing project called OpenStack, in partnership with NASA and 25 other organizations globally. OpenStack quickly became one of the fastest growing open source projects in history. In 2012, Mark co-founded the Open Infrastructure Foundation to manage the growth of the project, where he now serves at the COO. Today, OpenStack is one of the 3 most actively developed open source projects in the world, along with the Linux kernel and Chromium.

Mark is now helping to expand and evolve the Open Infrastructure Foundation’s mission, bringing the unique open collaboration method established by the OpenStack community to many new open source projects across the cloud infrastructure market, including Kata Containers, the Zuul CI/CD platform, the StarlingX edge computing platform, and Airship.

Azhar Sayeed

Senior Director, Technology, Architecture & Strategy
Red Hat

Azhar Sayeed is currently at Red Hat Inc., as a Senior Director driving their Telecom Architectures and solutions with Kubernetes, OpenStack, SDN, NFV and DC Orchestration. Prior to Red Hat, Azhar is a 17 year veteran of Cisco Systems Inc. His last responsibility there was a Sr. Director of Solutions Engineering. Azhar was responsible for developing System Architectures, developing and delivering Cloud based solutions and bringing them to market as whole offers for SPs.

Azhar has also actively contributed to the industry adoption of cutting-edge technologies. He is an active participant and a contributor to the open source community and industry forums such as XGVela, Anuket (formerly OPNFV) etc. His interests are in the area of Cloud Architectures, OpenStack, SDN, Virtualization, Data Center Networking and Mobile Networks.

Azhar is the co-author of a book and has 9 patents in the space of Network protocols and several published papers.

Emily Yousling

Product Manager
Meta Connectivity

Emily is a Product Manager at Meta Connectivity, supporting the open source Magma project. She spent the last 5 years driving product strategy for Google's Loon balloon-powered internet company, including launching a crisis connectivity service in partnership with AT&T. Before that, she worked in business innovation at Google's X R&D Lab, strategic partnerships at Google Singapore, and Morgan Stanley in NYC.