Keynote: An Open Approach: Virtualizing the CO for Mobile Services - Heather Kirksey, Vice President, Ecosystem & Community, The Linux Foundation; Qiao Fu, Project Manager, China Mobile; Azhar Sayeed & Hanen Garcia, Red Hat With the latest developments in orchestration tools and SDN controllers, inbuilt capabilities for a virtualized central office are now available to create solutions that support the delivery of residential, business and mobile services. Building on the Virtual Central Office concept debuted last year at the OPNFV Summit in Beijing that demonstrated both residential and enterprise services, the VCO Demo 2.0 has evolved to mobile services by focusing on the implementation of vRAN (virtual radio access network) as well as the virtualized mobile packet core elements (vEPC) which represent a minimum viable mobile access network configuration. The demo will highlight the collaborative power of open source communities to innovate and collaborate around one of the industry’s most pressing use cases. A portfolio of demo assets will be made available to the community to help replicate the demo in their own environments. About QIAO FU Qiao Fu is a project manager at China Mobile Research Institute. She obtained her Master’s degree from the Dept.of Electronic and Engineering at Tsinghua University in 2013. She joined China Mobile after graduation and is currently working on network technology research. Qiao Fu is now leading the internal team for future network CI/CD and edge cloud research inside China Mobile, and is responsible for the nation-wide future network experiments. Qiao Fu is also engaged in the OPNFV community since its establishment. She is now the TSC member for OPNFV, and PTLs for the High Availability project and the edge cloud porject. She is also working on the C&C; committee and End User Advisory Group in OPNFV. About Hanen Garcia Hanen is the Global Telco Solutions Manager at Red Hat, with more than 15 years of experience in the telecommunications industry, building complex networks solutions and value-added services for large telecom operators in Europe, his current role is to support telecom operators during their networks transformation journey. Before joining Red Hat, Hanen worked at Ericsson as innovation specialist designing cutting-edge IoT solutions for mobile networks. Hanen holds an M.Eng. in Innovation Management from the ÉTS in Canada and an M.Eng. in Telecommunications from Polytech in France. About Heather Kirksey Heather Kirksey works with the community to advance the adoption and implementation of open source NFV platforms. Before joining The Linux Foundation, she led strategic technology alliances for MongoDB. Earlier in her career she held various leadership positions in the telecom industry, including running a partner program for CPE, doing solutions marketing for the IP division at Alcatel-Lucent, and working in business development and numerous standards activities. While at Broadband Forum she helped create and launch TR-069; served as BroadbandHome Technical Working Group Chair; served on the Board; and oversaw collaborative activities with ATIS, 3GPP, OSGi, ITU-T, OMA, IETF, Small Cell Forum, UPnP Forum, Home Gateway Initiative, and other groups. Heather received her master’s degree in English literature from the University of Texas, Austin. About Azhar Sayeed Azhar Sayeed is currently at Red Hat Inc., as a Chief Architect driving their Service Provider Architectures and solutions with Openstack, Kubernetes, 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, and Cloud based solutions. Azhar has also actively contributed to the industry adoption of cutting edge technologies. He is an active participant and a contributor to industry forums and standards bodies. His interests are in the area of Cloud Architectures, Openstack, Kubernetes, SDN, virtualization, Data Center Networking and Mobile Networks. Azhar is the co-author of a book “MPLS and Next-Generation Networks: Foundations for NGN and Enterprise Virtualization” and has 9 patents in the space of Network protocols and several published papers.
