Connections

Adrian Farrel

Old Dog Consulting, UK

Adrian Farrel is an innovator and standards-maker in Internet technologies working within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) where he has participated in the development of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), Generalized MPLS (GMPLS), Path Computation Element (PCE), and various Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies. He served as one of two IETF Routing Area Directors for six years, and now chairs the Layer 2 VPN Service Model (L2SM) working group. He is the co-author of over 70 RFCs, currently serves as the Independent Submissions RFC Editor, and has written, edited, or contributed to seven books on Internet technologies and three books of fairy stories.

Lee Howard

Retevia, USA

Lee Howard led one of the world’s largest IPv6 deployments, and has provided guidance to dozens of organizations on when to buy addresses, use transition technologies, and when to sell addresses.

He co-chaired the IETF’s IPv6 Operations Working Group (v6ops) and the IPv6 Renumbering Working Group (6renum WG), and was a major contributor to the IPv4 Sunsetting Working Group (sunset4).

He has served on the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Board of Trustees of ARIN (the American Registry of Internet Numbers), and the NRO-NC (the Number Resource Organization Numbers Council).

Mohit Sethi

Ericsson, Finland

Mohit Sethi is an Experienced Researcher at Ericsson and a post-doctoral researcher at Aalto University. He has received a Doctor of Science (Tech) degree in Computer Science from Aalto University. He has previously completed his dual MSc. degree in security and mobile computing from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden and Aalto University, Finland with full EU scholarship. Mohit actively contributes to IoT standardization at the IETF and is currently co-chairing the Light-Weight Implementation Guidance (LWIG) as well as the EAP Method Update (EMU) working groups of the IETF. He has received best paper awards at the ACM Ubicomp and IEEE IoT conferences and has more than 20 international patent applications.

Michael Richardson

Sandelman Software Works, Canada

Michael Richardson is an open source and open standards consultant. An autodidact, he wrote mail transfer agents as a teenager, and in the 1990s, found his calling designing and building embedded networking products, in the security sector.  Michael has built multiple IPsec systems, joining the FreeS/WAN team in 2001, and founding Xelerance in 2003. Since 2008 Michael has worked in and chaired the IETF ROLL working group, doing routing protocols for IoT mesh systems.  Michael has authored a number of IoT related RFCs including RFC8366 and RFC7416. Michael currently works on IoT security systems in the 6tisch, ANIMA and ACE WG, specializing in the problem of initial bootstrap trust.

Shraddha Hegde

Juniper, India

Shraddha Hegde has  17+ years of experience in Networking Domain  in the area of IGP, FRR, Segment Routing, MPLS and IP Security. She has vast experience in building and deploying highly scalable data-communications platforms. She is working for Juniper Networks as a Principal Engineer and responsible for IGPs and Segment Routing Technology. She is an active IETF contributor and has 4 RFCs and several Internet drafts. She is passionate about solving unique customer problems with innovative solutions and has more than 20 US patents.

Ramesh Chandra

Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, India

A versatile Telecom professional with 27 years of experience on various strategic, design & engineering and operational profiles. He has been responsible for new product & technology selections, design and Architecture of new platform rollout, driving product improvements for delivering best in class services to customers. 

He has been responsible to develop transition strategy for Jio network from IPv4/DS to IPv6 only and make transition transparent to users. He is passionate in improving customer quality of experience.

Eliot Lear

Cisco Systems, Switzerland

Eliot Lear is a Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems, where he has worked for nearly 20 years and focuses on IoT security,  He has participated in the IETF since 1989, and has served in numerous roles, including as a working group chair and on the Internet Architecture Board.  He is the author of sixteen RFCs.   Eliot has also served in the ITU-D as a rapporteur on a culture of cybersecurity.  He resides in Switzerland with his wife and daughter.

Rajesh A Shinde

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., India

Rajesh A Shinde has a 24 years of Substantial experience dedicated in the Telecom industry, with 16+ Years in Reliance Infocomm (and Reliance Jio Infocomm) as part of R&D, Network Planning and Engineering, Operations, software teams. He is a Telecom veteran who built five Pan-India IP/MPLS networks, participated in SANOG, Cisco Live, and various R&D activities on national level. He has institutionalized best practices in tools and automation while handling various network operations. he holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics (1990-94) from Mumbai University and IIM- Kolkata (Management Course). 

Abhijan Bhattacharyya

TCS, India

Abhijan Bhattacharyya is presently serving as a scientist in Network Embedded Infrastructure Research Area, TCS Research, Tata Consultancy Services, Kolkata, India. He has been serving the industry for 15 years. His current areas of interest are network protocols for IoT, machine intelligence enabled low-latency communication, 5G communication, etc. In the past he has provided technical leadership to several critical projects in India and abroad on implementation of contemporary digital wireless communication protocols for wireless test equipments used by some global leaders in mobile communication. He has several international publications and granted patents. He is also a visiting faculty of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. At present he is playing a lead role in representing his organization in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). He has led the first ever contribution of TCS to IETF Standard in the form of "RFC 7967". He has been a fellow under the NextGen Leadership Program of Internet Society. He has also actively participated in the efforts to spread awareness on IETF in India through initiatives supported by Ministry of Electronics and IT, Govt. of India.

Michael Ackermann

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, USA

Michael Ackermann is a network engineer for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. Board member on various national and international network advisory boards. Particularly active with several IETF Working Groups, including Internet Protocol Performance Measurement (IPPM), and IPv6 Operations (V6OPS). Michael is co-author of RFC8250, Performance and Diagnostic Metrics (PDM). He was a part of the core team planning the IPv6 migration for the Blue Cross companies - the largest health care insurer in the United States. Focus areas include most aspects of large enterprise operation, including network management, server administration, senior level diagnostics, and application/network performance. Michael has been with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan for 35 years. 

Dhruv Dhody

Huawei, India

Dhruv has been working in the networking domain for last 15 years with Huawei Technologies. His current designation is Lead Architect for Network Business. Over the years he has worked hands on L2VPN, VPLS, OSPF, NTP, ALTO, CSPF etc for the Huawei's Routing Platform. He is currently working on research, standards and proof of concepts for various emerging technologies as PCE, Segment Routing (SR) and ACTN. He is an active IETF contributor in the area of Path Computation and Traffic Engineering with 18 RFCs. He has filled 20 patents. He is also serving as the PCE WG secretory at IETF. He is a founding member and secretary for India Internet Engineering Society (IIESoc). 

Siddharth Mathur

Fastah, India

Siddharth is the founder and CEO of Fastah, a company building Google Maps for Traffic, but for 4G LTE speeds in Asian cities. Siddharth has long history with the mobile internet : he started his career building 3GPP-R5 powered streaming products at a Boston startup, and later transitioned to HTML5 web standards and WebKit open source software at Nokia R&D. After relocating to India in 2012 with his family, he has worked on emerging-Asia specific mobile products and services. At Fastah, his crowdsourced 4G LTE mapping platform is emphasizing the underserved problem of mobile internet quality-of-service. Siddharth studied Signal Processing at the University of Arizona, and dabbled in Economics at the Harvard University’s extension school.

Mahendra Singh Negi

Huawei, India

Mahendra Singh Negi is a System Architect for Network Business Line at Huawei Technologies. He has been working in the networking domain for past 9 years on MPLS-TE, PCEP, IGP, SR, SR-TE and SRv6 for Huawei VRP platform. Have co-authored various drafts in IETF PCE group and currently focusing on the SRv6 solutions design and development.

Vinayak Hegde

Zoomcar, India

Vinayak Hegde is currently Chief Technology Officer at Zoomcar. Previously, Vinayak has worked across different domains such as embedded systems, Content Delivery Networks and Ad technology and has more than 18 years of experience. Through his career, Vinayak has worked in a variety of individual contributor and senior technical leadership roles. He has worked at hyper-growth companies such as Speedera (acquired by Akamai) and Inmobi helping them scale 100x+. Vinayak is a well known speaker at various national and international technology conferences.

Ali Sajassi

Cisco, USA

Ali Sajassi is a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems where he has been working on network virtualization and overlay solutions for SP, DC, and Enterprise segments. These solutions include multicast for L2, L3, and IRB overlay networks, distributed virtual PE using DC fabric, service function chaining in SPDC, inter-DC solutions with seamless integration of L2/L3VPN PEs, next gen Metro and aggregation networks for SPs, and virtualized overlay private networks for Enterprises. Some of the areas of his expertise are L2VPN, L3VPN, BGP, Multicast VPN, Network Virtualization Overlay for data centers, and inter-DC technologies and protocol. He has invented numerous technologies and protocols with wide applicability in SP, DC, and Enterprise networks. He invented EVPN and PBB-EVPN and introduced them to networking industry in 2009. Prior to EVPN, he innovated PBB-VPLS, H-VPLS with QinQ access, CFM (IEEE 802.1ag), and co-invented SPB-VID (IEEE 802.1aq) and SPB-ECMP (IEEE 802.1Qbp). He has participated at IETF, IEEE, and ITU standards groups and he has made numerous contributions to these groups in the area of L2 and L3 VPN and Metro Ethernet. Ali has over 90 patents registered to his name. Ali received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and he completed his Ph.D. studies at George Washington University in the area of networking and communications.

Rohit R Ranade

Huawei, India

Rohit is currently serving as the Senior Technical Lead, in the Network Business Line for Huawei India. Over the years he has worked hands on DB architecture, File Systems and NETCONF. He is an active IETF contributor in the NETCONF working group and NETMOD working group. He has co-authored IETF drafts and contributed to other RFC/I-Ds. He is an alumnus of NITK- Surathkal, avid sports enthusiast and a foodie.