During the ONF member workdays, held September 8-10, 2015, ONF recognized its top contributors and leadership.
ONF Fellow Award presented to Jean Tourrilhes
Jean chaired the Extensibility Working Group until April of this year and established the rigorous and meticulous process for evolving the OpenFlow protocol specification. For Jean’s unflappable demeanor, his ability to channel talent into productive deliverables, and his lasting impact on ONF and SDN, we are awarding Jean the title of ONF Fellow.
Ping Pan Memorial Award presented to Pascal Menezes
In April this year ONF announced the Ping Pan Memorial Award and it is now my honor to present it for the first time. As a technologist Ping Pan, who passed away in March at the age of 47, was both deep and broad. Many of you are undoubtedly familiar with him in the context of optical networking, his having worked at Infinera since before ONF began. You might not know that he was one of the first ones to raise the question of standardizing the northbound interface, back in July of 2011. Ping always had strong opinions and was passionate about them. But his reasons were both technical and inspirational. So this award is intended for “someone who most embodies Ping’s combination of creative thinking and cheerful persuasion in the advancement of SDN”. I am therefore extremely pleased to present the first Ping Pan Memorial Award to Pascal Menezes, of Microsoft. Pascal has championed the definition, architecture, and coding of the northbound interface for real-time media. This is now project Aspen in OpenSourceSDN.org. Like Ping, Pascal is driven, passionate, creative, technical, and cheerful. He inspires, he makes you *not want* to disagree with him, and he listens when you have an opinion. Importantly, he produces results. Please join me in congratulating Pascal.
Outstanding Leadership Awards
Curt Beckmann, Brocade – Nominated by Yatish Kumar, for his work in Specification:
In my experience with ONF, there are only 4 or 5 individuals who are completely immersed in making ONF successful. They attend all the different meetings, they have an understanding of what the whole organization is up to, and they proactively drive ONF in a better direction.
Curt is at the top of that list. Despite living in France, dealing with time zone and travel handicaps, he is as engaged as always. We are restructuring the Specification area to give him even more oversight and control, because of the results he produces.
Finally, Curt does the right thing for ONF, regardless of Brocade’s commercial strategy. This sets a very important precedent for a multi-vendor organization, where we all work together. Too many other SDOs descend into partisan politics and back-stabbing because they forget this element. Curt’s view of fairness is something we can all learn from and embrace. Which is ultimately very, very important for ONF.
Weiqiang Cheng, China Mobile – Nominated twice, by Judy Zhu, for his work in the Carrier Grade WG/Operator Area, and also by Tina Tsou, for his work in NBI Architecture:
From Judy: Under Weiqiang’s management, the Carrier Grade WG is very active. More and more telecom operators have joined the working group and have contributed their use cases. I really appreciate the contributions that he has made to the Carrier Grade group and the Operator Area. I also believe he can lead the Carrier Grade WG to new successes in the future.
From Tina: Great leading work and professional contributions in several technical discussions. Weiquiang is working as a co-author on many documents in NBI-WG. He is also an active participant in regular NBI interims.
Edna Ganon, MRV, nominated by Judy Zhu for her work in Migration:
In the past several months, as the new chair of the Migration group, Edna has met many difficulties (lack of operator involvement, lack of experts to support the tasks, and big adjustments in the working scope). In order to address those problems, Edna and her team have worked very hard, and they have have worked effectively. Now, the group has finished the Request for Information Template for Migration to SDN. She is a very responsible chair, so I believe in the future Edna will lead the migration group to more remarkable achievements in the Migration and DC-related areas.
Mike Haugh, Ixia – Nominated by Reda Habib and Ben Mack-Crane for his work in Testing and Interoperability:
Mike brings to ONF years of networking and testing experience. His leadership has been demonstrated in many activities: reorganizing the work group for productivity, addressing ONF challenges by organizing meetings with other groups to resolve problems, initiating and leading many efforts to tackle testing challenges. He helped organize and led many testing and interoperability events.
Dave Hood, Ericsson – Nominated by Andy Malis and Nabil Damouny, Services Area:
From Andy: I’m nominating Dave Hood for his technical and managerial leadership that resulted in the publication of the Framework for SDN: Scope and Requirements document in June. In addition, Dave has led the charge in evangelizing ONF’s SDN Architecture throughout the telecom industry, leading to it being used by a number of other industry SDOs, such as the OIF, MEF, BBF, ITU-T, and elsewhere, and the wide recognition that SDN and the ONF have a much wider scope than just OpenFlow.
From Nabil: Dave Hood recently played a strong role in promoting ONF as the home of open SDN, and discussing ONF SDN architecture at the ETSI NFV meeting in late July. I would like to nominate him as a Key Ambassador for ONF. Dave worked diligently trying to align ETSI & ONF views, while highlighting some of the key aspects that need to be addressed.
Ron Milford, InCNTRE – Nominated by Mike Haugh, for his work in Testing and Interoperability:
As the vice-chair of the Testing and Interoperability working group, Ron led the efforts for the creation, review and approval of the OpenFlow v1.3 switch conformance specification. His leadership through weekly meetings, member workdays and plug-fest events drove this specification to completion. Ron also led the efforts at the InCNTRE lab, an ONF approved lab, to test conformance frameworks, vendor switches and develop the OF-Test suite.
Ron has just accepted a new role at Indiana University and has stepped down as vice-chair. This is a significant loss to ONF since he has been one of the single largest contributors to the T&I work group.
Sriram Natarajan, Deutsche Telekom – Nominated by Dacheng Zhang for his work in Security:
Sriram has been part of the security group from the very beginning. Since then, he has been engaged in all of the important tasks of the security group and has made significant contributions. When the security project was founded, he was assigned as the vice chair because of his reputation and influence in the group. After that, Sriram cooperated with other leaders of the security group to found the Florence project and he exerted a huge effort in promoting this work. Specifically, he specified and implemented most of the testing cases. We would like to nominate him and expect he will lead the group to many exciting achievements in the future.
Outstanding Contributor Awards
Sergio Belotti, Alcatel-Lucent – Nominated by Lyndon Ong and Karthik Sethuraman for his work in Optical Transport:
Sergio has been very active in the Transport API project from its inception. He made important contributions to path-computation scenarios that have aided in ensuring the APIs are sufficiently complete for real-world applications. His detailed analysis and inputs to the proposed Transport API requirements and the information model have led to refinements and clarifications of the model and related concepts. Specifically, we would like to acknowledge his contributions to the Path Computation APIs and and to furthering the effort towards the first release of APIs.
Fengkai Li, Huawei – Nominated by Tina Tsou for his work in NBI Architecture:
Fengkai Li has been very involved in the activities of the NBI Architecture group and he is an active contributor to the NBI architecture document. Fengkai’s main contributions are User-Centric NaaS Service information model and example APIs, User-Experience Monitoring information and example APIs, Inter-Domain topology information and example APIs. Moreover, Fengkai set up an open source project TELLURIDE in the OSSDN community and Fengkai is the chair of the project. TELLURIDE is the open source implementation of the standard API document contributions in the NBI Arch group for the E2E WAN scenario. With real implementation and open source coding, the process of moving standards into real deployments will be greatly accelerated thanks to Fengkai’s help.
Shahar Steiff, PCCW Global – Nominated by Weiqiang Cheng for his work in Carrier Grade SDN:
Shahar contributed key parts of the carrier grade SDN framework document. Shahar also provided east-west API application requirements and use cases.
Outstanding Technical Contributor Awards
Spence Jackson, PMC-Sierra – Nominated by Lyndon Ong and Karthik Sethuraman for his work in Optical Transport:
Spence provided a significant technical contribution proposing an innovative solution to support optical transport requirements for OAM monitoring and protection using the Autonomous Function concept. Spence’s contributions helped propel the work of the group from broad discussions to a clearer framework for potential extensions to OpenFlow for optical transport OAM monitoring and protection.
Radek Krejčí – Nominated by Anantha Ramaiah and Deepak Bansal for his work in Configuration and Management:
Radek was the lead developer for Project Durango. Project Durango is about providing an open source implementation of OF-Config for OVS. Radek not only completed the work ahead of time, but was also very active in providing support and documentation. This is a very good example of project execution and a significant milestone for Configuration and Management.
Kam Lam, Alcatel Lucent – Nominated by Nigel Davis for his work in Information Modeling:
Kam brings immense experience to ONF. He works tirelessly in his leadership roles in ONF and especially in his efforts to promote the work of the ONF teams and to propagate that work into the other key technical communities of the industry such as IETF and ITU-T. Recently, Kam has completed the development of documentation in ITU-T that captures the ONF Information model aligning fully with the work in ONF. This went under the heading of G.gim but is now formally numbered ITU-T G.7711 with the aim of driving this to be the way ITU-T consider the modeling of networking for the purpose of Management-Control. One of the fundamental purposes of our work is to reduce unnecessary variety in the industry, variety that causes cost not gain, and to promote convergence. Kam is a critical champion of this cause and a vital member of ONF. Well done, Kam!
Kingshuk Mandal, Ixia – Nominated by Mike Haugh for his work in Testing and Interoperability:
Kingshuk has been a strong technical contributor to Testing and Interoperability over the past several years. Last year he stepped up to lead the efforts for the OpenFlow controller benchmarking specification. The specification is now in a final draft and is expected to be approved and published in Q3. It consists of ten tests and is expected to be the first benchmarking specification approved, which is a significant accomplishment for the ONF.
Eric Wu, Huawei – Nominated by Tina Tsou for his work in NBI Architecture:
Eric was a very active participant in deep discussions in regular NBI interims. He made outstanding contributions to the fine-grained core API in NBI-WG. Eric is well connected with people and open-minded when cooperation is necessary, which is a great help for solving real requirements and standardization.
Outstanding Initiative Awards
Italo Busi, Huawei – Nominated by Lyndon Ong and Karthik Sethuraman for his work in Optical Transport:
Italo has been very active in the Transport API project from its inception. He has contributed use case scenarios and concrete examples that have aided in keeping the focus on practical usage of the APIs and took the initiative to lead discussions on open source implementation. His detailed analysis and inputs to the proposed Transport API requirements and the information model have led to refinements and clarifications of the model and in resolving key issues. Specifically, we would like to acknowledge his contributions to the Topology APIs and to his work towards the first release of the APIs.
Chen Li, China Mobile – Nominated by Weiqiang Cheng for his work in Carrier Grade SDN:
Chen Li was a key person in Carrier Grade, he organized several BOFs, which set up the foundation of the group. He is also a highly valued individual who contributed greatly to the charter and framework of the CGSG, and he also contributed several key use cases to the group.
Celebrating 5 years of Board Leadership
Recognizing Urs Hölzle (Google):
ONF’s incorporation papers were filed on June 22, 2010. Two days later on June 24, 2010, a board of directors was appointed and that board elected a board chair, Urs Hölzle. Now, five years and three months later, Urs is still the ONF chair. Urs provides strategic thought leadership for the organization. He is especially adept at resolving issues quickly by seeing directly to their heart. To honor Urs’s five-plus years (and counting) of board leadership I am pleased to present to the ONF chair the…ONF chair. Urs, thank you for your dedicated service and we look forward to more of the same.
Recognizing Nick McKeown (Stanford):
Nick McKeown the board’s incumbent activist, is the engine behind not only ONF but also the SDN movement we all know and love. His students created the major foundational elements of architectural constructs, protocols, prototypes, tools, proofs of concept, and even companies. In recognition of Nick’s five plus years of board service as well as his role as the grandfather of SDN that really rocks, I am pleased to present Nick with…the ONF rocking chair.
Recognizing Peter Feil (Deutsche Telekom) for 4 years of Board Leadership:
Studious, ever-present, diligent, the one who unfailingly provides feedback when asked for, Peter has served as Deutsche Telekom’s alternate director since May 2011. He doesn’t miss a meeting, and when he speaks, everyone quiets down to hear what he has to say. Peter has graciously shown me his lab in Berlin, of which he is rightly proud. He has represented ONF at executive speaking sessions when I could not. Peter is a guy you can trust with your message. We offer him our heartfelt thanks for his four-plus years of relentlessly dedicated board service throughout our life as a publicly launched organization.
Certificates of Appreciation
ONF recognized of Srinivas Vegesna and Gil Bloch with certificates of appreciation. Following last year’s successful launch in Ireland, this year ONF conducted its second and third regional, one-day, community-building symposia, in India in January and Israel in April. Each one was sensationally successful, with excellent attendance, fascinating talks, amazing local innovation, and high energy. Each one was also masterminded by an individual who took the initiative to pull the effort together.
In Bangalore, Srinivas Vegesna of Criterion Networks landed the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce as our local co-host, got us a great venue, commandeered outstanding speakers, and produced some always delicious Indian food. He organized tutorials and an expo, and all went smoothly. Srinivas has already planned the next one for January 31-February 1.
In Tel Aviv, Gil Bloch of Mellanox took the reins and, despite everyone’s saying it could not be done, pulled off an insanely great symposium. Our co-host was the Neptune Consortium for Network Programming and the lineup of speakers was like a who’s who out of the book Startup Nation, which explains why Israel has more startups per capita than any other place in the world, by a wide margin. Set right on the shores of the Mediterranean, the conference lost no one to the lure of the surf for a very long and stimulating day. They said it couldn’t be done, but Gil did it.
