At the ONF member workdays, held September 15-17, 2014, ONF recognized its top contributors and leadership. On behalf of ONF, thanks to everyone for all your hard work!
Outstanding Contributor Awards
Pan Zhang, Beijing Internet Institute (BII)
Outstanding Contributor, Testing Leadership Council and Testing & Interop WG
Pan Zhang has distinguished himself as a member of the Testing Leadership Council (TLC) since inception. He has contributed to all TLC work including the development of the ONF Conformance Test Program policy and procedures, leading the charge for the v1.3 Pilot phase and participating in interlaboratory comparisons in order to uphold a high quality test program and management system. On top of his TLC duties, he also maintains high engagement in the Testing & Interop WG by hosting international plugfests, and contributing to whitepapers.
Guillaume Reffet, UBIqube
Outstanding Contributor, Migration WG
Guillaume has demonstrated a strong sense of initiative and pro-activeness. Despite the time zone difference between France and California, he has been a regular participant at the Migration Working Group’s weekly calls. Guillaume has made valuable contributions to the Migration Tools and Metrics document, where he took ownership of several important areas, including a list of vendor tools for monitoring, configuration & management, and testing & verification. Guillaume has also volunteered several times to help with other various activities.
Jeff Maguire, Freescale
Outstanding Contributor, Layer 4-7
A regular participant in L4-L7 group’s discussions, Jeff brings extensive industry, business and technical experience and knowledge to the group’s discussions. He has contributed well thought-out ideas to drive the effort forward, and provided constructive feedback on the group’s overall efforts and direction. In particular, Jeff was a key contributor to the proposal on a joint proof-of-concept trial with ETSI NFV.
Outstanding Leadership Awards
Michael Orr, Marvell
Outstanding Leadership, CAB
When the Chipmakers Advisory Board was conceived over a year ago, there was a sense that no one knew if this entity would be able to engage with the rest of ONF effectively. After all, these were all “chip people”, not real people like the rest of us! Seriously, We have been gratified and encouraged by the unique insights and contributions of the CAB, and one of the major reasons is the collaborative leadership, good sense, and encouraging style of Michael Orr from Marvell, the first CAB Chair. Under Michael’s direction, the CAB has produced materials that have help to better align the specification development and testing for the OpenFlow® protocol, and together with the FAWG WG, they have provided guidance and industry savvy as we continue to envision more hardware friendly ASIC architectures. Michael has a wisdom, a kindness, and a humility that makes his peers want to do their best work—the kind of leader ONF will always appreciate. Thanks, Michael.
Evelyne Roch, Huawei
Outstanding Leadership, Migration
In addition to being a regular participant in the Migration WG’s discussions, Evelyne has demonstrated strong leadership skills to drive on-time delivery of our group’s milestones, both as an Editor of the Migration Tools and Metrics document and a key technical contributor to various work items. Her ability to quickly produce high-quality content (both text and technical diagrams) as well as her teamwork spirit and knowledge sharing have been a great asset to the Migration Working Group.
Justin Dustzadeh, Huawei
Outstanding Leadership, Migration
Few in our organization have the record of volunteer contributions, industry insight, leadership, and collegiality than the winner of our next award (does it have a name?). Justin Dustzadeh from Huawei has served as the chair of the Migration WG since its inception, arguing persuasively that operators and those deploying SDN solutions need guidance, the sense that ONF cares about doing things right, and wants to provide the industry with a helping hand as they innovate with SDN solutions. Justin and his team have produced helpful and insightful documents, and they have been a force for pushing the industry forward toward seeing more and more real SDN solutions. There is no one who is a more tireless evangelist for ONF than Justin, and this award is but a small way to recognize his broad and influential contributions. Thank you, Justin!
Ben Mack-Crane, Huawei
Outstanding Leadership, Forwarding Abstractions
Ben Mack-Crane is, well, a one-man army. Of course the documents he produces are well structured and clearly written, unambiguous without going overboard on details. But there’s more. Ben comes with a wealth of protocol and standards experience, which has endowed him a with a lot of wisdom for knowing where a spec needs more detail, and where a simple sentence is enough. Ben also knows when to make a bold decision and articulate an approach. Often that will resolve and issue and lead to closure, or it will cause a big argument that will lead to clarity, which will also lead to closure. He’s diligent, tough when he needs to be and flexible when he can be. He can (and does) bail out his chair and vice-chair (perhaps a bit too often) by covering the meeting hosting details.In summary, Ben is a FAWG hero. Plain and simple. Good thing he doesn’t code much or there wouldn’t be much need for a working group….
Pascal Menezes, Microsoft
Outstanding Leadership, Northbound Interfaces (NBI)
Pascal has provided outstanding leadership as a vice-chair of the End User NBI subgroup. Not only has he successfully executed a liaison with the UCIF/IMTC, but under his leadership, the group has delivered a detailed use case and concrete NBI proposal for consideration by ONF. The End User group has also taken the lead on being unwitting guinea pigs for and ONF wide information modeling standard. Pascal leads by example, and we look forward to his group completing their important work over the next few quarters.
Paul Congdon, Tallac
Outstanding Leadership, Wireless & Mobile
Upon the unexpected departure of our previous WG Chair (Serge Manning), Paul stepped into the role of chair and has discharged the duties of chairperson and served to maintain the forward progress of the working group. He has also represented the group at the weekly Chairs meetings and at the recent face-to-face meeting, as well as soliciting input and providing direction to the project team leaders.
Outstanding Technical Contributor Awards
Raghavendra Tadepalli, Wipro Limited
Outstanding Technical Contributor, Northbound Interfaces (NBI)
Raghu is very active in the improving of onf2014.071 (NBI Framework and Architecture). He was involved in most of the discussion of this draft, and updated it.
Shinji Yamashita, Fujitsu
Outstanding Technical Contributor, Optical Transport
Shinji has provided key technical contributions to the proposals for extension of OpenFlow® for optical transport, and has also provided important support to the prototyping of these extensions in the joint OIF/ONF prototype demonstration now in progress.
Eve Varma, Alcatel-Lucent
Outstanding Technical Contributor, Architecture & Framework
Eve was an important voice in the SDN architecture development. Her perspective greatly helped in tying together the treatment of the broad-based SDN problem space. She repeatedly reviewed the work in progress, with thoughtful and constructive comments, and greatly assisted in resolving comments received during the final release process. She especially was very open the feedback received from outside the group and put in dedicated effort to address and revoice the concerns of those who did not personally attend the review meetings.
Ni Hui, Huawei
Outstanding Technical Contributor, Wireless & Mobile
Ni Hui has been a key contributor and reviewer during the entire Mobile Packet Core project phase. The project team is nearing completion of their architecture document and Ni Hui has contributed a large amount of content. He has provided the key procedures for GTP (GPRS Tunneling Protocol) – including simplification to handle GTP control in a gateway handler and (GTP) user plane with minimal impact to Open Flow. Also, Hui is working on prototype implementation to validate the techniques and procedures.
Cathy Zhang, Huawei
Outstanding Technical Contributor, Layer 4-7
Cathy is an active participant in the L4-L7 group’s discussions. She brings an in-depth technical understanding of the issues, and as an active participant in IETF and OpenStack technical discussion forums, is able to articulate the possible impacts of the latest developments in the adjacent technological areas, and how to address them. Cathy is currently leading the group’s effort to develop a technical specifications and architecture document on ONF service chaining.
Outstanding Initiative Awards
Marc LeClerc, NoviFlow
Outstanding Initiative, Market Education Committee
Marc has been a long-time participant in the Market Education Committee, who stepped up to lead the Presentation Library. For those of you who are not aware, the Presentation Library is a repository for official approved ONF content, made available to all ONF members. About a year ago, Marc assumed responsibility for the project team. In spite of the limited number of participants, he oversaw the release of the presentation library on ARO, working with the Marketing Operations team and ARO. Marc has also updated the ONF Presentation Template that we all use, and has recently led the planning/implementation for the Presentation Archive. The Presentation Archive makes available to the entire ONF membership the ONF presentations delivered at our tutorials and workshops. Stay tuned for details. Marc’s has persevered, while helping build and lead an SDN startup in Montreal. Merci beaucoup for your contributions, and felicitations on all of your commitment and service to the ONF and MEC.
Ben Pfaff, VMWare
Outstanding Initiative, Extensibility
In the Extensibility process, the prototyping phase is the part that nobody likes, because putting our idea into actual code is hard work, and few people have time and passion for that. Fortunately for us, for OpenFlow® 1.5, Ben Pfaff is rescuing us. When only a few people are prototyping their own proposals, Ben is just prototyping one proposal after another, and not being afraid to tackle the difficult ones. This is on top of his other contributions to Extensibility, Ben has reviewed and commented on almost every single proposal this year. Unfortunately, we have only one Ben, but that means that he won’t have to share his award…
Nigel Davis, Ciena
Outstanding Initiative, Optical Transport
Nigel has been a major contributor to the work on Optical Transport on information modeling. Beyond this he has also taken the initiative to work with other groups such as Architecture Framework and NBI to define a coordinated approach to information modeling that will help take advantage of pooled knowledge and avoid duplication of work within ONF. For taking the initiative and helping to spread common understanding across ONF, Nigel has my nomination for ONF recognition.
Kam Lam, Alcatel Lucent
Outstanding Initiative, Architecture & Framework
Kam helped greatly in getting the tentative agreement for the architecture WG to coordinate information modeling work across all of ONF. Once agreement was reached, the ball was in the architecture WG’s court to initiate positive steps to organize the work and define deliverables. Kam immediately volunteered, and has been instrumental in establishing an IM sub-project within the architecture WG, defining and documenting objectives and deliverables, reaching out to subject-matter experts and to other working groups, and directly contributing his own technical expertise to the task. He continues to be involved with similar work in OTWG, both in helping with the OT model and in separating tasks for OT and ArchWG focus. Kam has also been an active contributor to the Architecture document.
