Bithika Khargharia From ONF Member Company Extreme Networks Appointed To Critical Role at ONF
PALO ALTO, Calif., May 12, 2015 – The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced the appointment of Dr. Bithika Khargharia as the director of product and community management. Bithika’s service to ONF is being provided by Extreme Networks, an ONF member company where Bithika is a principal architect of solutions and innovation. She will continue in her role at Extreme Networks while also taking on her new responsibilities with ONF.
“Bithika’s nearly 20 years of networking industry experience, including product development, product management, open source software, and community management, will be invaluable in driving our open source software initiatives,” said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). “It is critical for ONF to have its leadership grounded in engineering and product development while being tied to the real-world challenges faced by network operators. We are pleased to be working closely with Extreme Networks to leverage a seasoned developer like Bithika for ONF’s mission to accelerate SDN adoption.”
In her new role as director of product and community management, Bithika joins the Software Leadership Council (SLC), a group of industry luminaries with experience in open source software, software development and community development. The SLC manages, maintains and oversees the ONF’s efforts in open source developments as well as the development of new ONF programs, events and activities to drive the creation and adoption of open source software for SDN.
“Extreme Networks is extending expertise to be leveraged by ONF as we are motivated to assist in changing our industry to provide customers with the framework necessary to drive their own networking destiny,” said Bithika. “I am honored to take on the role of director of product and community management for ONF’s open source software initiatives as we will continue to see open source software play a key role in developing de facto standards and fostering multi-vendor interoperability.”
Bithika earned her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Arizona where she developed a novel adaptive interleaving technique for data center server memory that demonstrated a 44.3 percent improvement on energy-efficiency over existing technologies. Since then, Bithika has gained two decades of technology research and development experience that has focused on energy-efficient computing; server, network and large-scale data center architectures; distributed (grid) computing; autonomic computing; and SDN, all of which will be invaluable to ONF’s future success.
About ONF
Launched in 2011 by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo!, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a growing nonprofit organization with more than 140 members whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of open SDN. ONF promotes open SDN and OpenFlow® technologies and standards while fostering a vibrant market of products, services, applications, customers, and users. For further details visit the ONF website at: https://opennetworking.org.
