2024 TSC Member Elections

2024 Qualified TSC Voters & Companies Page
An active contributor is defined as any member of the Nephio community who has made twenty or more measurable contributions as assessed by the TSC during the previous twelve month period, inclusive of code merges, code reviews performed, presentations, technical documentation of software functions, wiki page edits, or JIRA activities.
In addition the decision was made to allow a company to appoint a candidate in the event that no single individual has met the 20 contribution threshold if there are contribution in aggregate by employees of that organization to meet the 20 contribution threshold. Candidates running under this provision should note "appointed" below their company name.

Nomination Period: open: Oct 24, 2024 close Nov 14, 2024 11:59 pm Pacific Time

Election Period: open: Nov 21, 2024 close Nov 28, 2024 11:59 pm Pacific Time

	Name (use @ tag) + Headshot (100px x 100px)	Company	Short Bio	Candidate Statement

	Name (use @ tag) + Headshot (100px x 100px)	Company	Short Bio	Candidate Statement
1	Raj Panchapakesan @Raj	AccuKnox Inc	As the Global Head of Partner Ecosystem and Business Development at AccuKnox, I lead the creation and execution of innovative strategies to grow our cloud-native security platform and solutions across diverse markets and segments and Developer relations. With over 25 years of experience in technology-driven global enterprises, I have a proven track record of establishing and managing Strategic alliances, Business Development, and collaboration with cross-functional teams like Product, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Solution Engineering, Legal, etc. for product integrations, joint solutions, and GTM activities. Skills: Global Strategy · Strategic Relationships · Global Alliances · GSI · Teamwork · Partner Relationship Management · Global Business Development · Executive Management · Strategic Partnerships, Open Source Strategy and representation in Open source Consortiums	As a governing board member of CNCF and CD Foundation for three years, I contributed to developing and growing the cloud-native computing industry. I helped shape these influential open-source foundations' vision, direction, and governance during my tenure. My passion is to empower businesses and organizations to understand open-source tools and ecosystems, build their products, and achieve their goals with strategic partnerships, cutting-edge technology, and industry best practices. In Project Nephio, I aim to contribute by helping make it the de facto standard for K8S-based cloud-native network automation in different industries and LFN projects. I started the SIG Security, and Accuknox is the core contributor and maintainer of the SIG, in addition to contributing to Project Nephio. I want to represent Project Nephio in the LF Networking Strategic Planning Committee and Marketing Advisory Council, build relationships, and promote Nephio with other LF and open-source projects and various industry verticals.
2	Avinash Bhat	Samsung Electronics Co Ltd	I have 24 years of experience in telecom industry and had the opportunity to work in many diverse and cross functional teams. I have front ended many pre-sales discussions with various global operators and have played impactful roles in securing key business wins. Apart from this I have led many R&D Product development and currently leading virtualized RAN product development. Apart from this as part of the Global Open-Source Group, I am leading the Telecom related Open-Source Initiatives. I have played impact full role in O-RAN SC and represent Samsung in TOC, where we introduced a new project to bring in an AI/ML Framework that can work with non-RT RIC and Near-RT RIC based on the usecse. In Nephio, I have joined TSC around Apr’24 time frame but from the last year or so, I am driving the Nephio contribution strategy viz., O-RAN SC Support, Service Assurance, Helm to Operator tool etc. With my unique cross functional experience, I consider myself to be Telecom Industry expert with deep insight into the technology and market.	Samsung Electronics has been actively contributing to the Nephio Community. We have assigned many resources to the community and in the current eligible list 5/37 are from Samsung Electronics. I have internally nominated to represent Samsung Electronics in Nephio TSC and will internally coordinate the contribution strategy. I strongly believe in the power of open source and the role it will play in the telecom industry. In my opinion, we need to focus on Operators Business Outcomes and look at helping operators in areas such as improving customer experience, operational efficiencies etc. With a Cloud native based architecture, we can bring many IT capabilities like CI/CD, Scaling etc to Telecom. For orchestration and overall management, we should look at actively adopting open source-based solutions . Nephio has important role towards this journey, and I look forward to enabling features towards the same.
3	@Ciaran Johnston	Ericsson	Ciaran is a senior expert in operations support systems (OSS) and programmable network architecture, and he is the chief architect of Ericsson’s Network Management portfolio. He has over 20 years’ experience in software development and architecture in the OSS domain, driving the evolution of management paradigms through multiple generations of networks. In the past Ciaran has represented Ericsson on the ONAP TSC and architecture sub-committee. He is a strong believer in the use of open source software to progress industry alignment, drive standardization, improve openness and simplify processes in telecommunications network management.	Ericsson is an active participant in the Nephio community, with significant contributions to features, robustness and characteristics over the last two releases. I have worked as a TSC member and community participant since 2023, working on modelling in the Network Architecture SIG, contributing to user story definition and development, and documenting the Nephio architecture. I have a strong belief in industry collaboration on open source projects to improve overall the quality, security and interoperability of the systems we build. I believe the Nephio project has significant potential to contribute to this through the development of software solutions to materially improve network operations. I would like to see broader synergies between telco, the IT sector, and standardization to improve interoperability and enable innovation, and I believe the Nephio community can be an enabler of this. I look forward to continuing to contribute to Nephio and participate in the community in 2025.
4	@Timo Perala	Nokia	I'm Head of Open Source Network and Service Automation at Nokia, where I'm responsible for driving Nokia’s overall engagement in Nephio. In this role I work across multiple industry organisations, both open source and standardisation, engage with both customers and other industry players, as well as internally across all Nokia businesses. I have over 30 years of experience in network systems, ranging from multivendor interoperability verification, systems architecture research, new business incubation, to network and operations systems standardisation and open source. I've been with Nephio from the very beginning and I'm currently Nokia’s Nephio TSC representative. In addition to Nephio, I serve at LF Europe Advisory Board, and at Eclipse Open Regulatory Compliance Steering Committee.	Nokia is among the top contributors to Nephio with the intention to maintain strong involvement. I am excited of the opportunity to help Nephio to become successful in the industry and to accelerate its adoption. To this end, I’m looking forward to making it easier for new people to get involved in the Nephio community especially through improved documentation. Further, I intend to continue to help fostering fruitful industry collaboration between Nephio and other relevant open source communities and standards organisations. I’m looking forward to continue help Nephio be present in industry events, e.g. Telco Days in KubeCon, and to help organising quality Nephio events, be they e.g. LFN D&TFs or Nephio Summits.
5	@Sagar Arora	OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA)	Sagar is currently working at OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA). At OSA he is responsible for DevOps, Data Center management, and Radio equipment management. He takes care of packing OAI network functions (RAN and Core) and deploying them on different distributions of Kubernetes. He has experience working with ONAP and OSM. In the past, he has worked with OpenStack, LXC/LXD, and Juju. He holds a PhD in Telecommunication from Sorbonne University (Thesis title: Cloud Native Network Slice Orchestration in 5G and Beyond). His thesis focused on the orchestration of network functions.	Started contributing to Nephio to apply my experience of NF deployment and management. During my PhD studies, I have worked with different open-source Core and RAN network functions, and different Orchestrators (ONAP, OSM, and different European project proposed orchestrators). I would like to bring this experience and knowledge to Nephio. Contributions to Nephio Created deployment and networking blueprint for R2 Created operators and packages for OAI Core network functions using an alternative of Go Kubebuilder (Python Kopf) Contributed to NF configuration management for R2 Contributed to O-RAN NF Deployment and termination via SMO user story for R4 and beyond
6	Balaji Varadaraju	Red Hat	Working in the Telco engineering in Red Hat. Current TSC member and chair of SIG release. Has been committer and TSC member of open day light as well in the past. Active contributions to all SIGs .	Contributions to the roadmap and architecture. Synergy with O-RAN Contributions to all the SIGs AI use cases for Telco orchestration
7	Sana Tariq	TELUS, Canada	Sana Tariq is a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Fulbright alum, brings 20 years of telecom expertise. As TELUS's Principal Architect, shaping 5G and O-RAN automation architecture. A pioneer in cloud-native adoption through DevOps and open source, she leads initiatives with NGMN, LFN, and North American universities. Sana co-founded TELUS OSPO and Project Nephio. Her recognition as Nephio's top contributor award reflects her dedication to driving change in the industry and open source within TELUS. I have been serving Nephio community as TSC vice Chair and SIG Architecture Chair for the last 2 years.	I have been passionate about Nephio’s vision and adoption across industry since inception. Working in Service Orchestration space for the past 8+ years I understand the problems with previous opensource projects, standards, existing industry solutions and looking to bridge the gap of telecom, enterprise and web-scale world through Nephio. At this stage I would like to do the following Increase Nephio active participations through creating opportunities within enterprise, start-ups and academia’s involvement Ensure TSC members share a voice in shaping SIGs strategy and Nephio’s roadmap/direction Continue to align Nephio’s vision with O-RAN, CAMARA, Sylva and broader opensource ecosystem Drive AI adoption for Nephio at various levels bring synergies with LFN’s AI initiatives.
8	Vishal Varvate	Capgemini India	AS Capgemini’s Technical Architect, Vishal is responsible for leading the open-source contribution in Telco communities and align the work with internal R&D engineers. He is a Certified Kubernetes Administrative Professional and have contributed to Nephio since the starting. He has experience working with ONAP and O-RAN-SC community and he is an active contributor of OSC community.	I am passionate about the Nephio project because of its potential to reshape the way networks are deployed, managed, and scaled, and I believe that my technical expertise and experience in cloud-native architectures make me a strong candidate to contribute to its continued success. As moving forward, I would like to perform the following activities. Nephio compliance Capgemini’s RAN solution. Continue O-RAN contribution in R4 and start active contribution in GenAI group. Increase Capgemini’s active contribution in Nephio by involving more R&D engineers.
9	Eric Debeau @Eric Debeau	Orange	Eric is leading an automation team within Orange Innovation. He has a solid 25 years of experience in the telecommunications sector, with a particular focus on the adoption of IT and cloud technologies for networks. Through his extensive experience as a network architect and in platform development (IMS/VoIP, network API), he is recognized as a member of the Orange Expert Community, which is responsible for future network evolutions. He is currently leading a team focused on cloud-native automation, leveraging GitOps approaches. Eric is also a TSC Member for Orange and has represented the company on the ONAP TSC, presenting at various events such as LFN D&T and ONES. Orange is a founding member of Nephio and is strongly committed to driving the ecosystem to embrace cloud-native automation (Sylva, NGMN Cloud Manifesto).	Orange is a Nephio founding member. Orange is strongly involved to drive ecosystem to embrace cloud native automation (Sylva, NGMN Cloud Manifesto). Contributions to Nephio Contributions to the roadmap and architecture. Feedbacks from Orange Synergy with Sylva AI use cases
10	Bernard Tsai	Deutsche Telekom	Bernard Tsai is one of the Lead Architects of Deutsche Telekom with primary focus on Cloud Technologies and Lifecycle Automation. He has over 25 years of experience in the telecom industry in which he has designed and established various platforms and solutions ranging from a platform for the management of enterprise customer solutions, a self-service customer portal, workflow tooling for mass rollouts of network devices, first telco cloud platforms and various orchestration solutions for network functions. He has vast knowledge in the area of software development and operations and in addition and has headed the strategy department of the Systems Integration business unit. He is currently developing in the context of Deutsche Telekom's "ReImagine the Network" the architecture for the future network production models. Bernard Tsai has been with Nephio from the very beginning and is currently Deutsche Telekom’s Nephio TSC representative.	Simplification is key! Nephio has the potential to drastically ease the way software network functions can be operated in the future. It could allow telecom operators to declaratively and consistently describe the desired target state of network solutions, cloud infrastructures and potentially also the corresponding required network infrastructures. Adoption is an issue and therefore following questions need to be addressed in order for Nephio to be successful: How can we simplify configuration management and establish best practices for complex network solutions, so that telco operators can easily setup the corresponding CI/CD pipelines requiring only minimal support of the vendors of the network solutions? How can we simplify the management of the dependencies between software network solutions and cloud and network infrastructures and establish best practices which streamline the way dependency information is captured and processed? How can we seamlessly integrate configuration and deployment management with service assurance to support full scale closed-loop automation and establish best practices which streamline how to configuration information is fed to service assurance and vice-versa describe which kind of Nephio related policies can be triggered via service assurance? How can we enhance Nephio's rule-based operational procedures with the help machine learning and AI models, so that we can maintain end-to-end control over complex network solutions but at the same time make best use of all available resources and optimize service quality?
11	Kandan Kathirvel	Google Cloud	Kandan is currently the Head of Product for Google Distributed Cloud Platform and Telco Automation at Google Cloud. He is responsible for driving the development and delivery of innovative cloud products in Edge, Data, AI/ML, and Cloud-native automation to help enterprises and telecommunications companies transform their businesses. Kandan has over 20 years of experience in product innovation, building products from scratch, and driving their adoption. He is a strong advocate for open-source software-based products and has founded and led many open-source projects and associated products for mass adoption. He founded and chaired Nephio from its inception.	It's wonderful to witness Nephio's success and the continued enthusiasm of the community. I'm eager to see this community expand further and Nephio's adoption grow. It's my pleasure to serve on the TSC and contribute to Nephio's ongoing success.
12	Hunor Demeter	VMWare by Broadcom	Hunor Demeter is a technical product manager in VMware by Broadcom, Telco Cloud Automation (TCA). In his current role, Hunor is responsible for network function automation, implementing standards (ETSI NFV, TMF, O-RAN), introducing GitOps network functions, dynamic infrastructure provisioning for network functions and represents VMware by Broadcom in Nephio.	Nephio has a great potential to become the future automation engine in telecommunication and beyond. Let's make its vision become code.