Senior executives from Blue Planet, Cisco, Fortinet, Netcracker, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Spirent, Versa Networks, and VMware are tapped to bring critical technology perspectives to MEF.
The MEF technology advisory board (TAB) augments the leadership and expertise of MEF’s world-class board of directors and brings important technology provider perspectives to the strategic work of MEF.
MEF established the TAB to incorporate input from all key stakeholder communities—cloud, network, and technology providers—with a goal of helping the ecosystem more quickly develop and bring to market leading-edge services and solutions. TAB members will serve a one-year term and were selected for their extensive industry leadership in MEF’s strategic areas—cybersecurity, business automation, SD-WAN, underlay connectivity, and edge computing. The TAB initially will focus on increasing efficiencies and opportunities within the member ecosystem and supply chain more quickly to generate revenue.
The technology advisory board consists of ten industry luminaries:
- Kelly Ahuja, chief executive officer, Versa Networks
- Kailem Anderson, vice president of portfolio and engineering, Blue Planet
- Ari Banerjee, senior vice president strategy, Netcracker
- Rohit Batra, vice president and head of product, telecommunications, media & technology, ServiceNow
- Craig Connors, vice president and general manager, SASE Business, VMware
- David Fan, vice president and general manager, communications industry, Salesforce
- Sunil Khandekar, former founder & CEO of Nuage Networks, Independent
- Dave Larson, chief technology officer and general manager, Cloud & IP, Spirent
- John Maddison, executive vice president of products and chief marketing officer, Fortinet
- JL Valente, vice president, product management, enterprise routing and SD-WAN, Cisco
“We are thrilled to welcome this inspiring group of executives with invaluable leadership and knowledge to MEF’s new technology advisory board,” said Nan Chen, president, MEF. “For more than 20 years, MEF has been successful because of the extensive collaboration by its members and board leadership to help solve shared business challenges. Bringing in the technology perspective of the TAB further strengthens the industry collaboration that drives enterprise digital transformation through a better-together ecosystem of service, cloud, and technology providers.”
“The formation and launch of the TAB is an important step in meeting the needs of the entire digital services ecosystem,” said Pascal Menezes, chief technology officer, MEF. “Honing MEF’s strategy with guidance from the vendor community about the way technologies enable services and products to be delivered and managed will enable us to advance fully automated transformational offerings with the goal of helping our members realize revenue faster.”