September 7, 2016

Congratulations to ONF leaders who were recognized during the ONF Member Workdays, held September 7th-8th, 2016!

Outstanding Initiative

youngYoung Lee (Huawei) – Nominated by  Services Area, Andrew Malis (Huawei)
Young had a vision for performance improvements of geographically distributed SDN-based data centers and cloud applications so that their resource utilization and state can be coordinated and orchestrated with the WAN backbone network. He brought that vision to the ONF and first organized  a breakfast BOF a year ago, and then chaired a full session at the last MWD meeting, and that resulted in new work that’s already produced its first document, TR 528, and has open source code well in progress. Young has shown outstanding initiative in getting this work organized and already producing results.

Dean ChengDean Cheng (Huawei) – Nominated by Carrier Grade SDN Working Group, Weiqiang Cheng and Shahar Steiff
This award recognizes Dean Cheng, who leads the Carrier-Grade SDN use cases document in the Carrier Grade SDN group. Over the past several years, Dean has been a major contributor to the group, participating in countless hours of planning and meetings. The Carrier-Grade SDN use cases document involved more than 10 use cases from 8 different operators. Now it is ready to publish and is very important contribution to ONF from CGSG. Dean has also been working on the Carrier-Grade SDN framework project, which we expect to  publish in a matter of months.

Outstanding Contributor

Tetsuro INUI (NTT) – Nominated by Carrier Grade SDN Working Group, Weiqiang Cheng and Shahar Steiff
Tetsuro-san has taken significant amounts of time in several different kinds of work that supports the Carrier Grade SDN Working Group efforts from the beginnings of the working group. He is one of the editors of the carrier grade SDN use case document and contributed valuable and Influential use cases. He also works as a key reviewer of the carrier grade SDN group charter and other documents. His diligence and support are very valuable to the group.

Timothy Winters (University of New Hampshire, IOL) – Nominated by Testing and Interop Working Group, Yuanwen (Daisy) Sun and Li Chen
Timothy did a superb job organizing the annual AppFest held at UNH-IOL this year, the biggest interoperability event sponsored by the Testing and Interop WG each year. Timothy and his team put a lot of effort into the facilities and people resource planning. They outstandingly-equipped facility and test network saved participants setup time and allowed them to focus more on actual use case testing. We accomplished a lot during 3 days of testing and could not have been nearly so productive without the help from Timothy’s team for configuring the network, testing the machines and recording the results. Timothy is also a regular TIWG participants and has contributed to other activities including conformance and benchmarking. Thanks for the entire UNH-IOL team for delivering such a successfully organized AppFest.

Outstanding Technical Contributor

chris Chris Hartley (Cisco) – Nominated by IMP, Kam LAM and Nigel DAVIS
Chris Hartley brings an enormous wealth of knowledge from his background (originally with Telstra and now Cisco) along with strong information modeling skills and insightful thinking. His early contributions, which guided some critical shaping of the ONF core model (1.0), were indirect via liaised work from TM Forum but over the past year+ he has been contributing and participating directly. He integrated into the team almost immediately on joining and has been a strong supporter and driver of the ongoing work. His current input is focused on advanced thinking around constraints and on dismantling the NE model into its essential aspects.

Hui DingHui Ding (China Academy of Telecommunication Research, MIIT) – Nominated by IMP, Kam LAM and Nigel DAVIS
Hui Ding has been a key contributor to the tooling used for UML-Yang mapping and also more recently to the Pruning and Refactoring tooling. Open source tooling is clearly a major factor in the success of the ONF model approach and was one of the main aspects of the ONF work that persuaded MEF to adopt ONF Core and TAPI. Hui has demonstrated the right approach to agile development of the code base and has provided critical enhancements to capability as required. 

Martin Skorupski (Telefonica) – Nominated by OTWG – Wireless Transport, Giorgio Cazzaniga
Martin’s technical contribution has been outstanding in the last year, essential for having a defined model for microwave transmission systems. Martin has provided valuable technical contributions to the definition, has coordinated the team to produce applications for the second PoC organized by WT team in April 2016, and he is the responsible in the team to produce and maintain the Yang model for microwave. Moreover he is always available for technical consultancy and support to the other team members in an open and cooperative manner.

Outstanding Leadership

DachengDacheng Zhang (Huawei) – Nominated by Services Area, Andrew Malis
While doing double duty as both Chair of the Security project and co-Area Director of the Operator Area, Dacheng has continued to keep the Security group focused on getting its work done, and as a result there will be soon be several new Technical Recommendations coming from the Security project. He has also continued to technically contribute to the security work as well. 

Sandra Scott HaywardSandra Scott-Hayward (Queen’s University Belfast) – Nominated by  Security Working Group, Dacheng Zhang (Huawei)
Sandra has been a driving force behind the work of the ONF Security Group for the past few years. In November 2015, Sandra took up the role of Vice-Chair of the group. She has focused the group to produce relevant technical documents, to engage and liaise with other ONF WGs, and to provide a valuable contribution to the SDN community. In May 2016, Sandra publicized the work of ONF SecWG in an interview with Light Reading. In her role as vice-chair and as project leader of OSSDN Delta, Sandra continues to lead and further the discussion of security in SDN.  She also represented ONF in an outstanding presentation to the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications on “Regulatory Implications of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV)”. When Sandra speaks. people listen, and act.

ONF Fellow

Marc CohnMarc Cohn – Nominated by Dan Pitt and Rick Bauer of ONF
Finally, it gives me great pleasure to present our most eminent award, that of ONF Fellow. This is only the third time we have done so in the history of ONF, once to Jean Tourrilhes and once to Ben Pfaff, both of whom were huge contributors to the OpenFlow protocol specification. Today we are recognizing a different but no less important contribution. Marc Cohn has driven our Market Education Committee and Market Area for nearly five years, and served as chair of MEC and Market Area Director for nearly four of those. Marc motivated the formation of the MEC in the fall of 2011 and we held our first (and memorable) meeting in December 2011, with Isabelle Guis as the initial chair. In less than a year Marc became chair and in the ensuing four years Marc brought vision, passion, and initiative to our entire Market Education Program. Through three different employers, not counting his current one, Marc established our goals for educating the market about SDN’s benefits, both general and specific. He took pen to paper for our first SDN White Paper, which is still quoted and cited, and worked relentlessly to craft and hone our message and define our audience. He spurred the development of numerous vehicles for getting our message out and pulled together teams to execute on many fronts. Perhaps his most impressive legacy is the SDN Market Workshops we have conducted at every major top SDN conference around the world. And when I say “we” I mean “Marc”. Before long these workshops met or exceeded the quality of the best sessions at the conferences themselves; they became a “don’t miss” event. On the weekly PR calls Marc always had the most insightful comments and constructive suggestions, and often took the action items himself. Personally I have known Marc since the late 1980s from the FDDI days. Then in the 1990s, when we both lived out here, our families turned up in the same religious-education program. So when Marc showed up at the beginning of ONF I could not have been more delighted. It has been a true pleasure to work with Marc and he has taught me a lot. I cannot think of anyone more dedicated and hardworking on ONF’s behalf than Marc. Often it seemed like he had two full-time jobs. The reputation we enjoy today, for objectivity, quality, openness, and expertise , we can largely thank Marc for. So please join me in thanking Marc for his timeless contributions and in congratulating him as our newest ONF Fellow.