Conference Advisory Board

Charles C. Byers
Technical Leader and Platform Architect
digital Media System's Business Unit
Cisco

Charles C. Byers is a Technical Leader and Platform Architect with Cisco's Digital Media System's Business Unit. He works on the architecture and implementation of high definition video and signal processing equipment for telepresence, multimedia, and digital signage applications.

Before joining Cisco Systems, he was a Bell Labs Fellow at Alcatel-Lucent. During his 22 years in the telecommunications networking industry, he has made significant contributions in areas like voice switching, broadband access, converged networks, VoIP, multimedia, and platforms. He has also been a leader in several standards bodies, including serving as a founding member of PICMG's AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC, and MicroTCA subcommittees, and on the SCOPE Alliance.

Mr. Byers received his B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He holds 42 US patents.

Brian Carr
Strategic Marketing Manager
Emerson Network Power Embedded Computing

Brian Carr is a Strategic Marketing Manager for the Embedded Computing business of Emerson Network Power, with a particular focus on communications servers and building blocks based on open standards such as AdvancedTCA, Carrier Grade Linux and Service Availability Forum. Brian brings together customer and application trends with next-generation technology advances to guide the company’s strategic ATCA roadmap.

Carr joined Emerson with its acquisition of Motorola’s Embedded Computing Group in January 2008. His 21 years experience in the telecom industry began in R&D at BT Labs, where he helped develop a network embedded voice services platform and was technical lead on several related application deployments.

Carr holds masters degrees in Engineering from Cambridge University and in Information Technology from Essex University.

Will Chu
VP of Marketing & Business Development
CorEdge Networks

Will Chu is the VP Marketing & Business Development of CorEdge Networks, a leading developer of AdvancedTCA, MicroTCA, AdvancedMC, and IPMI products, and he helped to start the company in 2004 while he was a principal at Signal Lake Ventures.

At Signal Lake Ventures he focused on early stage venture capital investments since 2001. Prior to that, he held various technical and managerial positions at Fidelity Investments, Texas Instruments, ITU Ventures, and a number of startups.

Will holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and graduate and undergraduate Electrical Engineering degrees from Tufts University.

Jim Lawrence
Chief Software Standards Officer
Enea

Jim has been a leader in the communications industry for over 25 years. During those years he has pioneered many telecom technologies and solutions for Motorola, Intel, and OpenClovis. Currently Jim is serving Enea as Chief Software Standards Officer where he is applying 10 years of standards experience to driving next generation standards based software platforms.

Jim is a member of the Service Availability Forum where he serves as Member Relations Officer. In addition, Jim is currently co chair of the Middleware Work Group within the SCOPE-Alliance, and contributing to the Manageability Task Force within the Communications Platform Trade Alliance.

He has a Masters in Program Management from George Washington University and a BSEE from University of Maryland.

RJ McLaren
Product Manager - Systems
Pentair Electronic Packaging - Schroff

RJ McLaren is the Systems Product Manager for Schroff, a division of Pentair, and has 7 years of experience in the electronic manufacturing industry. RJ has worked as an Application Engineer, Program Manager, Market Manager, and in Project Engineering roles for standards based equipment with current focus on ATCA and MicroTCA products. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration from NNU.

"The AdvancedTCA Summit has been the premier event for system integrators to learn how they can use AdvancedTCA to develop their next generation products and see the latest product innovations all in one place. Schroff continues to invest strongly in developing next generation AdvancedTCA equipment for use in Telecom and other market segments. We continue to see a high level of interest and adoption of ATCA with customers and continued growth in the Market. With the addition of MicroTCA, integrators have new options to utilize AdvancedMCs which is used in both AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA. This has significantly increased the overall interest in these products due to their broad application usage."

Ian MacMillan
Senior Product Marketing Manager
Interphase Corporation

Ian MacMillan is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Interphase Corporation responsible for the ATCA / AMC Intelligent Packet Processing product lines. Ian has a broad telecommunications background spanning more than 15 years having worked for a number of large telecommunications equipment manufacturers such as Nortel Networks and Mitel Corporation as well as large telecommunications carriers such as SBC (now ATT) and MCI (now Verizon).

Ian has worked with emerging technologies covering all sectors of telecommunications including voice, data, and wireless and holds two US patents including one for IP to PSTN Gateways. Ian has been a frequent speaker at telecom industry events around the world. He holds a BASc in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

"This is the fourth year for the ATCA Summit and every year it has improved and expanded.  Given the focus on the ATCA industry, this is one “must attend” show for companies involved in ATCA.   The show provides an excellent environment for meeting with customers and suppliers for both companies new to ATCA as well as those who have already have experience with ATCA.  The maturity that ATCA has now achieved and the ecosystem that has emerged makes this an ideal time to evaluate developing new products and moving existing platforms to ATCA."

Eric M. Mantion
Corporate Innovation Evangelist - Embedded & Communications Group
Intel Corporation
Member of Advisory Board for Embedded System Conference

Eric Mantion is a Corporate Innovation Evangelist in charge of conducting training of and coordinating promotions for the new Intel® Corporate Product Catalogue – which has a web front-end that can be found at ARK.intel.com.  Prior to that, Eric was a strategic marketing manager responsible for competitive intelligence which included gathering information about competing companies and their products, analyzing the data, and presenting out strategic recommendations to our long-range planning activities as well as training various internal and external groups as to how Intel could be the most competitive in the Embedded Market Segment.  Before joining Intel in 2005, Eric had worked as a senior and then principal analyst for market research firms such as In-Stat and ABI Research.  This was after he had spent 2 years at a small communications-focused semiconductor company working as a product marketing engineer.

Eric received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the US Naval Academy with a focus on Quantum Mechanics and Nuclear Engineering.  He has fully completed the US Navy’s graduate-level but classified Nuclear Engineer Program and has been certified by the federal government to be the lead engineer of a nuclear facility.  He spent 3 years on a fast-attack submarine (USS Santa Fe – SSN-763) and two and a half years attached to a SEAL Team in Hawaii responsible for many of their maintenance functions and large scale construction projects.

"AdvancedTCA Summit is one of the purist tradeshows in the technology industry that remains laser focused on all sides of the PICMG 3.0 effort – if you are involved with ATCA or any of its related specifications (µTCA, AdvancedMCs, etc.) then you need to be at this show." 

Venkataraman Prasannan
Senior Director, ATCA Product Line Management
Radisys

Venkataraman Prasannan (VP) is the Senior Director ATCA Product Line Management at RadiSys Corp. He has over 15 years telecom and networking experience in marketing, product and business management. He is a frequent speaker and author on computer/communications topics for the Communications industry.

Prior to joining RadiSys, Venkataraman was with Tektronix where he was involved in various video networking and telecom test products for SONET/SDH, ISDN and DS1/DS3 products. He holds masters degree in Business and Engineering and has prior experience as a software engineer working on real-time instrumentation.

Venkataraman can be reached at vp@radisys.com.

Dharmaraja Rajan
Platform Product Manager
Nortel

Dharmaraja Rajan is responsible for managing Nortel's Common Engineering ATCA platform software for next-generation voice and packet core products. He has broad experience spanning 17 years in telecommunications network architecture, CVOIP, network management, and product management.

Prior to Nortel, Rajan worked at Cisco Systems in network architecture and at the Indian Space Research Organization on real-time communication systems. He is a senior member of IEEE. He has published many papers for IEEE and ACM world conferences. He holds an MS in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University and a Master of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur.

“Nortel is leading the adoption of ATCA with a common platform that works across multiple products. The demand for the latest and most innovative products and services can be met with the use of commercial-off-the-shelf ATCA technology from Nortel.  This provides service providers with a common and flexible foundation for future data and switching products. The summit is an excellent opportunity to learn and share user experience in advancement of the open standard ATCA ecosystem.”

Dr. Asif Naseem
President and COO
GoAhead Software

Dr. Asif Naseem is president and chief operating officer of GoAhead Software, Inc. in Seattle, WA. He is also the president of the Service Availability Forum. He has more than 20 years of experience in the computer and communications industry. Asif is a veteran speaker having presented at national and international events such as ITU Telecom Geneva, GSM World Congress, CTIA, and numerous other events. He has also presented papers at conferences organized by ACM, IEEE, and others, and is a frequent author of papers published in several technical journals and magazines. He has an MS in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Computer Engineering from Michigan State University.

"Our customers look to GoAhead Software for highly available, application-ready platforms that are based on open standards, so they can ensure flexibility, focus on revenue-generating applications and reduce project risk. With its efficient form factor and cost effectiveness, we are excited about MicroTCA. We look forward to The MicroTCA Summit as the premier venue for equipment providers to learn about MicroTCA, get answers to challenging questions they are facing, and understand how they can take advantage of this promising platform.”

Thanh Nguyen
Sr. Marketing Manager
MicroBlade

Thanh Nguyen is a long-time telecom and embedded industry. He has seen and involved with most of the technology buzz out there – ISDN, ATM, MPLS, VoIP, NPU, and others.  He even dabbled in Management Consulting and Computer Recycling to round out his experience as a technologist, marketer, and business operation. Currently he is a Sr. Marketing Manager at MicroBlade, a dynamic and innovative company focusing on MicroTCA. Prior to MicroBlade, he spent his 20 years at IBM, Rockwell, Emerson, and others. Thanh has an MBA from Regis University and a BSEE from Penn State University.

“AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA are probably the most exciting technologies to date. While AdvancedTCA offers the highest performance system dedicated to the telecom industry, MicroTCA is the flexible platform that can adapt to other industries. Best of all, both technologies share the same AdvancedMC modules building blocks, enabling system designers to serve different markets. MicroBlade is focused on delivering innovative solutions based on MicroTCA. Recognizing the importance of ATCA, we support both the AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA summits. Together, the two summits offer the best venues for system designers to learn what they need to know about AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA.”