Governance

Sr. Director, Head of Network Infrastructure, Alibaba Cloud

Dennis Cai

Dennis Cai leads the team to build predictable network for Alibaba Cloud, with close to 100K SONiC based white-box switches, gateways and routers deployed. Prior to joining Alibaba, he was a distinguished engineer at Cisco, driving the architecture evolution for the mega-scale web and carrier networks.

VP, Networking Switch Product Marketing, Marvell

John DaCosta

VP & GM, Networking and Edge Group, Intel

Ed Doe

Edward (Ed) V. Doe is a vice president and general manager in the Intel Networking and Edge Group at Intel Corporation.

Prior to joining Intel during the Barefoot acquisition in 2019, Doe was chief business officer of Barefoot Networks where he was responsible for strategy, corporate development, product, marketing, business development, and field/customer engineering. Before joining Barefoot, Doe held the position of Director, Product Management at Broadcom, covering various product lines including StrataXGS switches, NetXtreme NICs and SmartNICs, StrataGX ARM SoCs, scalable fabrics, and network processors. Earlier in his career, Doe was product line manager at Nortel and was responsible for launching Layer 3 to the Stackable Ethernet Switch product line, introduction of Gigabit Ethernet to the Stackable switch product line (BayStack), coverage of the smart service modules for the Layer 3 modular switch.

Doe holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, and two years of graduate studies towards a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University.

Senior Director, Engineering, Broadcom

Mohammad Hanif 

Mohammad Hanif leads the software development of SONiC at Broadcom where, in a short span of time, his team has become one of the largest contributors to the open source SONiC.  Prior to Broadcom, Hanif held leadership roles at Brocade and Foundry Networks where he designed and developed industry leading switching and routing products for service providers and enterprise data centers.  During his career, he has also worked for Novell, Apple, Ascend Communications, and others where he built and shipped a diverse set of products ranging from Networking Protocols, Enterprise File Servers, and Broadband Access Switches.  Hanif is a hands-on technology leader and is passionate about building highly scalable and highly resilient networking products.  He holds a BS in Computer Engineering and MS in Computer Science both from the University of Arizona.

Director of Product Management, Networking Solutions at Dell Technologies

Saurabh Kapoor

Saurabh Kapoor is Director of Product Management and Strategy for Networking Solutions at Dell Technologies. He played a key role as one of the founding members in creating the Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies, the first commercial offering for SONiC.

In his current role, Saurabh leads engagements with the open-source community, technology ecosystem partners, and silicon and partner ODM vendors. Since joining Dell Technologies in 2019, he has played a pivotal role in building the Dell Networking product portfolio and has been instrumental in driving business development and product strategy for their Open Networking offerings.

With over a decade of experience in Product Management, Solution Engineering, and Business Development, Saurabh possesses a keen eye for identifying and executing “big, disruptive, strategic game-changer” ideas. He has consistently delivered remarkable results, adapting to new challenges and driving innovation throughout his career.

Saurabh is known for seamlessly blending technical and business skills to drive strategy, establish C-Level partnerships, foster business development, and lead cross-functional teams. His ability to align strategies with the organization’s vision, mission, and goals has been instrumental in achieving success.

Prior to his role at Dell Technologies, Saurabh gained valuable experience in Product Management, Solution Engineering, and Business Development with technology companies such as Emerson Electric and Aricent.

Saurabh holds an MBA from George Washington University School of Business and a Master’s in Technology from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India.

VP, Ethernet Switch, Nvidia

Amit Katz

Amit Katz is Vice President Ethernet Switch at NVIDIA. He has served as VP and previously, Senior Director of Worldwide Ethernet Switch Sales since 2014 at Mellanox, and previously worked in various Product Management roles at Mellanox beginning in 2011. Prior to that, Amit held various Product Management positions at Voltaire and at RAD Data Communications. He graduated from the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo with a BA of Computer Science and an MBA from Bar Ilan University. Amit and the Mellanox, now NVIDIA team have been involved with the SONIC community since its inception.

Vice President, Network Infrastructure, Google

Dan Lenoski

Dan is a Vice President of Network Infrastructure at Google, where he leads the team responsible for all cluster and host networking software for Google’s data centers. Over his career, Dan co-founded and led engineering teams at three successful start-ups and multiple major corporations, including Cisco, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, Intel and Apple.  Dan’s interest and experience lie in leading-edge software and hardware designs that push the state-of-the-art in distributed systems, networking and fault-tolerance. He’s been involved in the SONiC community for over 5 years, both at Google and previously at Barefoot Networks/Intel.   Dan holds a BS from Caltech and an MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.

Principal PM Manager, Microsoft
Outreach Committee Chair

Xin Liu

Dr. Xin Liu leads Azure Network Platform PM team. She is responsible for evolving the network infrastructure with the latest hardware, software technology (SONiC), building management system, and health system to operate the network extensively. Xin holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a doctorate in Computer Science and has worked in the Cloud space for ten years. She is an avid advocator of open-source technologies. She has led the SONiC community since its early stage, building a rich ecosystem to benefit broad users. Xin loves to take on new challenges. She mentors female engineers and graduate students and loves to grow more of them in the high-tech area.

Technical Fellow & CVP, Azure Networking, Microsoft
Chair of the Governing Board

Dave A. Maltz 

David A. Maltz is one of the original founders of SONiC, and is currently the Chair of the Governing Board for the SONiC Foundation.

At Microsoft, he is the engineering leader for the Azure Networking team, responsible for developing, deploying, and operating the software and network devices that connect all Microsoft’s online services, including the Azure Public Cloud and Microsoft 365.  We write the code for the network services ranging from Network Security to DNS, the distributed systems that control our software defined and physical network, and the SONiC firmware that runs many of our physical switches.  We design the cloud-scale networks and data centers that provide petabits of connectivity at low cost and high reliability, from the optical systems on up.

His past projects include a broad array of hardware and software that improves the usability, performance, and cost of cloud computing and mobile/wireless networking.  He founded two venture-funded startup companies in network traffic management and wireless networking, and he worked in both industry research and academia, including 5 years in Microsoft Research.

Education – Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, 2001.  S.B. and S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1994.

VP Engineering, Cisco

Vijay Tapaskar

Vijay is Vice President of Engineering at Cisco. He has 24 years of experience is engineering and product leadership roles. Currently his team is working on SONiC support for Cisco 8000 series of platforms. Cisco is now supporting multiple fixed and modular system that can run SONiC on Silicon-1 based NPU. Vijay and his team at Cisco are bringing to VPP based software data plane support to SONIC.

Vijay was prior to Cisco Vijay was co-founder of ZEDEDA. It’s an open-source edge computing platform startup. Vijay has helped to support LFEdge/EVE project incubation to growth.

 VP of Engineering, Microsoft Azure Networking
Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Chair

Lihua Yuan

Dr. Lihua Yuan is currently a VP of Engineering at Microsoft Azure Networking. He leads the network platform team supporting the network infrastructure connecting major business including Azure, Microsoft 365 and Bing. His team drove the networking hardware evolution from 10G generation all the way to 400G generation in Microsoft. His team lead the development of the open-source SONiC network operating system that is widely adopted in the industry. His team developed software automation that manages the whole life cycle of the network.

Dr. Lihua Yuan’s work led to multiple research publications at top networking conferences. He is the incubation committee member at the Open Compute Project between 2018 and 2022. He is currently the technical steering committee chair of the SONiC Foundation.