Open Compute Project Foundation Announces Incubation Committee Chair Changes

The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) and Board are proud to announce the appointment of Tom Anschutz and Aaron Sullivan as the Incubation Committee (IC) Co-Chairs.

The OCP Incubation Committee helps set the goals and strategic direction for the OCP Community by encouraging open collaboration and driving the adoption of OCP hardware and embedded software. Because of their diverse technical backgrounds and insights into technology verticals and industry trends, they advise on charter and project scope, as well as review all contributions that are submitted to the Foundation. IC Chairs serve two-year terms.

Tom Anschutz is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T and has been serving as OCP’s Telco IC Lead for the past year - leading one of the fastest growing project communities at OCP. Tom has worked closely with the industry leaders within the Project to help shepherd contributions such as the Universal Customer Premise Equipment (uCPE) and Edge Routers. In his role as a network architect, he is instrumental in the development of AT&T’s software-centric network, and in progressing the key technologies that support it - SDN and NFV. Tom has been working on various network and data center architectures for most of his career, and has experience in product management and standards development, where he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the Broadband Forum. He’s been granted over sixty patents.

Aaron Sullivan has served as a member on the committee since late 2012 and has served in many leadership roles at OCP. Over the past 20 years, Aaron has worked in security, networking, performance research, product development, cloud infrastructure and is focused on infrastructure development after the end of Moore’s Law. Aaron currently serves as a Director of Hardware Engineering at Facebook. Prior to joining Facebook, Aaron was a Distinguished Engineer at Rackspace, and led the development and deployment of Open Compute-based systems there. Earlier in his career, he held roles at AT&T, SBC and GE.

“Tom and Aaron bring a very high level of subject matter expertise to the leadership, and have been long-time contributors to the OCP Community” stated Rocky Bullock, OCP CEO. “We would also like to thank Amir Michael and Eran Tal who have faithfully served in these roles for the past few years, and helped lead the Foundation’s momentum and growth to unprecedented growth globally.” A recent study by IHS Markit concluded that the market impact of OCP hardware, removing OCP-Board member companies to determine a more accurate assessment of market adoption, had exceeded $1 billion in 2017, and is expected to surpass $6 billion by 2021.

OCP will be hosting its first Regional Summit in Amsterdam, Netherlands 1 – 2 October, 2018. The annual OCP US Summit will be held 14 – 15 March, 2019 in San Jose, CA, and draws 3,500 technology leaders and innovators from across the globe.