Board Members

Rebecca leads the organization that influences every aspect of Intel’s cloud platform solutions.
Together they shape Intel’s development, production, and business
strategy for Hyperscale Cloud Service Providers by driving strategic collaborations with key
partners to ensure platform requirements meet customer needs. Rebecca is an Open Compute
Project board member and is on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list of most influential people in
technology. 
In her "spare" time, she is the lead singer of the funk and soul band, Sinister Dexter, and enjoys
her passion of dance and choreography. She has two amazing little boys, and loves to run (after
them, and on her own). Rebecca graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.  
 
LinkedIn: Rebecca Lipon Weekly 
Twitter: @rebeccalipon

Andreas Bechtolsheim is a Founder and Chief Development Officer of Arista Networks, a high-speed datacenter and cloud networking company. Previously, Andy was a Co-Founder and Chief System Architect at Sun Microsystems, responsible for next generation server, storage, and network architectures.

From 1995 to 1996, Andy was CEO and President of Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet Switching startup company he founded that Cisco acquired in September of 1996. From 1996 to 2003 Andy was General Manager for the Gigabit Systems Business Unit at Cisco System that developed the Cat-4K Switch family, which became the highest volume modular switching platform in the industry.

As a private venture investor, Andy has been involved in the funding of numerous companies including Google, VMware, Mellanox, Brocade, and Magma Design. He has served on the Board of Directors of 25 companies, the majority of which went public or were acquired.

Andy earned a M.S. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1976. He was a doctoral student in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 1977 to 1982. He has been honored with a Fulbright scholarship, a German National Merit Foundation scholarship, the Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the year award, the Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation, and he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Jim Hawkins is the vice president of global data center operations and engineering at Rackspace, where he oversees the company’s worldwide network of data centers, hardware engineering, and other critical infrastructure and operations.

Jim joined Rackspace in 2008, initially serving as director of operational excellence. Since then, he has held several positions, including director of U.S. data centers and senior director of global data center operations.  

Jim has brought a number of strengths to these roles, including a specialized knowledge of Lean Six Sigma methodology and operational discipline. While serving in each of his roles at Rackspace, he incorporated his knowledge of these principles into the design and daily operation of Rackspace’s critical infrastructure and teams transforming their performance.

Before he joined Rackspace, Jim was a plant manager and North American fiberglass fabrics manager at Owens Corning, where he turned a struggling $40 million division into a very profitable business by leveraging his knowledge of Lean Six Sigma methodology. He earned his BS in marketing at Westminster College, graduating Summa Cum Laude, and received his MBA, with high honors, at Purdue University.

Zaid Kahn is a General Manager in Microsoft's Azure division where he leads a team focusing on advanced architecture and engineering efforts for Microsoft’s AI infrastructure. Zaid is part of the technical leadership team across Microsoft that sets AI hardware strategy for training and inference. Zaid's team is also responsible for software and hardware engineering efforts developing specialized compute systems, FPGA network products and advanced network switch technologies in the 400/800G space. Prior to Microsoft Zaid was head of infrastructure at LinkedIn where he was responsible for all aspects of architecture and engineering for Datacenters, Networking, Compute, Storage and Hardware. Zaid also led several software development teams focusing on building and managing infrastructure as code. This included zero touch provisioning, software-defined networking, network operating systems (SONiC, OpenSwitch), self-healing networks, backbone controller, software defined storage and distributed host-based firewalls. The network teams Zaid led built the global network for LinkedIn, including POP's, peering for edge services, IPv6 implementation, DWDM infrastructure and datacenter network fabric. The hardware and datacenter engineering teams Zaid led were responsible for water cooling to the racks, optical fiber infrastructure and open hardware development which was contributed to the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP). Zaid holds several patents in networking and, is a sought-after keynote speaker at top tier conferences and events . Zaid has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Physics from the University of the South Pacific.

Parthasarathy (Partha) Ranganathan is currently a VP, Engineering Fellow at Google where he is the area technical lead for systems hardware and datacenters. Before this, he was a HP Fellow and Chief Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs where he led their research on systems and datacenters. Dr. Ranganathan's research interests are in systems architecture and manageability, energy-efficiency, and systems modeling and evaluation. He has done extensive work in these areas including key contributions around energy-aware user interfaces, heterogeneous multi-core processors, power capping and power-aware server designs, federated enterprise power management, energy modeling and benchmarking, disaggregated blade server architectures, and most recently, storage hierarchy and systems redesign for non-volatile memory. He was also one of the primary developers of the publicly distributed Rice Simulator for ILP Multiprocessors (RSIM). 
Dr. Ranganathan's work has led to broad impact on both academia and industry including several
commercial products such as Power Capping and HP Moonshot servers. He holds more than 50
patents (with another 45 pending) and has published extensively, including several award-winning
papers. He also teaches regularly (including, most recently, at Stanford) and has contributed to
several popular computer architecture textbooks. Dr. Ranganathan and his work have been featured on numerous occasions in the press including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, San Francisco Chronicle, Times of India, Slashdot, and Youtube. Dr. Ranganathan has been named one of the world's top young innovators by MIT Technology Review and has been recognized with several other awards including the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award and Rice University's Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni award.  
Dr. Ranganathan received his B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Rice University, Houston. He is also an IEEE Fellow.

As head of hardware engineering, Mark is responsible for the building, scaling and innovation of the infrastructure necessary to support Facebook’s mission to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Facebook builds efficient and flexible infrastructure to support over two billion people from around the world using Facebook’s family of apps and services.

Prior to Facebook, Mark was the COO at Rackspace, where he managed the global infrastructure and associated services such as data center engineering & operations, hardware design, networking, infrastructure services, supply chain, procurement, facilities, physical & cyber security and enterprise IT. Mark began his career as an engineer at Compaq before moving into management, and has held senior leadership roles at Microsoft, Intuit, Sirius XM, and eBay/PayPal. Mark is an influential change agent and has helped lead some of the world’s best technology companies as they have grown from small enterprises to hyperscale in just a matter of years.

Mark is a founding board member of the Open Compute Foundation that was created in 2011 by Facebook, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs and Intel. Mark is a strong proponent of open standards as they increase the pace of innovation and make technology available to all.

Mark has been a strong supporter of charities dedicated to enriching the lives of children with disabilities. He is on the Board of Directors of Taelor’s House Foundation, Morgan’s Wonderland and supports the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association, Special Olympics and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. He previously served as technology advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Mark holds a BBA degree in management from Texas A&M University.