Incubation Committee

Aaron Sullivan is a Director of Hardware Engineering at Facebook. Aaron has served on the Incubation Committee for most of the time between 2012 and present day. Aaron’s career has spanned a broad array of technologies and industry segments, including Security, Enterprise and Telco Service Provider Networking, Performance Research, Product Development, Large Scale Systems Engineering, and most recently, Infrastructure Development after Moore’s Law. Prior to joining Facebook, Aaron was a Distinguished Engineer at Rackspace, and lead development of Open Compute-based systems there. Earlier in his career, Aaron also served in roles at AT&T, SBC, and GE.

Lihua Yuan is a Partner Software Engineering Manager in Microsoft Azure Networking team. He leads the network management team that manages the entire lifecycle of network devices in Microsoft data centers through automation. He has led a transformation in how Microsoft manages the network - from human- and spreadsheet- driven workflows to automated "lights out" services driven continuously by desired state. He has led multiple research projects advancing the state of art of network management, monitoring and diagnostics, with multiple publications at top research venues like SIGCOMM, NSDI and SOSP, and direct impact on how Microsoft operates the network. 

      Lihua has been working closely with the OCP community since 2014. He has spearheaded the standardization of Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) at OCP, with the support of every major switch ASIC vendors and industrial partners. He leads the open source initiative of SONiC, a Debian-based modular and containerized network operating system that supports many ASIC and hardware platforms. SONiC has attracted a large developer community and been deployed at scale at multiple companies in production at scale. He is committed to work with the OCP community towards an open and disaggregated ecosystem.

Tom Anschutz is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T. 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.

Most recently he’s undertaken the development of Open Compute specifications for disaggregated access technologies that have become adopted by the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) project. Under Tom’s guidance and leadership as the IC Rep, the Telco Project has taken off – there are several contributions under way for uCPE (Universal Customer Premise Equipment) and edge networks devices.

Robert Bunger is the Director of Data Center Standards at Schneider Electric within the Global Industry and Government Alliances team, and is based in the US. In his 18 years at Schneider Electric, Robert has held management positions in customer service, technical sales, offer management, and business development. He has also lived and worked in Denmark and China, where he supported data center solutions business growth in those regions.

Prior to joining Schneider Electric (American Power Conversion before being acquired by Schneider Electric), Robert was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy and served eight years in the submarine force. Robert holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the US Naval Academy and a Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

John has over 35 years in the computer industry: architecting, designing and coding. Currently, John is a Principle Engineer and a system manageability architect for Rack Scale Design. John has been a member of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standards body since 2004 and has authored and contributed to over 40 DMTF specification. Currently, John sits on the DMTF Board and holds the office of VP of Alliances and Vice-chair. John authored the "OCP Hardware Management using Redfish" which is currently released as DMTF work-in-progress. As the IC Rep for the HW Management Project, John will be responsible for directing the efforts for an OCP profile for RedFish. OpenBMC is currently being developed and once ratified, John will work to define the OCP Profile for OpenBMC as well.

Philip Pokorny is Chief Technical Officer for Penguin Computing and responsible for all aspects of its hardware products. After joining the company in February, 2001 as an engineer, he has steadily taken on more responsibilities. He brings a wealth of both customer and engineering experience to the design, development and support of Penguin Computing products.

Since the beginning of the Open Compute organization, Penguin Computing has been involved and Philip has developed multiple products and accessories to make the Open Compute Open Rack products appeal to a wider range of enterprise customers in addition to the core group of OCP founding companies. These are all available from Penguin Computing under the "Tundra" trademark but are completely Open Rack compatible and interoperable.

Prior to Penguin Computing, he spent 14 years in various engineering and system administration roles with Cummins, Inc. and Cummins Electronics. At Cummins, Pokorny participated in the development of internal network standards, deployed and managed a multi site network of multiprotocol routers and supported a diverse mix of office and engineering workers with a variety of server and desktop operating systems. He has contributed code to Open Source projects, including the Linux kernel, lm_sensors and LCDproc.

Philip graduated in 1987 from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with BS degrees in Math and Electrical Engineering, and a second major in Computer Science.

James Jau is the Vice President of Research & Development of QCT’s Cloud Computing Business Unit. James is responsible for all the research and development, management, and product planning for QCT’s cloud computing products, including its server, storage, network switch, and rack systems. James has been newly appointed as the IC Rep for the Rack & Power group. As the rep, James will help lead the OpenRack and CG Open Rack 19 efforts and associated rack and power contributions.

Bob Ogrey has over 25 years of experience in the area of design and architecture in both consumer and enterprise products and platforms. Current focus is working with multiple OEM/ODM server system design architectures, definitions of end customer large datacenter Web 2.0/Cloud. The Server group is benefitting from the leadership of Bob who is helping with the multiple aspects of the community. There are 3 subgroups – Mezzanine Card, Project Olympus and ToolChain. All three are quite active.

At Hyve Solutions, Douglas has previously overseen sales, engineering, and program management as Vice President of Enterprise Products but now runs the quality and compliance departments as Vice President of Quality and Compliance. The Storage Community is working closely with Doug’s leadership and guidance to put forth some very interesting projects such as rack derivative storage chassis and sleds for the OpenRack and EIA310-D and E19” racks. Components and peripherals include SAS, SATA, NVMe, SSD and PCIe to name a few.

Jeff is the Vice President of Technology at Edgecore Networks.  He is responsible for research and integration of technology into Edgecore's award winning Open Networking product portfolio.  Jeff is an industry recognized technology leader with more than 25 years of in-depth experience in the telecommunication industry with an extensive skill set for networking product architecture and deployment.  Prior to Edgecore Jeff was the Vice President of Engineering for Enablence Systems and led worldwide engineering teams to create successful product lines for access layer connectivity.  In addition, Jeff served as General Manager of Switching and Routing at Enterasys/Cabletron Systems leading engineering and marketing groups to successfully bring high volume, high revenue products to market.  Jeff continues to drive the Open Networking technology road map for Edgecore and in the process is transforming the networking landscape as a whole.