Prayson is passionate about helping the telecom industry go virtual. He believes network functions virtualization (NFV) is the key to profitability and evangelizes about essential benefits achieved by using big data analytics and pure-play NFV orchestration to optimize a carrier-class virtual networking environment. Prayson speaks about NFV and software-defined networking at industry events, posts regularly to industry blogs and his own site www.praysonpate.com, and contributes articles for publication in industry media. As CTO at Overture he is focused on making NFV real and profitable for communication service providers (CSPs.) Prayson is an accomplished technologist who began his career in 1983 at FiberLAN. He also worked for Bell Northern Research and Larscom before co-founding Overture in 2000.