NEW YORK -- Light Reading ( www.lightreading.com ), the market-leading online community for the global communications sector, today announced that Basil Alwan, President, IP Routing & Transport, Alcatel-Lucent, will keynote the Big Telecom Event (BTE) (www.bigtelecomevent.com/chicago/ ). BTE, to be held June 17-18 at the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago, is a demo space and conference that brings real-world, cutting-edge technology demonstrations and business insights to communications service provider executives.

Alwan will explore the impact of the shift to cloud-centric applications and services and the resulting need for the underlying network infrastructure to become more fluid. He will look at how cloud applications will evolve as the networking environment becomes more flexible and unconstrained and what new service provider business models will be necessary to thrive in this environment.

"Basil Alwan is without question one of the key movers and shakers in the telecom industry, and has been for some time," said Light Reading Editor-in-Chief Ray Le Maistre. "As we have pointed out in the past , Alwan's leadership of the IP division over the years has given Alcatel-Lucent a solid base on which to build its new strategy. His insights are invaluable."

Alwan is President of IP Routing and Transport for Alcatel-Lucent. Previously he was President of Alcatel-Lucent's IP Division with overall responsibility for the company's portfolio of IP/MPLS and multiservice switches and routers, and network and service management. In addition, he was responsible for the portfolio strategy for the Carrier Group. Formerly, Alwan was the founder, President, and CEO of TiMetra, a startup focused on service routers for IP/MPLS networks, which was acquired by Alcatel in 2003 and merged with the MSWAN and NSM business lines to form the IP Division. Prior to TiMetra, he held executive positions in Silicon Valley startups as well as large companies. Formerly, he was VP and General Manager of Nortel Networks' Enterprise Products Division. He came to Nortel through the Bay Networks acquisition of Rapid City Communications, where he was VP of product management and marketing. Alwan served as a member of the boards of directors of multiple Silicon Valley companies, including 2Wire, Omneon Video Networks, CiiNow, and WiChorus. In 1984 he graduated from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana with a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering.

BTE combines the educational power of interactive conference sessions devised and hosted by Heavy Reading's experienced industry analysts, with multi-vendor interoperability and proof-of-concept networking and application showcases. BTE is geared toward helping attendees better understand the business rationale for concepts such as SDN, NFV, small-cell architectures, next-generation policy and charging, big-data analytics, and mobile network security.

To register to attend BTE, click here. Media interested in attending may [email protected].

Speaking and sponsorship opportunities are available. For more information contact:[email protected].

Light Reading