NPF Adds System OEMs to Board

FREMONT, Calif. -- The Network Processing Forum (NPF), a non-profit industry association fostering the growth of network processing technologies, today announced the results of their annual election. Serge Audenaert - Director Technical Strategy FND CTO of Alcatel, Claude Basso - IBM Distinguished Engineer, Network Processing Architecture at IBM, Misha Nossik - Director of Network Processing at IDT, and Brian Holden - Principal Engineer in the Microprocessor Products Division at PMC-Sierra were elected to the NPF Board of Directors. The new Board elected officers including Misha Nossik as Chair, Raj Yavatkar as Vice-Chair and Chuck Sannipoli as Treasurer.

Vinoj Kumar - Software Architect in the Multi-service Network Division at Agere Systems was elected Chair of the Software Working Group. Jim Hamstra - Systems Architect in the Corporate Technology Group at Flextronics was elected Chair of the Benchmarking Working Group. Sunil Baliga - Senior Director of Marketing and Business Development at Kawasaki LSI was elected Chair of the Technical Education and Marketing Working Group, and Michael Lerer - Industry Consultant representing Xilinx was elected Chair of the Hardware Working Group.

Prior to the election, the Board appointed Lars-Goran Petersen, Expert - Packet Switching Technologies at Ericsson, to fill a mid-term open Board position.

"The NPF is particularly pleased to see networking equipment manufacturers Alcatel and Ericsson accept leadership roles," said Misha Nossik, returning Chair of the NPF Board of Directors. "System OEMs help guide our specification and benchmark development by providing vital knowledge and insight into the requirements of today's networking and telecommunications solutions."

In total, the NPF has seven board members and four working group chairs. The complete NPF Board and Working Group Chairs include:

Board Members

Working Group Chairs

Lars-Goran Petersen is a designated Expert in Packet Switching Technologies at Ericsson. He has held this position for 10 years and has been one of the main system architects behind the Ericsson Connectivity Packet Platform (CPP) that is now used in Ericsson's 3G nodes. He has played an active role in multiple standards development organizations including the ATM-Forum, ITU-T-SG13, MSF (Multi Service switching Forum) and the RapidIO Trade Association.

Brian Holden is a Principal Engineer in the Microprocessor Products Division of PMC-Sierra, Inc. and is the Technical Chair of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. He has worked in the communications and computer industry for 22 years, serving as the CTO of Integrated Telecom Technologies, Inc., the CEO of Network Synthesis, Inc., and as a Manager and Co-Founder of StrataCom, Inc. He has worked in many standards efforts including IEEE 802.17 and several ATM Forum and HyperTransport specifications. He has 17 U.S. patents including StrataCom's original patents. He has also helped architect and helped develop many significant products including the NSI/IgT/PMC AAl1gator and the StrataCom IPX. He has an MBA with graduate studies in Computer Science from Cornell University. He also has a BSEE with highest honors from U.C. Davis.

Vinoj Kumar serves as software architect with Agere System's Multi-service Network Division. He was an early employee of Agere Inc., which was subsequently acquired by Lucent Technologies. Mr. Kumar has more than 12 years experience in the areas of telecommunications, networking, distributed computing, distributed objects, programming languages and graphic modeling. Work experience includes various design, architecture and project management roles in both large and small companies including NASA and IBM. Mr. Kumar holds several patents in the areas of distributed objects and communications. He holds a masters degree in Computer Science from University of Louisiana and a bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from University of Mysore, India. Mr. Kumar continues to contribute to industry standards bodies and consortiums including the Network Processing Forum (NPF) where he is currently the Software Working Group Chair.

Jim Hamstra is a Systems Architect in the Corporate Technology Group of Flextronics International. He has over 30 years experience in hardware and software architecture and design. Jim has made major contributions to NPF and OIF Implementation Agreements and to ANSI and IEEE standards, including Streaming Interface (NPF), FDDI (ANSI), Fast Ethernet (IEEE), SPI-4, SPI-5 and SxI-5 (OIF), and CEI Electrical and Protocol (OIF).

Network Processing Forum (NPF)