Sterling has more than 20 years' experience in telecommunications as an industry analyst and journalist. His coverage area at Heavy Reading is optical networking, including packet-optical transport and 5G transport. He also authors Heavy Reading’s Metro Optical Networking Market Tracker and Core Optical Transport Market Tracker. Sterling joined Heavy Reading after five years at IDC, where he served as lead optical networks analyst, responsible for the firm's optical networking subscription research and custom consulting activities. Prior to IDC, Sterling worked for Standard & Poor's, where he delivered global industry analysis on a range of IT segments. He is a former journalist and editor at Telecommunications Magazine. In addition to chairing and moderating many Light Reading events, Sterling is a NGON & DCI World Advisory Board member and past member of OFC’s N5 Market Watch Committee. Sterling is a highly sought-after source among the business and trade press.

Kent Jordan is an Advisor of Portfolio Marketing at Ciena. He is responsible for introducing to the market, Ciena’s compact, modular solutions for high-capacity interconnect applications, including Ciena’s Waveserver family of products. He has a background of 20 years in the optical telecommunications industry through a variety of positions, including network and architecture planning, business development, and competitive/market intelligence.

Teresa Monteiro is Director of Marketing at Infinera, a global supplier of innovative networking solutions. In this role, she champions for Infinera’s software and automation solutions, with particular focus on SDN, Analytics and Machine Learning techniques, helping network operators modernizing and transforming their networks. Teresa has close to 20 years of experience in the telecommunication industry. Prior to Infinera, she held various senior engineering roles in packet-optical technologies at Siemens and Product Management positions at Coriant. Teresa received a PhD in Physics from the University of Hamburg, in Germany.

Joe Mocerino is a principal solutions architect at Fujitsu. Joe oversees solutions strategy and technical marketing for the Fujitsu 1FINITY, Smart xHaul and Smart Optics portfolios. He has written numerous whitepapers and served in speaking roles for telco and MSO forums, currently focusing on Mobile xHaul Optimization and service delivery. Joe has a thirty year track record in product line management, marketing, business development, sales, engineering and manufacturing. Joe’s technology expertise includes Packet Optical Networking, CPRI/eCPRI Optical Fronthaul and Network Slicing. Joe holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ.

Kanika Atri is Senior Director, Product Management, responsible for building Juniper’s Paragon Automation portfolio serving Wide Area Networks for our Service Provider, Enterprise, and Cloud Provider customers globally. She is driving the shift to Cloud, AI enabled and Experience driven Automation solutions that solve real customer problems and drastically simplify operations as WAN networks grow in scale and complexity. Kanika brings her passion for innovation and maniacal focus on delivering business outcomes for customers to Juniper. Prior to joining Juniper, Kanika held various leadership positions in Corporate CTO, Strategy and Marketing functions at Nokia. She has been part of the telecom revolution from 2G, 3G, to 4G and 5G in the last 20 years of her professional career, building on her grass roots experience in radio network engineering, pre-sales and sales across multiple geographies and companies such as Siemens, Nortel and Cisco.

Rich Loveland is the Director of Product Line Management for Vecima’s Passive Optical Networking (PON) for fiber-to-the-premise products.

With more than 35 years of experience in the telecommunications industry, Rich has held various marketing, product management, business development and engineering roles at Ciena, Ipitek, Pliant Systems Inc., Nortel Networks, Nokia (Formerly Alcatel-Lucent) and now Vecima Networks Inc.