Charles has extensive IT experience and brings substantial knowledge gained through several successful leadership positions. At Lenovo, he is leading the strategy, product development and go-to-market definition for the DCG Edge & Telco segment. Charles’ team is actively developing, optimizing and supporting Telco solutions ready to be deployed in NFV and 5G infrastructure.

Prior to joining Lenovo, Charles led the global business development activities at Nuage Networks from Nokia. His responsibilities as vice president included establishing a global presence with Telecom Service Providers onboarding their NFV journey. In addition, he set up Nuage’s technology partner program to support collaboration with more than 30 companies.

Prior to joining Nuage, Charles was the SDN Executive at IBM, responsible for global sales and business development. He also led the IBM System Networking business unit in Europe for several years. Charles’ involvement in datacenter networking began with the creation of BLADE Network Technologies (BNT, later acquired by IBM) where he was Vice President and General Manager for EMEA.

With over 22 years of international experience, Charles has a strong background in Software Defined Networking and has been one of the early promoters of the technology. He also participates in many SDN and NFV events, actively engaging customers and developing concrete user cases helping them solve modern datacenter and WAN networking issues.

He earned an MBA from the University of Wales. His undergraduate work at the University of Québec focused on Mathematics and Computer Science. He is a true global executive, having worked in Canada, Germany, and the United States. He is fluent in English and French, and knows basic German.

Christoph Hilz leads the Voice & Messaging organisation at Deutsche Telekom. This includes the Engineering, Validation, Planning and Operation responsibilities for all fixed & mobile platforms in this area. Over his more than 20-year career with Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile, Hilz has held leadership roles in various domains including routing, switching & security.

Throughout his career, Christoph has been tenacious in pursuit of the company’s objectives, and always drives himself and his team to set and achieve daring, innovative goals.

Most recently he has focused on the cloudification and automation of Deutsche Telekom´s voice and messaging infrastructure.

David Niks has over 20 years’ experience in the telecommunication industry and is currently a lead Solution Architect for Mavenir. He has contributed to the evolution of the Packet core and IP Multimedia Services Layer components together with local engineering teams across Europe.

He currently leads Mavenir’s strategy and architecture of the IP Multimedia Core Network with a focus on the evolution of the services layer and defining future services. David began work with Deutsche Telekom in 2016 leading designs in the Mobile and Fixed space. He has been an instrumental part of the NIMS project, driving automation and new concepts for IMS solutions based on a virtualized infrastructure.

Paul has over 30 years’ experience in data and telecommunications protocols, products and network design – spanning arcane details of SDLC links right up to multi-national cloud IMS architectures.

As Vice President Product Strategy, Paul co-ordinates future direction for Metaswitch portfolio, including IMS, VoLTE and NFV solutions for mobile and fixed operators, with a particular focus on Cloud Native architectures and operational automation. Having previously spent 10 years running our SE team, working closely with carriers of all shapes and sizes and in every market and geographies, he has the in-depth real-world knowledge and experience necessary help service providers of all types fully exploit the ever-accelerating pace of change in Telecoms technology and end-user expectations.

Paul joined Metaswitch in 1986 after studying Mathematics at Cambridge University. He is the author of, or major contributor to, several IETF RFCs, multiple white papers, and patents covering everything from protocols deep in the network to innovative user experiences for multi-modal communications, and is a frequent speaker at conferences on NFV and orchestration. When not at work, he can most often be found sailing around the western coasts of the UK and Ireland.