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Michael Brenner Joins GigaSpaces to Lead NFV Standardization Strategy
[August 17, 2016]

Michael Brenner Joins GigaSpaces to Lead NFV Standardization Strategy


GigaSpaces (News - Alert), provider of software for cloud application orchestration and scaling of mission-critical applications on cloud environments, today announced that Michael Brenner, veteran of telecommunications industry leaders Bell Labs (News - Alert), Lucent Technologies and Alcatel-Lucent, has joined the company as chief architect for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

Brenner's role at GigaSpaces will be to lead the standardization strategy for NFV and Software Defined Networking (SDN) and accordingly influence the product strategy for Cloudify and the ARIA project. Cloudify is an open source, TOSCA-based cloud orchestration framework that provides full lifecycle automation (provisioning, deployment, monitoring and remediation) of enterprise and NFV applications. ARIA is an open-governance reference implementation of TOSCA and is used as the engine behind Cloudify.

"Michael brings to GigaSpaces a unique blend of experience in product architecture, development, management and standardization which will help drive our leadership in the fast-growing NFV-directed orchestration segment. His first task will be to tackle the cooperation between TOSCA and YANG, in order to achieve increased automation leading to OPEX (News - Alert) reduction", said Nati Shalom, founder and CTO of GigaSpaces.

Brenner comes from ClearPath Networks, where in his role as SVP product strategy he drove product management, standardization and open source strategy for the company's platform for virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE) use cases. Prior to ClearPath Networks, he was senior architect and director in the CloudBand Business Unit of Alcatel-Lucent, responsible for CloudBand's NFV platform architectural vision and NFV standardization strategy. During hs 25 years with Alcatel-Lucent, Brenner also led development for Service/Network/Policy Management systems and mobile application enablers standardization efforts, including the development of over 20 RESTful API standard specifications, before moving to cloud and virtualization-related projects.



"GigaSpaces is a company that is pushing the envelope of NFV standardization with its innovative orchestration products and commitment to open source initiatives, which are perfectly in sync with my passions and experience," said Brenner. "I look forward to contributing significantly to the effort as GigaSpaces expands its leadership and market presence in NFV and SDN, and as we collaborate with others to bring about transformative advancements in the industry."

Until recently, Brenner served as vice-chair of the Network Functions Virtualization Industry Specification Group (NFV-ISG) of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI (News - Alert)), an industry group that develops architectural studies and normative specifications impacting NFV. In this capacity, he focused on advancing collaboration with open source communities (e.g., OPNFV, OpenStack and OpenDaylight) and championing the advancement of NFV's motivators for service agility, OPEX reduction, CAPEX reduction and efficiency via automation. He plans to continue driving the Multi-SDO information and data modelling industry efforts towards attaining a common information and data model for NFV, both inside and outside ETSI NFV-ISG.


Brenner has received a number of industry awards and accolades, including an ICIN Best Presentation Award (2009), an Open Mobile (News - Alert) Alliance Excellence Award for Outstanding Contributions (2007) and a National Technology Team Award (1981). Most recently, in November 2014, he was awarded the first ETSI NFV-ISG Excellence Award for contributions to the forum, specifically related to the resolution of Management and Orchestration issues. He has also published numerous technical papers, and co-authored the book The Open Mobile Alliance - Delivering Service Enablers for Next-Generation Applications (John Wiley and Sons, 2008).

About GigaSpaces

GigaSpaces Technologies provides software for cloud application orchestration and scaling of mission-critical applications on cloud environments. Hundreds of tier-one organizations worldwide are leveraging GigaSpaces technology to enhance IT efficiency and performance, including top financial firms, e-commerce companies, online gaming providers, healthcare organizations and telecom carriers. GigaSpaces has offices in the US, Europe and Asia. More at www.gigaspaces.com and getcloudify.org.


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