Kaniz Mahdi is Vice President of Advanced Technologies at VMware. In this role, Kaniz is responsible for long term vision and architecture direction for VMW Telco Edge Cloud Platform, while shaping the next chapter of wireless evolution with fusion of B5G/6G, AI and Cloud. Prior to VMware, Kaniz held various technology leadership positions at Ericsson, Huawei, Ciena and Nortel.

With 45+ patent grants, Kaniz has a stellar record of continuously pushing the envelope on new technologies. She is an inventor of essential technologies underpinning current Voice over LTE systems and has been instrumental in defining the 5G era landscape with disruptive technologies (e.g. SDN/NFV & O-RAN). Kaniz’s current technology focus is on research incubation for new technologies that sit at the cross section of B5G/6G, AI/ML, Time Sensitive Communications, High Performance Distributed Compute and Complex Adaptive Systems for enablement of Collaborative Controls Systems of the B5G/6G era.

Cole Crawford is CEO and founder of Vapor IO, the creators of the Kinetic Edge™ platform. Vapor IO is the leading provider of edge colocation, edge networking and edge interconnection services. Cole has been a thought leader in the data center technology and edge computing industry for over a decade. Cole is a founding board member of the Open19 Foundation, the founding executive director of the Open Compute Project Foundation and co-founder of OpenStack. He is leading Vapor IO in developing the largest nationwide edge colocation and interconnection platform at the edge of the cellular network. Cole is a Forbes contributor, has been named to Data Economy’s list of The World’s Most Influential Data Economy Leaders and The World’s First Top 50 Edge Computing Influencers.

Matt Trifiro is the chief marketing officer of Vapor IO where he leads the company’s global marketing, branding and communications efforts. He is an expert in edge computing, is co-chair of the State of the Edge Report and Chair of The Linux Foundation’s Open Glossary of Edge Computing. He is a technology industry veteran and a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded or led over a half dozen startup companies. Prior to joining Vapor IO, he was entrepreneur in residence at Xseed Capital and chief marketing officer and senior vice president at Mesosphere. Prior to Mesosphere, Trifiro was chief marketing officer at Heroku, a division of Salesforce, and prior to that he served as senior vice president of marketing for Salesforce Desk.com. He was also a co-founder and CEO of e-commerce startup 1000 Markets (sold to Bonanza) and co-founder and vice president of marketing for interactive television pioneer Wink Communications (NASDAQ IPO). He currently holds advisory roles with a number of venture-funded startups, including Buoyant and Move37 Marketing, and is working on a book about Open Source Marketing.