As Group CTO, Erik Ekudden is responsible for setting the direction of technology leadership for the Ericsson Group. In 2017 he was re-located to Kista, Sweden, after nearly seven-year at Ericsson in Santa Clara, California.

His experience from working with technology leadership globally will influence the strategic decisions and investments in mobility, distributed cloud, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things. This builds on his decades-long career in technology strategies and industry activities.

Ekudden first joined Ericsson in 1993 working on mobile systems research. He has served as research area director and vice president of standardization. During his career, his team created technology and multimedia functionality that are now used in today’s smartphones worldwide. This team also conducted some of the first work on virtual and augmented reality for mobile systems. He has worked to create global mobile systems for 3G, 4G and 5G in close collaboration with customers. 

He holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

Åsa Tamsons is Senior Vice President and Head of Business Area Technologies and New Businesses and member of Ericsson’s Executive Team. With focus on technology and innovation, her team is responsible to drive growth in new areas for Ericsson by identifying, developing and scaling new businesses to support Ericsson’s customers to capture the full potential of 5G, IoT and future technologies. Her team also drives the Ericsson strategy, and Mergers & Acquisitions across Ericsson.

Åsa joined Ericsson from McKinsey & Company in April 2018, where she was a Partner. Her primary focus has been on high tech, software and telecommunication industries where she has lead growth and commercial strategies and also lead the B2B Digital Sales service line in EMEA. She has worked with companies across the world and been based out of Silicon Valley, Stockholm and Sao Paulo.

With a passion for technology and a strong entrepreneurial spirit, she has been a core leader of McKinsey’s Fast Growing Tech practice, supporting the growth of several tech start-ups in the Nordics. She is also a strong advocate for leadership and empowerment of women, initiating and co-founding Women Up leadership program.

Prior to joining McKinsey, Åsa has experience from private equity, marketing and business development at a French strategy consulting firm, H&M and the International Herald Tribune.

She holds a Master of Science in Business Administration from Stockholm School of Economics.

Kyle Okamoto is the Chief Executive Officer of Edge Gravity, a global Edge Cloud Platform that supports the use cases of tomorrow through innovative edge computing solutions. 

Kyle was previously a founding member and the Chief Network Officer at Verizon Digital Media Services, overseeing a global content delivery network and a cloud-based video workflow system supporting server-side advertising insertion. Kyle has worked in various executive capacities for over 17 years in Product, Marketing, Business Development, and Engineering.  

Kyle has also founded and exited several start-ups in the social enterprise and digital media space. Kyle is on several advisory boards for technology companies in the Bay Area and serves on the Executive Advisory Board for the Robert Chinn Foundation and the Asian Pacific Employees for eXcellence (APEX), a philanthropic organization he led for over 6 years. He is also an angel investor and advisor in the venture capital and private equity spaces.

Kyle has a BE from Stevens Institute of Technology and an MBA from New York University and spends his time in California and New York, as a new dad with his wife, to his daughter Rosetta.

Hafiz is the CEO for Telekom Malaysia (USA) Inc. He is a 13+ year Telecommunications veteran with strategy, sales, marketing & operations experience. In Hafiz’s current role, he leads the global organization responsible for strategic business development & performance of a key Telekom Malaysia subsidiary in the Americas and catalyzes transformation of its operations. He also serves as the Chairman for the Malaysia-US Chamber of Commerce and holds a Master in Computer Engineering from UPENN.

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Joe Madden is Founder and Principal Analyst at Mobile Experts Inc., a network of market and technology experts that analyze wireless markets. His accurate predictions over the last 29 years have earned the trust of the 200+ companies that subscribe to his research on 5G, Small Cell, Base Station, Handset, and IoT markets. Mr. Madden holds a Physics degree from UCLA. Despite learning about economics at Stanford, he still obeys the laws of physics.

Lynn Perry joined gaming network company Haste, as CEO in May 2018. Prior to Haste, she held sales, marketing and service leadership roles for Sage Software, marketing automation company Salesfusion, Cloud Sherpas, which was acquired by Accenture in 2015. Lynn is a graduate of The University of Georgia and has a Masters from Georgia Tech.

As founder and CEO, Sam Nagar has led Pixeom to become the market-leading edge computing software platform. A visionary entrepreneur and technologist, Sam has focused on growth areas including edge computing, cloud, IoT, operating systems, virtualization, and distributed computing. Sam believes that by committing to a software platform that is hardware, operating system and cloud agnostic, enterprises can benefit from significant cost reductions, more efficient transfer of data and a truly responsive user experience.

Neil joined Limelight in 2017 and drives the company’s content delivery platform which provides the underlying services for its media, software, and website verticals. Neil also owns Limelight’s edge compute product strategy to help enterprises increase efficiency, improve customer experiences and drive innovation through global connectivity.

Prior to joining Limelight, Neil held senior roles at Akamai Technologies focused on streaming video solutions and managing strategic Cloud Service Partners. In addition, he was a Product Manager at Cisco focused on Service Provider video and networking technologies. Neil majored in telecommunications at Southgate Technical College and holds an MBA from Babson College.

Joshua Petty is the VP of Products and Marketing for Macrometa Corp. He is a veteran of multiple technology startups, and previous to Macrometa held leadership roles at VMware, EMC and Dell Technologies.  JP now works with customers to leverage Macrometa’s Global Data Network for distributed application development.  He lives in Dallas, TX and works with local organizations that offer STEAM programs for girls and veterans, drive environmental legislation, and support the arts community.

Soma is Head of AI and Accelerated Computing, evangelizing AI adoption into telecoms and 5G wireless communications at NVIDIA. Soma is a successful serial Intrapreneur and product leader with more than 20 years in software and the high-tech industry. He has incubated and launched multiple software products globally for large corporations. He is also a mentor to early stage start-ups and Stanford incubation program (iFarm). Soma has the full product-lifecycle experience from product strategy to R&D.

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