Global, CTO

Vanessa (Van) has developed a diverse technology toolset in the last 25 years. She has experience in network and system architecture, mobile video system architecture and governance in both telco and retail sectors. She has consulted for nearly every telco as well as major retailers in North America and has worked as everything from unix sysadmin to Chief Technical Officer with a number of leadership and architectural roles in between, contributing to technologies from mobile, enterprise data centre, multi-national networks and beyond. Now as the Global CTO at Interdynamix Systems (www.interdynamix.com), Van is focused on creating leading innovative solutions that address the current and upcoming market.

She is leveraging commercial hardware and software as well as Open Source technologies to solve for specific problems. This role has her speaking at conferences around the world and spreading the word about the next generation of technologies. A member of Women of Openstack, and Women in Comms, Van is active in showcasing and championing women in tech fields. Currently splitting her time in various open source communities, she was the Chair of the Technical Steering Committee of Open Source Mano. She is also a former member of the Layer 123 NFV advisory board as well as a Linux Foundation Board Member. In addition, she spearheaded the VNF Onboarding Open Source community focused on rapid templating and automation of virtualized network function workloads.

Van attended the University of Toronto where she majored in Computer Science and Astro-Physics. Vanessa currently makes her home in Toronto Canada, where she enjoys spending her free time playing hockey, tennis and fishing.