Speaker

Patrick Lopez is Global Telecom Field CTO at Pure Storage.

He has over 25 years’ experience building, launching and operating telecoms businesses in startups, mid-sized and tier one multinationals.

Prior to Pure Storage, he was global VP of Product Management for 5G products at NEC, where he managed the product strategy and planning, corporate development, and growth of NEC telecom business, including Open RAN, Packet Core and automation, orchestration.

Prior to NEC, he was global VP of Networks Innovation at Telefonica group where he led the teams that invented Open RAN and deployed the first telco Edge Computing. He also extensively worked with Bell Canada and Deutsche Telekom for their Telco Cloud and Edge computing strategy and implementation.

His latest achievements include:
• Over 30 international awards for new product / technology introduction and execution.
• World’s first Open RAN (virtualized Radio Access Network) commercial deployments in greenfield and brownfield networks.
• World’s first multi access (mobile, fixed, enterprise, residential) edge computing deployment (software defined Central Office re-architected as a data center project with transport aggregation, access virtualization, edge computing).
• Pioneered Lean Telco innovation framework for telecom operators.
• Multi 1oo´s million$ joint venture with Facebook and development banks to connect the unconnected. Includes SDN, NFV, open source virtualized ENodeB, EPC, satellite backhaul, Facebook, TIP, Google Loon…

While at NEC, Patrick sat on the board of directors of NEC Advanced Networks (an NEC company) and while at Telefonica he was on the Boards of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and 5Tonic (an open 5G laboratory).

Patrick has collaborated with various industry and financial institutions including Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse First Boston, and has written several articles in collaboration with The Wall Street Journal, Wireless Week, Fierce wireless, RCR Wireless News, CNN and CNBC.
Patrick currently resides in Toronto, Canada and has worked in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Ireland, Spain and France.

He holds an MBA in Corporate Management.