Optus Case Study

Mary Kay has 20+ years’ experience in Technical Project and Program Management working for a variety of Fortune 500 enterprises and small start-ups across multiple industries. After receiving her Computer Science degree from Rochester Institute of Technology, she was accepted into a prestigious 5 year accelerated management training program at the Travelers Insurance company.

After successfully completing the program, Mary Kay relocated to Boston, MA where she began working at multiple technology startups, driving improved quality practices within Engineering as well as leading successful enterprise customer engagements. Most recently she has held positions working directly for company leadership to drive strategic transformation of Engineering and non-Engineering operations alike.

At PW, she spear-heads the efforts to strategically transform operational activities to ensure PW is creating products and delivering services to create customer success. Mary Kay is equally passionate about company culture and communication and has led PW’s Value in Action Awards program along with the Getting to Know PW series.

Sanjay Harwani is the GM, India and VP, R&D at Parallel Wireless. Sanjay is a highly experienced R&D manager with 25+ years of experience in Research and Development. Sanjay joined Parallel Wireless in 2014 and built various products in Parallel Wireless portfolio. Sanjay played a key role in building various R&D teams and was instrumental in growing them manifolds.

Before joining Parallel Wireless he worked with Cisco for 10+ years where he lead various cross functional teams in the domain of Broadband Access, Core Routing, Switching, Telecom Core and various Gateway functions.

Sanjay has held several technical and leadership roles within high tech companies, among them are Cisco, Infineon and Marconi/FORE Systems.

Sanjay holds a Master of Science degree in Networking and Telecom from Stratford University, USA and a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communications from NIT Bhopal, India.

On a personal note, Sanjay is married to Keerti and is a proud father of 2 kids, Kanav and Hrishant. In his free time, he loves to play table tennis and spending time with his family.

Eugina, a self-made immigrant woman, started her telecom career as a secretary and now has gone on to become VP of Marketing of the major telecom industry disruptor Parallel Wireless. She has over 20 years of strategic marketing experience, leading marketing and communications for small and large global technology companies.

She has been Instrumental in establishing Parallel Wireless as the #1 supplier of Open RAN solutions globally. At Cisco, she was responsible for fiscal planning, managing a 20m+ budget, and all integrated marketing activities for SP Mobility and IPNGN product and solutions portfolios globally. Prior to Cisco, she was the Marketing Manager for Starent, since nearly the company’s inception and developed and managed the marketing strategy for the launch of Cisco’s $2B Starent Networks acquisition at Mobile World Congress 2010.

She is also an inventor, holding 6 patents that include 5G and Open RAN.

Her passion is to help other women in telecom to realize their full potential through mentorships, communities’ engagement, and workshops. Her story is a positive example that if you work hard, play fair, continue to learn, and always believe in yourself, you can grow yourself, your career, and others.

Eugina resides in Massachusetts with her husband, teenage son, and three rescue dogs. She loves theater and museums. She volunteers for dog rescues and programs that help underprivileged children and women.

Eugina has a Masters of Teaching from Moscow Pedagogical University, and studied computer undergrad at CDI College in Toronto, Canada.

Baruch is highly experienced R&D manager with almost 20 years of experience in Research and Development. Before joining Parallel Wireless Baruch held a position of engineering manager at Intel, where he led cross domain teams for several wireless solutions, from the Silicon and RF design, through development and integration till mass production. It included several engineering functionalities such as VLSI, software, firmware and hardware.

Baruch had several technical and leadership roles within high tech companies, among them Siano Mobile Siicon and Motorola.

Baruch joined Parallel Wireless back in 2018 as a Director of Access Technologies, which he led and built several teams globally. Baruch promoted into a Vice President of Access Technologies role for 2 years and today he is acting as Head Of global R&D. As Head of R&D Baruch is in charge for leading all engineering functions, strategic planning, budget and execution.

Baruch holds a B.Sc in computer engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology (Cum Laude), M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University and Management studies from Tel Aviv University.

Reni Ninan brings over 25 years of experience to his role as SVP of Product Management at Parallel Wireless. His unique background from living and working in Delhi, Dubai, Chicago, Dallas, Moscow, Gurgaon, and India, across multiple technologies; Optical, IP, Microwave, Mobile and 2G/3G, 4G and now 5G, will serve as an asset to the organization. Additionally, his ability as a results-oriented, problem solver and quick, data driven decision maker with a strong customer focus will positively impact the Parallel Wireless experience. One of the contributing factors to his success is through developing strong relationships with customers and internal stakeholders that build trust, credibility and create positive results.

His most previous experience was as Vice President and Head of Global RAN Operations at Mavenir where he successfully oversaw and grew an incubation team for customer engagements spanning across multiple countries in all continents. Prior to joining Mavenir, he served 21 years between Nortel and Ericsson, with Nortel being acquired by Ericsson in 2009. During his tenure, he held various advancing roles, across multiple technologies, with his final as VP and Head of Operations of Emerging Business.

He holds a BS in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Government College of Engineering, Trivandrum, India.

My name is Steve O’Brien. As an HR Executive with 30 years of experience I am excited to join Parallel Wireless in my new role as Chief People Officer (CPO) . I have a strong track record and passion for building great teams and great businesses with publicly traded companies(GE, Cadbury Schweppes, Sara Lee, Avon Products), distressed companies undergoing turnarounds (Playtex and Mikasa) as well as global, well funded pre revenue startups (Freshly, Clever Leaves). One of my greatest strengths is an ability to build cohesive global teams filled with talented, engaged team mates who deliver results in a supportive, high performance culture. I believe passionately in a People First Strategy. During my tenure, I’ve experienced both success and failure as a business leader. I bring a “Work Hard and Play Harder” philosophy and strive to be an empathic leader and player/coach.

On a personal note I am married to Susan O’Brien, a very talented and successful Psychotherapist(My Coach) and I’m the proud father of four kids, including Triplets (Daniel, Sara, and Rebecca O’Brien). In my free time I enjoy golf, open water swimming, Notre Dame Footbal (Go Irish) an enjoy spending time with my partner and kids.

Matt brings over 15 years of global law firm and GC experience representing technology companies across all stages of growth. At Shoobx and Gazelle, he was a member of the executive teams responsible for all corporate financing, legal operations and strategy to support growth. At Endeca, he managed commercial licensing and was responsible for overseeing corporate compliance and governance initiatives, intellectual property matters, international operations and expansion. Matt was responsible for driving legal aspects of the successful negotiation and sale of the company to Oracle (its 6th largest acquisition ever when announced – reported at $1.1 billion). As an attorney at Goodwin, Matt represented public and private growth technology companies and advised clients on IPOs, mergers and acquisitions and venture capital transactions. Matt has a BA in Political Science from Boston College and a JD from Boston College Law School.

Chris is an accomplished CFO, CEO and Board member with a passion for leading dynamic high growth businesses.  His executive leadership experience spans companies of all sizes ranging from start-ups to large multinationals including Dataxu, Inc, Gazelle Inc, Fidelity Investments, Pegasystems, Event Zero, and Digital Equipment Corporation.  Chris has helped these companies build game-changing and actionable business and financial plans to drive revenue growth and improved profits. His track record for improving financial results while improving customer and employee satisfaction led to his being named CFO of the Year (2012) by Boston Business Journal.

Yisrael has over 30 years of experience in business development and account management where he’s driven revenue growth and led strategic planning, budgeting, forecasting, and deal pricing. At Gilat, he sought out and sourced new clients by developing networks and independently identifying and developing relevant resources for sales and business development. Yisrael also refocused Gilat’s portfolio from satellite solutions to include cellular solutions to drive an increase of 42% in company revenue. Previously, as a General Manager at EMI System in Nigeria, he performed P&L and R&D responsibility for ‘full options’ security solutions to high profile clients in the private and public sectors across Nigeria while also directly managing a global team responsible for product planning, product marketing, new product introduction, software development, network level testing, solutions development, and post-sales support. He has an MA from MeA SheArim, Jerusalem.

Simon has over 30 years of experience as a telecom and defense industry executive. Simon was the founder and CEO of Axis Network Technology and reimagined the remote radio head with a next-generation re-configurable digital radio platforms company. As a result of the company’s technology and significant market share, it was acquired by leading Korean manufacturer AceAxis and its products have been deployed in numerous cellular networks around the world. Prior to AceAxis, Mr. Mellor led technology strategy at Airtech as Chief Technology Officer, where he reimagined base station and coverage enhancement equipment. As a head of Global Business Development and then European Sales for REMEC, he achieved significant growth in multiple OEM accounts. Simon holds an MSc, Microwave and Modern Optics from U. of London, BSc, Electronic Physics from Royal Holloway, University of London and MBA from The Open University.

Sridhar co-founded Parallel Wireless after 20+ years as a proven technology leader with focus on reimagining traffic/policy management, base stations, Class 5 Switching, IMS Core, Wireless MSC and Telephony Application Server. As the Sr. Principal Architect of Next-Gen Products, Sridhar reimagined the design and development of Cedar Point/Genband 3GPP traffic and policy management solution. He was a founding member of several successful startups such as Cedar Point (acquired by Genband) where he was Technical Director of Call Processing, Excel Switching/Lucent (Technical Lead) where he led the design of Lucent soft switch and Tellabs Wireless where he led design of PCS base station. He has 15 US patents pending and issued. He holds an M.Tech, Applied Electronics from CIT and B.E, Electronics Engineering.

As Chief Product Officer Kaitki is responsible for leading product strategy, product management and engineering. Kaitki co-founded the company after 20+ years of leading and managing worldwide product development teams who reimagined the Packet Core. She has been instrumental in managing and scaling the development of the Starent/Cisco Multimedia/VoLTE strategic product line that generated multimillion dollar revenue. Prior to that, as a founding member of several successful startups, Kaitki was responsible for SS7 & SIP Signaling at Cedarpoint, Wireless MSC at Lucent/Bellabs and was involved in reimagining Base Station Controller (BSC) for wireless network at Tellabs. Kaitki has 20+ US patents pending and issued. Kaitki holds MBA from Babson College and a BS in Computer Science from IIT.

Rajesh is a visionary who, together with the other company founders, accurately identified the need for easy to deploy, resilient and cost-effective LTE network architecture that would overcome many of the legacy technical challenges associated with wireless communications — the foundation upon which Parallel Wireless was born. Rajesh co-founded the company after 21+ years of reimagining the wireless, wireline, and cable industry and leads the technology behind the Parallel Wireless solutions. As one of the industry’s pioneers in convergence technologies, he led the development of next-gen VoLTE and 3G/4G Femtocell convergence servers at Tatara, led transformation of first commercial softswitch into a Wireless MSC product at Bell Labs/Lucent, reimagined cable industry leading IMS servers at Cedarpoint, and led commercial mobile ad hoc networks (MANETS) development at Powerwave Cognition. He has 25 US and international patents pending and issued. He holds a BS in Computer Science from IIT.

Keith brings to the organization a tremendous amount of business, technology and thought leadership expertise. As Chief Technology Officer at his previous company, Fuze, Keith led innovation and differentiation strategy for Fuze’s product portfolio. Prior to Fuze, Keith was co-founder and CEO of Parlai, a Boston-based startup focused on cloud-based email analytics. Before Parlai, he held the position of SVP of Engineering for 10 years at Endeca, one of the great Boston-based enterprise software success stories, where he led the teams that reimagined the company’s pioneering customer experience management, enterprise search, and business intelligence applications. After Endeca was acquired by Oracle, Keith became Group Vice President, Software Development and was given expanded responsibility over the Information Discovery, Oracle Web Center Sites, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, and Oracle Language Technologies product lines. Keith holds a BSE in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University.

Steve leads the senior management team in setting the company’s strategic direction and is guiding the company’s evolution from its successful first customer deployment into broad commercialization and growth. Steve has been part of reimagining the technology landscape for over 20 years. As founder and CEO of Endeca, he reimagined the database to support faceted information ultimately leading to Oracle acquiring the company as its 6th largest acquisition ever when announced (reported at $1.1 billion). He was part of the team creating Akamai that reimagined global Internet content distribution – now carrying peaks of 15 terabits/s of web traffic on any given day – and led the team at Inktomi that reimagined the network cache to create carrier class caching. Earlier he worked with AT&T Teradata where enterprise computing was reimagined with the first use of Intel processors for enterprise servers. He has a BS from Princeton University and MBA from Harvard Business School.