Walid Wakim is Chief Technology Officer at Infinera in the Systems group. Walid’s 25+ years of industry experience has spanned hardware to software to system engineering to defining both optical and multi-layer network architectures. In his current role, Walid heads the office of the CTO, focusing on future system and network architectures. He actively collaborates with network operators and vendors all around the world to create next-generation networking solutions and is actively involved with standards and open source forums. Walid also is a regular speaker at industry conferences, holds a number of patents, and has authored a number of papers in the International Engineering Consortium, IEEE, and OFC as well as for other major journals and industry conferences.