Speaker Bio
Dr. Ishwar Parulkar is the Chief Technologist for the Telecommunications vertical at Amazon Web Services. In this role he is responsible for setting AWS technology strategy, defining new cloud services and leading initiatives to enable next generation telecom networks and services.
Prior to AWS, Dr. Parulkar was a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco and Chief Architect for business units responsible for service provider access routing, mobile backhaul, packet core, small cell and network orchestration products. He was involved in building the first LTE networks for several tier-1 and tier-2 telecoms across the world based on these products. He was a founding member of industry-wide initiatives around mobile edge computing and 5G and the conviction that cloud technology can transform the telecom field brought him to Amazon in 2016. Before his stint at Cisco, Dr. Parulkar was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems where he led the design of SPARC architecture-based data center computing technology and products, including the first multi-core processor systems and first compute virtualization platforms in the industry. He started his career at Apple, where he worked on the Mac desktop/laptop product lines and on the Newton PDA technology, which had the seeds of the iPhone revolution.
Dr. Parulkar holds an M.S. from Vanderbilt University and a Ph.D. from University of Southern California. He served for several years as a member of the Industry Advisory Board of University of Southern California. He holds several dozens of patents, has published over 25 papers in IEEE/ACM journals/conferences and served as Program Committee member/chair for IEEE/ACM conferences in networking and computing. In 2017, he was elected a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering for his excellence in and seminal contributions to the field of communication networks and data center computing.