Leadership

Stephen is a principal program manager working in the Azure team at Microsoft and leads the Governing Board for the Confidential Computing Consortium. Prior to that he was a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Stephen has been a technical executive, a founder, a writer, a systems developer, a software construction geek, and a standards diplomat. He has worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor, working with open source for 25 years. He blogs about open source and software business at “Once More unto the Breach”, opensource.com, and on Medium.

Mike Bursell is CEO of Profian, a company in the Confidential Computing space. He is one of the co-founders of the Enarx project (https://enarx.dev), a visible presence in the Confidential Computing Consortium and a Director on the Governing Board of the Bytecode Alliance. Previous companies include Red Hat, Intel and Citrix, with roles in security, virtualisation and networking. After training in software engineering, he specialised in distributed systems and security. He regularly speaks at industry events in Europe, North America and APAC. Mike has an MA from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the Open University, and is author of “Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud”, published by Wiley.

Dave Thaler is a Software Architect at Microsoft, where he works on IoT security.  Dave has over 25 years of standards body experience and currently chairs the IETF group on Software Update for IoT, as well as the Confidential Computing Consortium’s Technical Advisory Council.  He previously served as a member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) for 11 years.  He chaired IETF groups on Trusted Execution Environment provisioning, NAT behavior, the Port Control Protocol, and multicast address allocation, and has authored over 55 IETF and IAB publications (RFCs). Dave has 20 years of development experience in Windows networking, and has also been a contributor to a number of open source cross-platform projects.  He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan.

Jethro G. Beekman is working on next-generation cloud computing security at Fortanix. Jethro received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California at Berkeley in 2014 and 2016, respectively. Before that, he received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, in 2011. His current research interests include cloud security, secure enclaves, side-channel countermeasures, as well as network and hardware security.

Richard is the Customer Solutions Director at Fortanix and currently the Chair of the End-User Advisory Council as well as General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board of the Confidential Computing Consortium. He gained a Doctorate in Business Administration from Henley Business School by developing a formal mathematical model of perceptual change and has had an extensive career in systems engineering, with recent projects in the field of natural language processing and computational propaganda. By leveraging the integrity and confidentiality guarantees offered by Intel® SGX; Richard is currently working with Fortanix’ customers to enable secure applications deployment, multi-party computation and data analytics, at scale, using private and public cloud infrastructures.

Eric Voit is a Principal Engineer within Cisco’s Enterprise Group. Throughout his 30+ year career in the networking industry Eric has developed, standardized, and driven new technologies to market. These include event-based network Telemetry, architectures for Carrier Ethernet, remote access to VPNs, PPPoE for Broadband, and the first VoIP offering by a major U.S. local telephone carrier. Eric has 100+ US and International patents / patents pending and five IETF RFCs. Eric also runs a Cisco internal venture capital fund.

Marc leads Ecosystem Development projects at Arm as part of the Infrastructure Line of Business. Marc is part of the Ecosystem Development team at Arm, leading projects with partners in the field of security and networking.  Marc is involved in a number of Linux Foundation projects including Parsec and Project Magma.  He is representing Arm on the governing board as well as the outreach committee of the Confidential Computing Consortium.

Ron Perez is an Intel Fellow and Chief Security Architect at Intel. In the Office of the Intel CTO, Ron also directly leads security architecture and pathfinding for Intel’s server and datacenter products and organizations with a primary focus on Confidential Computing.

Ravi is the Sr. Director of Strategic Marketing at Fortanix. Ravi has extensive technology marketing experience spanning multiple startups and public companies, as well as in ZigBee Alliance (now Connectivity Standards Alliance), a standards organization.

Helen Lau joined The Linux Foundation in March 2022 and works as a Project Coordinator for the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC). Helen also works on RISC-V. Previously, Helen worked at the Practising Law Institute as a Senior Pro Bono Program & Membership Coordinator. Helen is excited to transition from helping the pro bono community to the open source community. In her spare time, Helen likes to lift weights in her home gym and aspires to return to powerlifting following the birth of her son. Helen currently resides in Salt Lake City with her family.

Kurt Taylor is a Senior Program Manager at The Linux Foundation.