In this community member profile we are pleased to welcome two new contributors to the VOLTHA community from BISDN GmbH: Cristina de Francisco (DevOps Engineer) and Jan Klare (Senior Solutions Architect).

About Cristina

Cristina is based in Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain. Most recently she has been investigating, debugging and fixing some of the pipelines for the Berlin VOLTHA community pods. Her primary focus has been resolving issues related to the test infrastructure.

Cristina holds a BS and a Master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of the Basque Country. During her bachelor studies, she started working as an intern at Keynetic Technologies, a cybersecurity startup. At Keynetic she mainly developed and maintained an SDN-based network access control application, as well as designed a CI/CD strategy in Gitlab to improve the testing and deployment process of the application. She continued working at Keynetic through her master’s studies and following completion of her master’s degree, began full time employment there. Keynetic Technologies established a partnership with BISDN GmbH and eventually the companies merged, thereby creating a Spanish subsidiary of BISDN. She currently works for BISDN developing and maintaining a pluggable OLT abstraction software called pOLTA, including the supporting testing and CI/CD strategies and laboratory environment.

About Jan

Jan is based in Berlin, Germany. He has been working on reviving the community VOLTHA pods at the Deutsche Telekom lab in Berlin. In addition, he has refactored the ci-management repository and repaired several bugs. 

Jan holds a Master of Science degree in Biology from the Justus Liebig University of Giessen. After finishing his studies, he and two friends started their first company focused on Open Source IaaS (OpenStack) in Berlin. More and more their focus shifted to automation as one of the most important paradigms in cloud environments. After almost 7 years of working in the world focused on data centers and building IaaS products based on open source software, he decided to broaden his focus and learn more about Software Defined Networking and how all these cloud paradigms could be applied and used in the world of telecommunications. After joining BISDN, he began working on the testing, product and open source strategy for BISDN Linux, a now completely free and open source network operating system. While discovering all the new facets of the growing SDN market and its applicability within the datacenter and telecom world, he sought to learn more about how SDN and the disaggregation and re-engineering telecom use cases to run on IaaS or PaaS could be applied to support upcoming ideas within TIP, the BBF and the ONF. Having a long history with open source projects, Jan decided to focus on interesting open source projects in this area and see where he could help and learn from the community while redesigning the architectures for these use cases.