Constantine Polychronopoulos is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Telco NFV business unit at VMware, San Francisco, since 2016, driving the company’s innovations in the Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Software-Defined Network (SDN) and Telco Cloud Infrastructure Domains.

Previously, he was Vice President and CTO, at Citrix Systems responsible for the Bytemobile product line, the SDN / NFV strategy, and for the expansion of the Netscaler ADC, into the service provider markets. In 2000 he founded Bytemobile, Inc., the global leader in wireless network optimization and data services, which he grew to about 350 employees and over 160 mobile network operator customers, before it was acquired by Citrix Systems in 2012.

Constantine Polychronopoulos received his BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Athens in 1980. He continued his studies and achieved his Masters of Sciences (MSc) in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University in 1982, and finally earned a
PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in 1986.

He was Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and director of the Center for Supercomputing R&D, where he directed the research of more than 70 PhD and MS students, and conducted research that produced novel solutions for compilers, operating systems and networking protocols, including the first cloud computing platform in 1999, the Computational Network Federations.

He founded Bytemobile in 2000, where he served on the Board of Directors and was the CTO, responsible for all products (establishing and leading development teams in four sites), expansion strategy, M&A, go-to-market planning and led sales in several strategic accounts. Among his many innovations were the first streaming video optimization platform, deployed in more than 100 operator networks world-wide, novel analytics solutions, and a framework that enabled Bytemobile to optimize encrypted traffic.

Dr. Polychronopoulos’ research results have been used in commercial software and hardware systems by Intel, Cray, Silicon Graphics, Convex, HP, and other high performance software and networking system vendors.

He holds 10 patents and has published more than 160 research papers on multithreading compilers, OS, distributed and cloud computing, wireless networks and mobile computing. Seven of his publications have received “Best Paper” awards at ACM and IEEE conferences. He has consulted extensively for many software and hardware companies including Intel, IBM, Silicon Graphics, HP, Kubota, NKK etc.

Mr. Polychronopoulos believes that In the next few years we’ll see significant changes in how Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) make the essential shift from communications service providers to rich content, service and application providers. He loves helping MNOs to grasp the real opportunities that an NFV infrastructure makes possible, while balancing the potential risks.

Many MNOs feel held back by their legacy networks, due partly to the heavy investment they’ve made, and partly to the unease that comes with transformational effects of NFV. On the other hand, they must leapfrog to virtualisation and cloud-native network services because both subscribers and enterprise customers demand increasingly innovative services from the MNOs. The network has to respond to the needs of the enterprise for agility; and that means efficiency, scalability-on-demand, and rapid service provisioning. With NFV, provisioning time is being reduced from months down to days, or even hours.

He and his team work closely with VMware’s customers to spread awareness of the opportunities ahead of them and the timeframe they are operating within. Changes need to be made to address the ever increasing real-time needs of the enterprise, and leverage software capabilities to drive scalability, better performance, and the rapid introduction of new services in the emerging world of IoT and 5G.

Mr. Polychronopoulos has received various awards and recognitions, the most notable of which are the 1989 “National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award” by President George Bush, the 1998 “Bodossaki Foundation Award” in Engineering, was given a “Pascal Chair” at the University of Leiden, in 2000, and named a “Fujitsu Endowed Professor” at the University of Tokyo, in 1992.

In 2010 was named among the “Mobile Power 50” as one of the 50 most influential industry leaders by UK’s “Mobile Today” publication and in 2015 he was named one of the top 50 innovators in the history of the Computer Science Department of the University of Illinois.