DEFENSE IS IN OUR DNA.

Alex Karasulu is an entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the software industry and a recognized leader in the Open Source community. His software is used daily by 80% of the Fortune 100, industry leaders such as Atlassian, Google, and Polycom, and is in every Cisco router, including their Kinetic Smart Cities/IoT solution. He is widely known as the original author of the Apache Directory Server, used by IBM both as the foundation of the Rational Directory Server and also integrated into the Websphere Application Server. Alex co-founded several Apache projects, including MINA and Felix, among others, which, along with their communities, thrive independently past his day-to-day involvement in the projects. He is the founder of Safehaus, where he authored the first low-resource mobile OTP algorithms in open source with the OATH community that was later adopted by Google in their Authenticator product. In addition, Alex is the architect of Granite, a new family of metastable consensus algorithms that form the bedrock of the next generation of distributed computing systems. He holds a BSc. in Computer Science from Columbia University.

​

Active in the Web since 1993, Sally Khudairi is the publicist behind some of the industry's most prominent standards and organizations. Sally is a long-time champion of collaborative innovation, notably as the former deputy to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Head of Communications for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). She helped launch The Apache Software Foundation in 1999, and was elected its first female and non-technical member. Sally is Vice President of Marketing & Publicity and Vice President of Sponsor Relations for The Apache Software Foundation, and Chief Executive of luxury brand communications consultancy HALO Worldwide. She helped launch Creative Commons, and co-founded Silicon Valley startups that were acquired by Google and Amazon. She is a technical governance advisor to the Libra Association, and champions "Tomorrow's Technology Today". She was featured in the documentary, "FUD", as well as the "Women Of The Blockchain" and “Faces of Open Source” projects. She is executive producer of "Trillions and Trillions Served", the documentary on The Apache Software Foundation.

​

Alfred Berkeley has 40+ years of leadership experience in the financial industry, startups, and technology. He is the former president and vice chairman of NASDAQ, and former Board Member of the World Economic Forum USA as well as Chairman of Princeton Capital Management LLC, a SEC-registered investment advisor. He has testified before the Joint Committee on Economics of the United States Congress, the House Science Committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Committee on Homeland Security. He was a member of the Public Affairs Advisory Group for the Director of the National Science Foundation, served on the Secretary of Energy Future of Science Committee, and was vice chair of the Evaluation Committee for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Al received his MBA from the Wharton School of Finance of the University of Pennsylvania and BA from the University of Virginia. He served as an officer in the United States Air Force, as a Captain, and Major in the USAF Reserve. He is a 2019 Prometheus Social Enterprise Awards Honoree in recognition of his efforts as Founder of the United Nations Sustainable Goals Equity Fund.

Phil Steitz is a noted FinTech and IT transformation expert whose extensive technology leadership over the past three decades spans highly visible roles that include the first Global CTO for American Express, CIO of Barclaycard US, CTO of Nextiva, CTO of Deem, and CTO of Pegasus Solutions. He was among the earliest to adopt Open Source as a strategic development advantage in the financial services sector, and has been an Apache Software Foundation contributor and Committer since 2003. Since being elected an ASF Member in 2005, he served as a member of the Apache Directory Project Management Committee, Vice President of Apache Commons, Apache Incubator mentor, member of the Board of Directors, and ASF Chairman. Phil holds a PhD in mathematics from the University of Maryland, and is a former professor of Mathematics and Computer Science.

Nursel Karasulu earned her Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Ankara Faculty of Science, and graduated as a post-secondary school teacher and Educational Administrator on Policy and Reform from the Ankara College of Education. She taught mathematics and physics for 30 years, then launched a career in banking at Chase Manhattan Bank which grew to mortgage loan consulting and eventually running her own real estate investment business. After her retirement, she co-founded and led financial operations for Critical Factor, a multinational consultancy for the defense sector, and was involved with the formation of OptDyn, originally Optimal Dynamics, in 2013.

OptDyn is based in the United States and is supported by a multi-national team distributed on three continents.