Margaret Chiosi, a former AT&T distinguished architect who's been an outspoken proponent of software-defined networking (SDN), is the latest open source expert to join Huawei.

Light Reading first reported Chiosi's new job this morning, and a Huawei executive confirmed it with SDxCentral. Her new role remains unclear; at press time, Huawei had not returned a request for a comment.

Chiosi, who left AT&T in May, was part of the team championing new approaches to the way the carrier builds networks. She and Senior Executive Vice President John Donovan spoke frequently about Domain 2.0, the initiative to redefine AT&T's network for the age of software-defined infrastructure, working with more startups along the way.

Chiosi was also prominent in SDN-related open source projects. She was an author of the 2012 white paper that introduced the idea of network functions virtualization (NFV). And she was the first president of OPNFV, the open source group developing an NFV reference implementation.

Her standing with those projects would maker her a good fit with the open source dream team Huawei has built. Led by Ayush Sharma, CTO of networks, the team includes experts Chris Donley, formerly of CableLabs, and David Lenrow, formerly of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). (Lenrow is also an occasional SDxCentral contributor.)

Photo: Lorenzo Cafaro via Pexels.