David Lu, Vice President, SDN Platform & Systems, is currently responsible for development and engineering of AT&T next generation ECOMP platform and open source ECOMP (ONAP) to enable AT&T network virtualization (SDN) and target OSS/BSS transformation including API, micro-services, policy control & orchestration, hyper-automation, and advanced data analytics. He leads an organization with more than 3,000 people across the globe.

David is a well-respected leader in large scale, and real time software architecture and development, network performance and traffic management, work flow and policy-controlled automation, large databases and big data implementation/mining/analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, software reliability and quality, and network operations process engineering. He has led major software platform transformation initiatives from sales to network/service delivery/assurance, and billing platforms. Examples of his achievements include large scale platforms he has led and engineered that process annually: 984 Trillion network performance events and 348 Billion alarms with 99.99%+ automation; 60 Million dispatches with 14.4 Billion automated manual steps; and over 90 Billion API transactions.

Since joining AT&T Bell Labs in 1987, he has served in various leadership positions at AT&T. He has led numerous automation initiatives in AT&T that resulted in multi-billion dollar savings in the past 15 years and won AT&T the CIO 100 Award in 2010. He holds 43 patents and has frequently appeared as a guest speaker at technical and leadership seminars and conferences throughout the world. He received numerous industry awards including the 2015 Chairman’s Award from IEEE Communication Society for Network and Systems Quality and Reliability and 2017 CIE AAEOY (Asian America Engineer of Year) Award. He has also been very active in community organizations and activities including AT&T APCA, DFW-CIE, and DFW Asian American Chamber of Commerce. He was recognized by AT&T APCA with the 2015 Corporate Leadership Award.

He was accepted to the world-renowned Shanghai Conservatory of Music and came to the U.S. to complete his college education. He has an undergraduate degree in Music, majoring in cello performance and graduate degree in Computer Science.