(Toronto) — The Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION) is pleased to welcome Ted Longley to the ORION team as the newly appointed Director of Engineering and Network Operations. As a member of the senior management team at ORION, Ted will provide strategic leadership for the engineering and network operations department.
Driven by a passion for building and motivating high-performance teams, he led the team that brought the re-architecture of the BlackBerry global network to fruition, resulting in significant reductions in routing complexity, better operational manageability, the increased ability to rapidly provision new services, and enhanced security capabilities.
“With all his experience and well-rounded knowledge, we look forward to having Ted join our senior management team. Ted will continue to work with technology leaders in our connected institutions to ensure that ORION is and remains a robust, secure, technically sophisticated and reliable network,” says Darin Graham.
Prior to joining ORION, Ted spent six years with BlackBerry , where he was an early thought leader and champion for Software Defined Networking/Network Programmability, creating and developing a formal, R&D-focused architectural function within BlackBerry global networks. Most recently, Ted was Vice President of Platform Services at ThinkingPhones, where he globalized the multi-tenant cloud-based service offering by opening new data centres in Europe and the US. He also introduced and integrated automation and continuous integration (CI) concepts, which significantly reduced delivery time of new systems and also reduced implementation error rates.
“I’m very excited to work with Darin and the ORION team, providing technical leadership and contributing to ORION’s important goals and priorities,” says Ted. “As new and existing users become even more immersed in a connected world, I look forward to developing plans help ensure ORION is and remains the backbone of innovation for Ontario’s researchers, educators and innovators.”
About ORION
The Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION) is an advanced technology, “ultra-fast” fibre optic network, owned and operated by a not-for-profit organization dedicated to supporting and advancing research, learning and innovation. ORION connects all of Ontario’s universities, numerous colleges, several teaching hospitals, other public research facilities and a growing number of school boards to one another and to the global grid of research and education (R&E) networks.