Raven Innovation
OUR TEAM
Founder and CEO
Dr. Levi Perigo is an information technology professional with extensive experience managing, designing, researching, troubleshooting, and training advanced technology solutions. Dr. Perigo is a Scholar in Residence | Professor of Network Engineering in the Department of Computer Science (additional appointment in Technology, Cybersecurity, and Policy (TCP)) graduate program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to joining the University of Colorado full-time, Dr. Perigo was a Senior Network Engineer at ADTRAN Inc. In this role, he served as an escalation point for isolation and resolution of heterogeneous internetworking problems for major accounts. He holds vendor certifications in networking technologies in areas such as software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP routing, switching, network design, wireless technologies, Voice over IP (VoIP), and Internet of Things (IoT) home integration.
As a Research Associate for the Open Networking Foundation, Dr. Perigo contributes to the creation and advancement of SDN and the OpenFlow standard. He is also on the MEF Research Council where he contributes with his expertise in SDN/NFV . For ONF and MEF, Dr. Perigo acts as a subject matter expert for their training and certifications programs.
His interests are in a variety of internetworking technologies such as network automation, VoIP, IPv6, SDN/NFV, and next generation protocols. Currently, his research focuses on network automation, SDN, NFV and cloud orchestration.
Dr. Perigo holds an MS in Information and Communication Sciences from Ball State University and a Ph.D. in Information Systems from Nova Southeastern University. Some of his interests outside of technology include cycling (mountain/road), rock climbing (traditional/sport), and snowboarding.
Chief Operating Officer
Andrew Hanlon is a business and technology professional with wide ranging experience in sales, operations, marketing, customer service, logistics, and software development. In addition to his responsibilities at Raven, he is the myFSU Product Manager at Florida State University. These products include the myFSU mobile application and the myFSU portal desktop application used daily by 42,000 students and 14,000 employees.
Prior to his time at FSU, Andrew spent 12 years in various leadership roles across the organization at GTO Access Systems (now Nortek Security & Control). As Senior Director of Retail Sales, his teams generated record growth in e-commerce through product differentiation, promotional planning, and inventory management. Key vendor partnerships included several multi-million dollar accounts such as Amazon, Costco, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Tractor Supply. As Sales Operations Manager, he ensured effective communication flow and collaboration between Sales, Marketing, Procurement, R&D, Finance, and Technical Support through business analysis, reporting, and market research.
Andrew holds a BA in Business Management from Anderson University (IN). Some of his other interests include cycling, college football, and working with youth.
SDN/NFV Architect
Dewang Gedia works as SDN/NFV Architect at Raven Innovation where he focuses on researching and developing end-to-end solutions for SDN and NFV Network Architectures to meet complex business and network requirements. Previously, Dewang has worked at Cisco Systems and Charter Communications Data Center. At Cisco, he worked on various regression test cases for Cisco ACI product development, and at Charter Communications, he was involved with creating a CI/CD platform for VNF appliances. Dewang has worked with various SDN controllers such as ODL, ONOS, Ryu, Floodlight, Open Contrail; OpenFlow capable switches like Open Switch, OVS, Pica8, HP Procurve 3500yl, Dell S3048-ON and Arista 7XXX; OpenStack; ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) and CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center).
Dewang is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Technology, Cybersecurity and Policy (TCP) program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dewang’s research specialization is in Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-defined Networks (SDN). His interest toward NFV developed while he was pursuing his Masters from the TCP program. During his Masters, he served as Teaching Assistant for the Next Generation Networks (NGN), and the Linux Systems Administration classes which helped him expand his horizon for NFV and SDN by working on various specialized projects under the guidance of Dr. Levi Perigo. Dewang graduated with his Masters in Telecommunications in May 2017. Upon completion of his Masters, Dewang was motivated to further his interests in NFV-SDN by pursuing his Ph.D.
Under the guidance of Dr. Perigo, Dewang has been researching the feasibility of containerized SDN-Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) for Internet Service Providers (ISP). The research is being conducted in accordance with the various challenges faced by ISPs around the globe and per the NFV Research Group (NFVRG) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI-NFV) for the adoption of VNF systems. Dewang was recently awarded the best IEEE paper for his work on performance evaluation of SDN-VNFs in Virtual Machine (VM) and Container.
Rahil Gandotra
SDN/NFV Architect
Rahil is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Technology, Cybersecurity and Policy (TCP) program with research interests in software-defined networking and energy-efficient networking. Rahil also serves as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for the courses in network management and automation, and software-defined networking working with Dr. Perigo. In this role, Rahil manages a team of Graduate Student Assistants for designing the course syllabus, setting up lab environments, holding recitation sessions, and troubleshooting students' technical issues.
In addition to his degree work at CU Boulder, Rahil works as an intern at Stateless Inc. creating proof-of-concept demonstrations of the Stateless system's integration into existing infrastructures. Prior to this, Rahil has also worked as an intern at CableLabs in their Software R&D team and was one of the early contributors to the SDN/NFV Application Development Platform and Stack (SNAPS) project. Prior to this, Rahil worked as a Network Application Engineer at Aryaka Networks. In this role, he researched, designed and implemented various deployment scenarios for their SD-WAN and CDN services, diagnosed the escalated network issues and worked with various stakeholders to drive them to resolution, and coordinated with different teams all over the world to create standard operating procedures, service impact reports, and a knowledge base.
When he doesn't have his 'geek hat' on, Rahil enjoys reading and hiking - striving to complete one novel a month and cover all the beautiful trails in and around Boulder, Colorado.