Management
John Elms, CEO
John Elms is the Chief Executive Officer and Director of Azalea Networks. Before joining Azalea, John was president and CEO of SpectraLink Corporation (now a part of Polycom), a NASDAQ-listed company until its sale in March of 2007. Under his leadership, SpectraLink became an OEM supplier to industry leaders such as Alcatel, Avaya, NEC, Nortel and Siemens, with sales growing from $71 million in 2003 to $145 million ending in 2006; approximately a third of its revenues came from outside of North America. John began his tenure at SpectraLink as Vice President of Operations. Prior to joining SpectraLink, John served in several sales and service senior leadership positions at PictureTel Corporation in both the U.S. and Hong Kong. He holds a Bachelor of Liberal Arts from Harvard University and is conversant in Mandarin Chinese.
Fang Wu, Founder & EVP Products
Fang Wu is founder, EVP Products and Director of Azalea Networks. Fang has more than 17 years of engineering & management experience and has filed more than 30 patents. Fang began his career designing and implementing DSP real-time Operating Systems. Following that, he worked at Compression Labs as a key engineer working on the world’s first MPEG-2 digital video encoder for DirecTV. Later, Fang started V-Bits (video compression company) as co-founder and VP of Engineering. In 1999 V-Bits was acquired by Cisco for $128 million. Following the acquisition, Fang worked at Cisco as senior manager for ISO-certified products and successfully shipped $20M V-Bits products before co-founding Azalea. Fang received a BSEE from Tsinghua University and an MSEE from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Felix Zhao, Founder & CTO
Felix (Fuyong) Zhao is a cofounder, CTO and Director of Azalea Networks. Felix has more than fifteen years of experience in the wireless and networking industry. He is responsible for the design and development of Azalea’s core intellectual property and currently leads a core engineering team in the company's advanced research & development efforts.
Prior to co-founding Azalea, Felix worked as senior researcher at Cisco Systems where he co-designed and developed award-winning products such as cable routers, mobile routers and residential gateways. While at Cisco, he oversaw the wireless sensor networking initiative and represented Cisco in ZigBee matters. Felix has also worked as Engineering Manager and Consulting Engineer at Cable & Wireless IDC where he played a key role in designing telecommunication network solutions for many major enterprise customers. Felix received BS degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Physics from Tsinghua University, and has seven US patents pending on IP routing, QoS, Radio Architecture, and Mobile Wireless Ad Hoc networking.
Frank Wang, Founder & VP of Engineering
Frank (Xiaodong) Wang has sixteen years of industrial experience in engineering management, and software & system development. He has been VP of Engineering for Acceleratemobile, Inc. in the U.S., a maker of wireless TCP gateways to accelerate TCP/IP data traffic on cellular mobile networks. Frank received his BSEE in Radio Engineering from Tsinghua University, and his MSEE from Colorado State University. He also holds an MS degree from the Engineering School at Stanford University.
Rake Jiang, VP and GM International Sales
and Global Strategic Alliances
Rake Jiang has a distinguished and global senior management career in sales, strategic business development and marketing at leading worldwide network and communication companies such as AT&T, UUNet/MCI Worldcom, Avaya/Lucent and Motorola, as well as entrepreneurial ventures. More specifically, Rake comes to Azalea most recently from Earthlink, where he was responsible for developing the company’s US markets serving multi-dwelling units and IP video products. Prior to Earthlink, Rake was the Chief Representative for sales, business and market development for the Asia-Pacific region in the municipal wireless and mesh network products group at Motorola. Prior to Motorola, Rake was the Managing Director for Asia-Pacific at Fiberlink delivering triple digit revenue growth year over year. Rake holds an MBA from the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird), a BS in software engineering from Peking University where he also attended for his graduate studies.
David Renqing Chen, VP of Operations
David Chen is the VP of Operations at Azalea Beijing where he oversees human resources, IT, manufacturing and operations functions. David has more than 16 years experience in market promotion and company management. He received his Bachelor's degree in Economics from UIBE, and holds the International Senior Professional Manager Authentication.
Ye Menghong, VP of Customer Service
Ye Menghong is the VP of Customer Services, responsible for deployment services and technical support. Ye has more than 15 years experience in the communications industry. Prior to Azalea, he worked in Ericsson (China) Inc. where he was in charge of networking and technology consultation. Ye Menghong previously worked in the Beijing office of Dialogic. He received both a BS and MS degree from Tsinghua University.
Brian Carlson, VP and General Manager North America
Brian Carlson has 28 years of experience in companies involved in telecommunications and information technology. He is responsible for Azalea's North American operations, including sales, sales support, and channel development and management. He has held various positions at Motorola, Ameritech, a U.S. regional Bell company, and NCR. At Motorola, he built and led the North American business for Canopy, Motorola's point-to-point and point-to-multipoint broadband wireless products. Brian earned a degree from Northern Illinois University.
Alan Chan, VP Sales & Marketing Greater China
Alan Chan has 28 years of experience in sales and marketing in China and throughout Asia. He has held various sales and management positions in IT and telecommunications companies including Hewlett-Packard, Hypercom, Newbridge, Alcatel, and Tellabs, Inc. Most recently he was country manager for Proxim Wireless. Alan holds a degree from Chinese University of Hong Kong and a diploma in management studies from Henley Management College in the United Kingdom. He also holds several professional engineering memberships in the UK, Canada, and Hong Kong.
Craig A. Dais, VP of Finance and CFOCraig Dais is the VP of Finance and Chief Financial Officer of Azalea Networks. Craig has more than 16 years experience in a combination of audit, accounting and finance positions with private and public companies. Prior to joining Azalea, Craig was the director of Financial Planning and Analysis for Sprectralink, which was acquired by Polycom. Previously, Craig held senior level accounting or finance positions with KPMG Peat Marwick, ICG Communications and Convergent Communications. In addition, Craig has provided accounting and financial consulting services including preparation for an initial public offering, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance services, financial modeling and audit management. Craig is a Certified Public Accountant, licensed in the State of Colorado. He received a Bachelor of Science in Accounting from Metropolitan State College of Denver.