DMTF Executive Biographies

Mike Raineri is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Dell Technologies, where he is a technical leader for enclosure management solutions for storage appliances within the Dell EMC Infrastructure Solutions Group.

Mike has been working in the storage industry since 2007 as part of EMC, and now Dell EMC. He has been involved in the architecture and the development of hardware diagnostic test suites, UEFI applications, and BMC firmware. These roles have allowed him to collaborate over a large spectrum of consumers, from the lowest level manufacturing processes to end users.

Mike has been actively involved with DMTF since 2015. He was elected as the co-chair of the Redfish Forum in 2017 assisting with the ongoing development and adoption of the Redfish standard.

Bill Kawakami is a Software Engineering Manager for the Computing System Product Group at Cisco. He is responsible for software development for blade Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) and Chassis Management Controller. Additionally, he oversees software quality assurance teams for BMC and Chassis Management. For the past 12 years at Cisco, Bill has worked on BMC software both on the B-series (blade) and C-series (rack) servers.

Bill has over 30 years of experience in software development. Prior to joining Cisco, he worked on server software for Silicon Graphics and Veritas. Bill holds a degree in Computer Science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Jeff Hilland is a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs (HPE) working on infrastructure architecture with a focus on management and security. Jeff served as VP of Technology for DMTF for 6 years before being appointed President of DMTF. Jeff has served in various leadership roles in DMTF since 2003, including chair of the Executive Committee, Technical Committee, Platform Subcommittee and co-chair of both the Server Management Work Group and the Desktop & Mobile Work Groups. Jeff is one of the chief architects behind Redfish and contributed significantly to SMASH & DASH. Jeff also co-chairs the SPDM Working Group. Jeff has spent the last 2 years driving industry standards and has also served in chairing roles in the Gen-Z Consortium, RDMA Consortium and the InfiniBand Trade Association.

Jeff's 40-plus year career in the computing industry includes systems and server management, management protocols, data modeling, security, distributed systems architecture, system software integration, automated deployment & configuration tool development, device driver and services architecture & development and performance analysis. It has also included contributions to high-speed intercommunications protocol development & standardization RDMA, CXL, UEC, Gen-Z, InfiniBand and the Virtual Interface Architecture.

John Leung is a Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation in the Data Center Group. John has over 35 years in the computer industry: architecting, designing and coding.

Before joining Intel, John worked at two successful startups (Sun Microsystems and Auspex Systems). In each of these companies, John developed firmware, board-level diagnostics and system-level diagnostics for new platform bring-up. Prior to working in Silicon Valley, John worked in the defense industry (McDonnell Douglas and Logicon). At Intel, John is focused on the manageability interfaces for Intel® Rack Scale Design and server platforms. John was the technology architect for Intel® Node Manager, which provided system power and thermal telemetry and power capping control.

John has been an active member of DMTF since 2004. In addition to his Board positions, John and has participated in many of its work groups, including the Redfish Forum and the CIM Profile working group. John has authored and contributed to over 40 DMTF specification.

John received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering & Applied Science from the California Institute of Technology. While attending Caltech, John worked concurrently as a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Richelle Ahlvers is a Storage Technology Enablement Architect at Intel, where she promotes and drives enablement of new technologies and standards strategies.

Richelle has spent over 25 years in Enterprise Storage R&D teams in a variety of technical roles, enabling new technology ecosystems, leading the architecture, design and development of storage array software, storage management software user experience projects including mobility, developing new storage industry categories including SAN management, storage grid and cloud, and storage technology portfolio solutions.

Richelle has been engaged with industry standards initiatives with SNIA and DMTF for many years. She has served as the DMTF Redfish Forum’s Treasurer, and she serves on the SNIA Board of Directors, the Chair of the Storage Management Initiative, and has led the SSM Technical Work Group developing the Swordfish Scalable Storage Management API from the groups inception; she is the alliance liaison between SNIA and DMTF, as well as the alliance liaison for OFA, OCP, and the SODA Foundation.

Hemal Shah is a Systems Architect in the Infrastructure and Networking Group of Broadcom Corporation where he has been instrumental in architecting numerous key manageability, networking, virtualization, cloud, and security features in several generations of NetXtreme I and NetXtreme II Ethernet controller products for both client and server platforms. Prior to joining Broadcom Corporation in 2005, Hemal worked at Intel Corporation where he led the development of system/silicon/software architecture of communication processors, 10 Gigabit Ethernet controllers, and offload technologies for TCP, iSCSI, RDMA, and cryptographic algorithms.

In DMTF, Hemal has served in various leadership roles including chair of Platform Management Sub-Committee, co-chair of Server Desktop Mobile Platforms (SDMP), Platform Management Components Intercommunications (PMCI), and Security Working Groups. Hemal has been a critical driving force behind the development of numerous DMTF standards related to system management (DASH, SMASH, and PMCI), virtualization management, cloud management, Open Virtualization Format (OVF), network port profiles, and Web Services for Management (WS-Management). Hemal has co-authored 60+ DMTF specifications, three IETF RFCs, and 10 plus technical conference/journal papers. Hemal is a named inventor on 18 patents with 26 pending patents. Hemal holds Ph. D. (computer engineering) and M.S. (computer science) degrees from Purdue University, M.S.E.E. degree from The University of Arizona, and B.S. (electronics and communication engineering) from Gujarat University, India.

Fernando Tavares is an Engineering Specialist within Product Development Engineering Group at Positivo Tecnologia, where he promotes and drives product and system certifications.

He has over 15 years of experience within technology industry at Bosch, PACCAR, Volvo, Michelin and Positivo Tecnologia.

During his career, he has been responsible for various projects related to product and system certifications, system implementation and new product developments.

He has been an active member of DMTF since 2019 and participates in activities throughout the organization. Fernando holds a Master’s degree in Quality Management from Estacio University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Parana Tuiuti University.

Patrick Caporale is a Distinguished Engineer & Chief I/O Architect within the Data Center Group of Lenovo. He has over 20 years of experience within the server, storage, and networking product groups at Lenovo and IBM. During his career, he has been responsible for various projects that delivered storage & networking I/O solutions for the data center, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and Infiniband products. Patrick is the chief technical architect across Lenovo’s server platforms for I/O and leads a team of engineers to deliver the latest generation of data center products. He has been an active member of DMTF since 2013 and participates in activities throughout the organization. Patrick is currently the Co-Chair of the Platform Management Components Intercommunication (PMCI) Working Group. He has been the editor and contributor to many specifications released by the PMCI workgroup. Patrick holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Manhattan College.