Chris Christou is a leader of ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½â€™s Chief Technology Office (CTO) BrightLabs organization, whose goal is to experiment, prototype, and bring to market new, emerging technologies of impact to government and industry. In this role, Chris serves as the firmwide lead for ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½â€™s 5G/NextG suite of offerings, which includes leading its state-of-the-art 5G test facility and the delivery of 5G and NextG capabilities for projects across multiple markets, including DOD, federal, and commercial. In his role, Chris leads the development and delivery of edge cloud solutions, to include extending hyperscaler cloud services to the edge through the development of small form factor cloud products and services. In addition, Chris’ team is delivering and taking to market AIOps offerings that focus on applying AI technologies to cloud operations and 5G/Next networks.
Chris has over 25 years of experience engineering, designing, testing, and deploying cloud environments, networks, and IT systems for commercial, civilian, and defense clients. Since joining ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½ in 2002, he has led projects related to deploying secure cloud environments, designing software-defined networks (SDN), engineering enterprise-wide IT systems, and integrating unified communications systems. Before joining ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½, Chris was a network design and planning engineer for UUNet, which was then the largest internet backbone in the world. Prior to UUNET, Chris worked as a telecommunications engineer for Mitretek Systems and as a software developer for Hughes/Raytheon STX. Chris earned a M.S. degree in telecommunications and a graduate certificate in engineering from the University of Maryland School of Engineering, College Park. He earned a B.A. from the University of Virginia and completed computer science coursework at the University of Pennsylvania. Chris holds certifications for Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Juniper, TMF, and SDN.