Our Leadership Team

Dr. Natarajan has been co-founder and CEO of Forum since its inception in 1991. He was also a co-founder and vice president of DSP Technology Corp. Dr. Natarajan is the co-inventor of the popular DCT transform technique which is the building block for image compression schemes like JPEG and MPEG and holds numerous additional patents. Dr. Natarajan is the Co-Author of a senior level text book on digital signal processing titled "Discrete-Time Signals and Systems". His previous experience includes senior executive and technical positions at Atlantic Richfield, Mead Office systems and Texas Instruments.

Mr. Ockelmann is Vice President, Forum Communications, responsible for Sales, Operations, and Program Management functions, and has been with Forum since 2016. He has more than 20 years of telecommunications industry experience, known for building strong customer relationships and effectively delivering complex solutions. Prior to joining Forum, Mr. Ockelmann served in several program management, product management, and consulting roles at Nortel Networks, and other wireless related companies, focusing on wireless LTE and CDMA networks and management systems.Mr. Ockelmann began his career in the Aerospace industry at Hughes Aircraft Company (now part of Raytheon), where he spent 10 years in program management and manufacturing engineering positions on several defense system programs. His educational background includes a BS degree in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA degree from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.

Muthu has served in the High Technology industry for over 25 years playing key roles as Product Innovator, Marketer and Technology Entrepreneur at Ascend Communications/Lucent Technologies, Intel, Solectron, BroVis Wireless, BlueZen Technologies, and LANNET Data Communications contributing to the growth of Telecom/Broadband Networking, Wireless Connectivity, Internet of Things (IoT), and Network Security. He has brought innovative Telecom-DSL, High Speed WAN/LAN, Wireless (WiFi/5G), Internet of Things (IoT) Connectivity products/solutions to market and helped build a strong installed base via direct and strategic sales partnerships. He possesses a diverse background in Company Scaling, Strategic Business Development, Product Marketing and Innovation Management.

Mr. Dunn is Director of Business Development responsible for addressing new market segments for Forum’s Products. He has more than 25 years of experience in the Telecommunication Networks market with management roles in Network Planning and Design, Technical Sales Support, Account Development and Sales Engineering. Larry has extensive experience in GSM/UMTS, CDMA, LTE, IMS, WiMAX, Packet Core and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies. Prior to joining Forum, Larry held senior positions at Nortel Networks, Ericsson and Cirrus Core Networks. Mr. Dunn holds electrical engineering Degree from the University of Ottawa, Canada.

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Mr. Dean McConnell is Director of Engineering in charge of Hardware systems and Firmware development for Forum’s Conferencing and Alerting products. He has been with Forum for over 20 years. His previous experience includes senior software engineering and project management positions at Rockwell Collins and Broadband Gateways. He was a lead software engineer for the Airforce One Console system at Rockwell Collins.

Mr. Bob Hartwig is Software Director and Consultant responsible for the Application software development for Forum’s Consortium Product line. He has been with Forum for over 20 years. His expertise is in the area of Object-Oriented programming concepts to design and implement flexible, scalable, secure, feature rich, virtualization capable software Applications.  He has extensive knowledge and implementation experience of the DoD Cyber security requirements for the essential software components. He is a VoIP Engineering expert. He has over 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry and previously worked for Darome Teleconferencing., TTI, Coherent Communications Systems and Tellabs.

With over twenty five years in the telecommunications industry, Mr. Jabara helped develop the Emergency Response market within the DoD and commercial arenas. He was key in increasing Forum’s marketplace leadership position. Neal gained his sales experience at Konica and Source Inc. Mr. Jabara earned a Strategic Management degree form the University of North Texas.

Mr. Higgins is an accomplished Sales Executive with a background of successfully selling new and innovative solutions to the channel partner/reseller and MSP Space. He has managed accounts comprising of organizations in Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail, Logistics, Transportation, Technology, Utilities and Government entities. He has product knowledge in selling SD-WAN, IP-Transit, Cyber Security, VPN, IT Networks, Cloud Hosting, Colocation, Data Centers, SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS solutions. Kevan received a BS in Advertising and Marketing from the University of Oklahoma.