Fran Heeran is Head of Cloud & Automation at Vodafone Group. Fran is leading the strategy and architecture for the group-wide transformation to fully cloud enable Vodafone’s network, systems and applications.

Fran has over 20 years’ experience in the software industry and has held senior technology and business leadership roles in globally renowned organizations including Alcatel-Lucent,
Nokia and NEC. Fran has worked closely with some of the largest global service providers and has been a contributor to standards organisations and represents Vodafone on the board of the Linux Foundation Networking project.

Prior to Vodafone, Fran was the Senior Vice President and General Manager at Netcracker , a division of NEC corporation where he led the SDN/NFV business unit. Fran was also Senior Vice President and General Manager and Alcatel-Lucent (and subsequently Nokia) where he led the Communications and Collaboration business as well as the charging and policy business. Fran has also held senior business, technology and strategy positions at Aepona (acquired by Intel) and Valista where he was CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Management.