Mads Lillelund - Profile
Mads Lillelund - General Manager, Bluesocket Business Group, ADTRAN
As General Manager for ADTRAN’s Bluesocket Business Group, Mr. Lillelund brings extensive senior global management experience and ingenuity to ADTRAN. Heis responsible for overseeing the business operations of the Bluesocket Business Group and the further expansion of its virtual wireless LAN solution into the enterprise and carrier markets.
Prior to ADTRAN’s acquisition of Bluesocket in August of 2011, Mr. Lillelund was the President and CEO of Bluesocket. During his leadership, his vision for a software only model for wireless local area networks (WLANs) was developed thereby transforming the company from a hardware centric model to a software model. His foresight around virtualization led to the development of Bluesocket’s virtual WLAN (vWLAN®), the industry's first cloud based WLAN solution residing on a hypervisor platform. The first hypervisor platform supported was VMware with vWLAN certified as “VMware-Ready”.
Mr. Lillelund established Bluesocket’s product development initiative around the creation of the next generation WLAN solution and set key sustainability metrics inherent to the solution. The metrics included; 1) eliminating hardware components to reduce 80% or more of energy consumption, 2) an over 50% reduction in carbon footprint, and 3) reduced “end of life” electronic waste by completely removing all controller based hardware. Accomplishing these metrics will ensure support of customers’ corporate sustainability strategies.
Mr. Lillelund has over 20 years of experience in the high-tech sector. He has held key leadership roles at AT&T, Lucent Technologies (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent), Enterasys Networks (acquired by Siemens Enterprise Group) and CGCS Computing Solutions, a US-based manufacturer of electronic packaging and embedded computing (acquired by SIE of Austria).
In 2006, Mr. Lillelund joined Bluesocket as President and CEO. Prior to Bluesocket, he served as President and CEO of the following CGCS businesses; CGCS, an electronic packaging and embedding computing company, Aurora Technologies, and Channel Access where he restructured the operations to achieve profitability. After joining Bluesocket, he continued to serve on the Board of CGCS and as an advisor to the company until its sale. Previously, Mr. Lillelund served as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Services at Enterasys Networks, where he was responsible for generating over $400M in annual revenue primarily through distributors and resellers. He has also held several key positions at Lucent Technologies and AT&T in Belgium, Ireland and the United States. In the early years, Mr, Lillelund successfully opened the Russian and Eastern European markets while later becoming the Managing Director and Regional Vice President of Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) for Lucent Technologies' Global Commercial Markets. As Managing Director he established the headquarters in Dublin, Ireland where he was responsible for Sales, Marketing and Operations in 22 countries generating revenues in excess of $320M.
Mr. Lillelund holds several board positions as well as advisory positions to high-tech start-up companies.He has a Bachelor of Business Administration Degree from Baylor University, a Master of Business Administration Degree from the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird) and is a graduate of the Executive Management Program at INSEAD.
In October of 2011, Mr. Lillelund was named the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s (MassTLC) Private Company CEO of the Year for 2011, for his tenure as President and CEO of Bluesocket. This award recognized his outstanding ability to inspire and direct the innovative development and implementation of Bluesocket’s industry-leading virtual wireless solutions, as well as his various philanthropic efforts.
Mr. Lillelund enjoys soccer, tennis and is an avid sailor having participated in several blue ocean races. His latest passion is BodyCombat™, a fitness program inspired by a wide array of martial art disciplines. While traveling throughout the world for key industry events, customer visits and partner meetings, he may attend a class in a city on his travel itinerary.
