Mory Ejabat
Chairman and CEO
Zhone Technologies, Inc.

Mory Ejabat is chairman and CEO of Zhone Technologies, Inc. Zhone is a newly formed company pioneering the development of next-generation communications equipment to enable carriers and service providers to cost effectively offer high-bandwidth services independently of the existing local loop communications infrastructure.

Before Zhone, Mr. Ejabat was president and CEO of Ascend Communications, Inc., which was sold to Lucent Technologies in 1999 for $24 billion. Ascend was the leader in wide area network (WAN) solutions for providers and users of the Public Network. Mr. Ejabat joined Ascend in 1990 as vice president of operations, assuming increasingly strategic roles within the company during his career there. He served as president, COO, and director of Ascend before its IPO in 1995. Under Mr. Ejabat's leadership, Ascend's annual sales grew from $40 million to nearly $2.3 billion in just over five years, with an increase in personnel from less than 100 to more than 3,000 full-time employees by the end of 1998. Ascend's business success was achieved both through organic growth and strategic acquisitions, the most notable being the $3.7 billion purchase of Cascade Communications in 1997 and of Stratus Computer Corporation in 1998.

Earlier, Mr. Ejabat was vice president for wide area communications products at Micom Systems, Inc., where he had total P&L responsibility for the WAN product line. Mr. Ejabat received his BSIE and his MS in systems engineering from California State University at Northridge, and he holds an MBA from Pepperdine University.