CTOs' vision for the future

Panel vision: collaboration, convergence and climate change

8 October, 2009

By Piers Letcher

Yesterday morning's 'CTO roundtable for growth' session of the forum brought together Hakan Eriksson, CTO of Telefon AB LM Ericsson; Stephan Scholz, CTO of Nokia Siemens Networks; Paul Excell, COO, Innovation, BT; Kazuo Murano, president of Fujitsu Laboratories; Philippe Lucas, vice-president international standard & industry relationships, Orange; Yingtao Li, president of central R&D unit, Huawei; and Samsoo Pyo, CTO of KT Corporation. The session was moderated by Malcolm Johnson, Director of ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB).

Across the vision statements made by the CTOs, the central themes were collaboration, convergence and climate change. "In five years there will be three billion broadband users and 80 per cent of them will be mobile," said Eriksson. "The data travelling over networks will grow a thousand-fold, so we're going to have to work incredibly hard, together, to meet the challenge of doing that. But I think it's doable."

"The internet is everything," agreed Scholz, "and it's going to get much bigger. We're going to have trillions of things and exabytes or zettabytes of knowledge."

"The key will be collaboration," said Excell, "as we move from a voice network, to a data network, to a knowledge network. People have a right to expect that their data is secure on our networks, and that's especially true when you're looking at applications like e-health, for example. We also need to focus on sustainability - so we need to make sure things are 'always available' instead of 'always on'."

"What's interesting about ICTs is that we're finally reaching the point where everything has to become human-centric," added Murano. "With IT, it was data centric, and with CT it was network-centric, but with convergence it becomes human-centric. We're going to have to enhance and enrich our products and services so that they are easier to use - especially for aging populations. And we're going to have to put ICTs at the service of other industries. Take farming, for example: if you use satellite monitoring instead of ground-monitoring, you reduce CO2 emissions by 97 per cent."

"ICTs can be hugely beneficial in reducing emissions in other sectors," agreed Johnson.