Power100

Global Telecoms Business is now selecting the Power100 for 2010

The Power100 for 2010 will be published at the end of September 2010 online on www.globaltelecomsbusiness.com and on paper in the September-October printed issue of Global Telecoms Business.

The Power100 are Global Telecoms Business's list of the 100 most powerful people in the telecoms industry, based on the nominations of our readers.

We are now looking for suggestions now. In order to propose an executive for the Power100.

This is how to do it

1 Click on this link to open an email: aburkitt@euromoneyplc.com

2 Fill in the nominee's name in the subject line. Subject line should read: GTB Power100 2010 nomination for NAME

3 Write 75 publishable words about why this person should be considered as one of the GTB Power 100 for 2010, stating their current role and the contribution they are making to the organisation and the industry as a whole. IMPORTANT NOTE: we will use these words in the online and printed list of the Power100 in the event that your candidate is selected. Please aim for 65-75 words in sentences that will clearly show why the person is there among the 99 other members of the Power100.

4 State who you are, give your email address and your direct phone number in case we need to check details. Your name will NOT be published but we do need to know it.

5 Add a high-resolution picture of the executive -- at least 600 by 600 pixels. A PICTURE IS ESSENTIAL.

6 Send the email. One email per nominee. If you want to propose a second person, please do it in a separate email.

Deadline for all contributions is September 2 2010. Online publication date: September 24 2010. The editor's decision is final.

Please note: this is not a vote. Please do not ask colleagues and business partners to send multiple nominations for the same person. One well written, well argued submission of 75 words will have more effect than six or seven separate emails all mentioning one persion's name and little more.   



See below for the Power100 for 2009 ...



The Global Telecoms Business Power100 for 2009

INDEX
Go to bottom of index to read entries in full

Ahuja, Sanjiv 61
Al-Barrak, Saad 20
Al-Fouzan, Salah 95
Alierta, César 7
Ametsreiter, Hannes 51
Baksaas, Jon Fredrik 50
Bartz, Carol 93
Bharti Mittal, Sunil 18
Brown, Greg 64
Catz, Safra 85
Chambers, John 54
Chang Xiaobing 10
Chou, Peter 73
Chua Sock Koong 40
Ciliv, Sureyya 45
Colao, Vittorio 11
Combes, Michel 44
Conroy, Stephen 31
Creaner Martin 77
De la Vega, Ralph 65
Desch, Matt 90
Entwistle, Darren 56
Eriksson, Håkan 53
Frenning, Malin 100
Gabriel, Chris 46
Ganek, Jeff 72
Garg, Punit 21
Gedeon, Ibrahim 94
Genachowski, Julius 5
Gilbert, Andrew 87
Gilbert, Chris 83
Gomi, Kazuhiro 96
Gorti, Bhaskar 41
Greenquist, Mark 66
Halford, Andy 62
Hesse, Dan 22
Holcombe, Tony 80
Hurd, Mark 38
Jha, Sanjay 47
Jobs, Steve 27
Kallasvuo, Olli-Pekka 36
Katz, Eli 52
Kennedy, Kevin 82
Key, Matthew 42
Kriens, Scott 28
Kumar, Vinod 60
Largent, Steve 59
Lee Theng Kiat 71
Lipatov, Sergey 84
Lombard, Didier 35
Lynch, Dick 24
McAdam, Lowell 39
McCormick, Walter 57
Mehrota, Rajiv 67
Melamed, Leonid 48
Morrissey, Kathryn 81
Nemsic, Boris 30
Nordmark, Ingrid 68
O’Hara, Michael 79
Obermann, René 13
Olsson, Mats 89
Pullen, Robert 63
Pusey, Steve 34
Quigley, Mike 49
Reding, Viviane 6
Ren Zhengfei 12
Richard, Stéphane 70
Rinne, Kris 92
Rob Conway, Rob 1
Robbiati, Tarek 75
Scheepbouwer, Ad 58
Schmidt, Eric 14
Seidenberg, Ivan 3
Seiffert, Grant 97
Senecal de Fonseca, Michelle 86
Shamolin, Mikhail 29
Silverman, Josh 37
Sindhu, Pradeep 74
Singh, Jagdeep 76
Son, Masayoshi 19
Spears, Ronald 69
Spio-Garbrah, Ekwow 88
Srinath Narasimhan 8
Stephenson, Randall 2
Storrie, David 91
Suri, Rajeev 25
Sweldens, Wim 98
Tan Kah-Rhu 32
Thodey, David 33
Touré, Hamadoun 23
Verwaayen, Ben 16
Vestberg, Hans 9
Wang Jianzhou 4
Wang Xiaochu 15
West, Barry 43
Willetts, Keith 55
Yamada, Ryuji 26
Yin Yimin 17
Yong Ying-I 78
Young, Gavin 99

1  Rob Conway
CEO of GSM Association and member of the board

Conway has steered the GSM Association to be more than a trade association representing 800 operators around the world. Even in charge of just that, he would be powerful: the GSMA has more countries on its list than the UN, and the success of its members has become a significant influence on those countries economic progress.

But Conway has become more than the voice of his collective members. He has also made the GSMA do more than most trade associations: with initiatives such as PathFinder it is creating the environment in which its members — and fixed operators, content providers and other partners too — do business with one another. The GSMA is creating today’s telecoms marketplace.

And with the number of GSM-family mobile phones in the world now approaching four billion, that’s some market to be in control of.

2  Randall Stephenson
Chairman, CEO and president of AT&T

Stephenson took over AT&T after the series of mergers creates what is now the world’s largest international telecommunications company, but he has helped to drive it into a more coherent, unified operation than anyone could have expected when BellSouth, SBC and classic AT&T came together along with Cingular Wireless.

Since becoming chairman in 2007, Stephenson has strengthened AT&T’s position as the world’s largest international telecommunications company by focusing on mobility and broadband access to the internet. In the US it fights Verizon and Verizon Wireless for business in smartphones — AT&T was first to sell the iPhone and still has US exclusivity — as well as mobile data, broadband, video and voice, and across the world it has a leading position in global business solutions.

3  Ivan Seidenberg
Chairman and CEO of Verizon

The king of mergers, who has welded together wireline and wireless companies in the US — Nynex, Bell Atlantic, GTE and Airtouch among others — and globally, with MCI Worldcom creating Verizon Business. His vision has helped to make Verizon — plus Verizon Wireless, which it owns 55% — one of the two leading operators in the US and one with an extensive international portfolio. Verizon is leading in directly fibred households in the US, putting on a million households in 2008, more than double the figure at the start of the year, and thanks to Verizon the US is now leading the world in annual FTTH growth.

4  Wang Jianzhou
Chairman of China Mobile

Wang runs the biggest mobile operator in the world, now investing heavily in 3G. In March 2009 China Mobile announced that it had 457 million customers, up by 23.8% on the previous year. Most of these are 2G, as the government’s reorganisation of the industry had only just kicked in. But for the 3G programme Wang has ordered 160,000 base stations and more than 200 cities will be covered by the end of 2009. The company will be using the home grown TD-SCDMA, which means terminals will be more expensive, but China Mobile has the advantages of scale. And he’s already planning for LTE: it will be “software upgrade and hardware adjustment” to the 3G network, he says.

5  Julius Genachowski
Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission

Genachowski is a lawyer who’s probably the most web-savvy person to be chairman of the US regulator: he has served on the boards of Expedia, Hotels.com, Web.com and other companies, and was chief of business operations at IAC, Barry Diller’s portfolio of internet businesses.

He’s joined the US regulator, as President Barack Obama’s nominee, when telecoms is being seen as central to the new administration’s strategy to stimulate the economy.

At the heart of this is the National Broadband Plan, which is now being developed by the FCC in consultation with others. That puts Genachowski in charge of the modern equivalent of the 1930s policies which did so much to stimulate the US power, car and steel industries.

The future of US telecoms operators — along with that of the US equipment industry — will depend on the policies Genachowski helps to evolve over the next few months.

6  Viviane Reding
European Commissioner for media and telecoms

A year ago we expected Reding to be approaching the end of her spell as the world’s most powerful politician in terms of influence in telecoms, but the election of José Manuel Barroso to a further term as president of the European Union’s commission means she’s likely to be part of his team for another five years. She did have a plan for a sort of supreme regulator, but more recently she’s shifted her focus to encouraging the spread of technology into less-developed parts of Europe as part of a programme to overcome the recession. As the top telecoms strategies for 27 nations in the EU, she will remain a powerful figure for some years ahead.

7  César Alierta Izuel
Chairman of Telefónica

With less of a public face than many of his peers in the industry, Alierta has established Telefónica as one of the world’s largest integrated telecommunications operators by market capitalisation. Since he took over in 2000, he has led the company on a bold global expansion — in South America, where Telefónica operates its Movistar mobile brand and owns fixed networks in Argentina, Brazil and other countries. In Europe outside Spain, the O2 brand predominates — and in the UK, it is now the biggest operator by market share and provides more connections, counting fixed and wireless, than BT, which floated off O2 a decade ago as its former wireless subsidiary. Now, his ambition is to turn Telefónica into a successful corporate provider as well as a consumer operator.

8  Srinath Narasimhan
CEO of Tata Communications

As an executive in the technology end of one of India’s leading industrial empires, Narasimhan was given the job in 2002 of taking over the former state-owned VSNL, which once owned a monopoly in the country’s international telecoms connections. He has transformed VSNL into a true international operation, putting Tata’s $29 billion might into taking over networks such as Teleglobe and Tyco Global Networks so that it now has a presence in Europe and North America — just the countries whose high-bandwidth connections into Indian outsourcing operations. With Tata Consultancy Services, a software company, in the group, he has a head start. Now poised for further global investments.

9  Hans Vestberg
President and CEO of Ericsson from the start of 2010

Ericsson CFO Vestberg will take over from Carl-Henric Svanberg, who is leaving to become chairman of oil company BP. While other Western equipment vendors have struggled with mergers or failed entirely, Ericsson appears to continue to ride the broadband wave. Vestberg has just two shadows to haunt him: one is Sony Ericsson, the handset maker that appears to be reverting to Sony’s control; the other is Huawei and ZTE. Ericsson is developing its managed services side, like its rivals, but is showing extraordinary success in good old engineering — driving 3G to extraordinary speeds while forcing along the development of its successor, LTE. Svanberg has set his successor a high standard to follow.

10  Chang Xiaobing
CEO of China Unicom

Shorn of its CDMA operations but with the addition of fixed-line China Netcom to its own GSM business, China Unicom is the smallest of China’s three new giants in terms of revenue. But it is creating new international links — with Telefónica, the Spanish operator that has extensive interests in Latin America and Europe and is already one of the largest in the world. China Unicom has the advantage in China of being the only operator of the three to be rolling out industry-standard WCDMA, giving it access to roaming data revenues from visitors as well as access to volume products. Unicom and Telefónica together will be a powerful force that the world’s vendors will have to listen to.

11  Vittorio Colao
Group CEO of Vodafone

Vodafone is the biggest international mobile phone operator, with 315 million customers, and Colao has now been running it for just over a year, since he took over from Arun Sarin in mid-2008. He is the company’s first leader from Omnitel, the Italian operator — now part of Vodafone — which has been the nursery of many leaders in the industry today, and he has helped take the group away from its 1980s roots in the English countryside, by deciding to move the headquarters to London. He’s more of a media person than previous Vodafone bosses, who tended to be engineers: he worked for publishing group Mondadori and for McKinsey on media and telecommunications, and spent a couple of years from 2004 as CEO of another Italian publisher, RCS MediaGroup. Today he’s one of a powerful group of four — with the CEOs of Verizon Wireless, China Mobile and Softbank Mobile — who are working together on the future of mobile.

12  Ren Zhengfei 
Founder and president of Huawei Technologies

In the 20 years since he set up Huawei he has turned the infrastructure world on its ear. Like its fierce Chinese rival ZTE the company has done well in emerging markets, but also like both of them Huawei is appearing more and more in developed economies too. In the past few months it has scored deals with Vodafone, Clearwire, BT and Deutsche Telekom among others. It’s beginning to be confident enough to take a prominent place alongside traditional western suppliers.

13  René Obermann
Chairman of the management board of Deutsche Telekom

Head of T-Mobile until he moved up to take over the whole company in the wake of the removal of Kai-Uwe Ricke in late 2006. He joined the German incumbent as head of sales for T-Mobile Deutschland in 1998 and then went on to be CEO of the German business, and then ran T-Mobile’s operations elsewhere in Europe, including its expanding interests in eastern Europe.

He spent four years as the mobile supremo on the DT management board until he replaced Ricke to become head of Europe’s biggest telecoms company. Since then he has brought in new senior colleagues from the mobile side of the group.

Deutsche Telekom is frequently said to be interested in buying other European telcos — it already owns Hungary’s Magyar Telekom and it now has a managing interest in Greece’s OTE.

He’s in the mood for some reorganisation, having just agreed with France Telecom to merge their two UK operations, and the industry is waiting to hear his plans for T-Mobile in the US: sell it, or buy something, or do something like the UK deal?

14  Eric Schmidt
Chairman and CEO of Google

In 2008 Schmidt was far and away proposed by more of our readers than anyway else, and his influence continues. Android, the Google-led operating system, is now available on a number of handsets, and some are tipping it as a system for PCs too.

Google remains one of the biggest customers of the industry, with servers and network around the world, but it has not become a direct competitor — its Googlevoice voice over IP offering has been launched just in the US and has not really taken the world by storm. It is, though, an investor in Clearwire, the Sprint-dominated WiMax project which hopes — perhaps optimistically — to challenge the GSM mobile world’s LTE.

Schmidt has an impressive track record, which has taken him through Silicon Valley hotspots such as Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and Sun Microsystems, where he was CTO and ran the Java development.

15  Wang Xiaochu
CEO of China Telecom

Has the challenge of turning round China Telecom’s fixed-line operations — which has been losing 10 million customers a year — and of revitalising the CDMA operations acquired from China Unicom and putting into operation a fast 3G rollout, which is good news for CDMA vendors. But he’s also building up China Telecom into an international wholesale operator — forging relationships with global operators with multinational customers wanting access to China’s still growing industrial sector.

16  Ben Verwaayen
CEO of Alcatel-Lucent

He’s now had almost a year at the successor to Pat Russo at the head of Alcatel-Lucent. The company recorded a small quarterly profit — just €2 million — at the end of July, but it was the first since Alcatel and Lucent merged; so he’s making progress. Verwaayen knows both sides of the industry, having started his career as a supplier at the old ITT before joining what became KPN in 1988, and then moving to the board of Lucent Technologies in 1997 until he ran BT from 2003 to 2008. When he left — initially to take a rest from the industry, before Alcatel-Lucent called — the feeling was that he had done well, but the ambitious 21CN project has stalled and the former group CFO is taking a close look at BT Global Services.

17  Yin Yimin
President and executive director of ZTE

Yin has been the CEO of ZTE for five years now, though he rarely makes public appearances, still less gives interviews. He spoke at a Mobile World Congress press conference in February 2009: it was the first time most people there had seen him. Despite this, ZTE goes from strength to strength, and the company has won business in emerging markets — such as Ukraine and Uganda — and the developed world, where its HSPA+ dongle is working on mobile broadband networks at up to 21 megabits a second. It has a close relationship with Telstra and the Australian operator’s Hong Kong mobile offshoot, CSL.

18  Sunil Bharti Mittal
Chairman and group CEO of Bharti Enterprises

Mittal has spent much of 2009 wrestling with a proposed merger of his Bharti Airtel with South Africa’s MTN, which would create one of the largest mobile operators in the world. The talks have already had several extended deadlines, and they may fail. Mittal — who has grown one of India’s biggest business groups, owning the biggest GSM operator in the country — will be powerful in the telecoms industry even if the merger is called off. If he does merge with MTN the new company will be a tremendous influence.

19  Masayoshi Son
CEO of Softbank Mobile

Bought Vodafone’s languishing Japanese operation for $15 billion in 2006 to add to his already successful range of businesses — which include super-fast fixed network operations and internet services. Since then has continued to take the initiative in Japan’s highly competitive telecoms market. Son believes that telecoms operators have to be careful not to become dumb pipes, carrying content for others. But he’s also made Softbank into one corner of a four-way partnership — with Vodafone, China Mobile and Verizon Wireless — which are working together on the fourth generation of mobile technology and services.

20  Saad Al-Barrak
CEO of Zain

Expanded Kuwait’s MTC into the Middle East, then bought Celtel in Africa and rebranded the lot as Zain — now one of the most powerful brands in a wide part of the world. His colleagues say he is inspirational: he is certainly dynamic and very ambitious. But the future of Zain has been under a surprising cloud since early 2009, with rumours of discussions with companies wanting the take over the African operations, and more recently reports that mysterious investors are set to buy 46% of Zain. But the lack of confirmation of any of these details leaves observers mystified. Nevertheless Al-Barrack remains a towering figure in Zain, who has helped to drive innovation and expansion.

21  Punit Garg
President and CEO of Reliance Globalcom

Under Garg’s leadership, Indian operator Reliance has put together a portfolio of strategic acquisitions of telecoms companies Vanco, eWave World and Yipes and he has overseen their integration in a period of 12-18 months with an earlier acquisition, Flag Telecom. This has transformed Reliance into a powerful international operator, capable of delivering services to operators and multinational corporations.

22  Dan Hesse

CEO of Sprint

Sprint is recreating itself though it’s still wrestling with a surprising number of wireless technologies — the former Nextel’s iDen, its own CDMA 3G and the new WiMax, which Sprint is now pursuing as the biggest investor in Clearwire. There are some powerful fellow investors in that — including Google and Intel — and Sprint is launching a WiMax MVNO using Clearwire’s technology. Meanwhile it continues as a significant corporate and international wholesale provider. Hesse’s latest move is to take 100% control of the US version of Virgin Mobile, which runs on the CDMA network — but he’s also giving iDen a lease of life with a pay-as-you-go service.

23  Hamadoun Touré

Secretary General of the ITU

The ITU is one of the specialised agencies of the United Nations — though it is older than the UN itself, as the ITU dates back to the 19th century. Under Touré, a former satellite engineer and executive with Intelsat, Touré has promoted the organisation to lobby actively for bridging the digital divide and helping telecoms make a contribution to the economies of developing regions. Everyone has a fundamental right to communicate, says Touré.

24 Dick Lynch

CTO of Verizon

Lynch’s adoption of LTE in late 2007 as Verizon Wireless’s route to 4G was a crucial moment in the development of the new wireless broadband technology: it closed the market to Qualcomm’s 4G plans, shrunk the potential market for WiMax and gave Verizon access to a future world of 4G data roaming. Now, he’s overseen the testing of equipment from Verizon Wireless’s two chosen vendors, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson, including test calls of voice over IP as well as video and files.

25  Rajeev Suri

CEO of Nokia Siemens Networks from October 2009

Suri was the head of NSN’s services operation and has been chosen to take over from Simon Beresford-Wylie, who has decided to leave after playing a central role in setting up the merged vendor. Suri, who will be moving to Finland from his current base in New Delhi to take up the appointment, has been with Nokia since 1995 after a career in the computer industry. He has worked in Finland, the UK and Singapore as well as India. He was head of NSN Asia Pacific until he took over when NSN set up its new services division — and his appointment to the top job is perhaps a further indicator of the future for equipment vendors.

26  Ryuji Yamada

CEO of NTT DoCoMo

After several years of withdrawing from the rest of the world — after unhappy experiences trying to promote iMode at the start of the decade — DoCoMo, led by Yamada since June 2008, is on the move again. It is working with Tata in India, which is using the DoCoMo brand for its new nationwide GSM rollout, and it has bid for a German mobile services company. At home, DoCoMo is competing with KDDI and Softbank: all are moving towards LTE operations, though the Japanese prefer to use the term 3.9G than 4G.

27 Steve Jobs

CEO of Apple

The iPhone remains the most stunning handset yet released, but operators are starting to look a bit more sceptically at its contribution to their revenues. He, and the iPhone, are cults; but Jobs is now recovering from a liver transplant his continuing contribution to the industry is now something that people dare to question.

28  Scott Kriens

CEO of Juniper Networks

Twelve years so far as head of one of the few vendors that is not moving into managed services, instead focussing on high-performance IP technology and promoting cross-industry standards via IPSphere, an organisation now merging with the TM Forum. Juniper has quietly grown to the point at which it now has 10 times the market capitalisation of Nortel, exceeds that of Alcatel-Lucent and is nudging that of Motorola.

29 Mikhail Shamolin

President and CEO of MTS

MTS, part of the giant Sistema industrial and business corporation, is the largest mobile operator in Russia and neighbouring countries and is one of the biggest in Europe. It’s in the process of merging with another part of the Sistema empire, the UTS-Comstar operation, which has fixed networks — so the deal will allow the expanded company to offer triple-play packages and more. Shamolin took over the top job in May 2008 after heading the Russian unit, when revenues grew 67%. Now MTS is lending its brand to Sistema’s Indian investment.

30  Boris Nemsic

General director of VimpelCom

A year ago he was the high-profile CEO of Telekom Austria, a group with expanding ambitions across eastern Europe. Earlier in 2009 he made a personal journey still further, to Moscow, to run VimpelCom, the company which has similarly expansionist plans. It has licences covering the whole of Russia plus the entire territories of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Armenia. Last year it acquired licences in Vietnam and Cambodia. He’s been unusually quiet since taking on the new role — but he does have a huge operation to learn.

31  Stephen Conroy

Australia’s federal minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy

The Australian government is the first in the world to come up with national plan to link all households to a high-speed national broadband network — fibre to 90% of homes and businesses and the rest wireless and satellite. It’s plan B for Conroy: the first idea was to ask operators such as Telstra and Optus to bid for the project. After Telstra’s bid was judged not to meet the criteria he set up an NBN Company — now headed by Mike Quigley — which will build the networks itself at a cost of $A43 billion (US $37 billion). The network will be used for other applications including e-health, education and smart grids.

32  Tan Kah-Rhu

CEO of OpenNet

OpenNet is the consortium appointed by Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority to build a carrier-neutral national broadband network reaching every home — the model more recently adopted by Australia and now being examined by others.

Tan was previously SingTel’s vice-president for access and transmission engineering, and was appointed in February 2009 to run the project to build the network: SingTel is one of the four partners in OpenNet. She is an engineer who ran Singapore Aeradio from 1996 to 2001 and has headed the planning and operation of the global submarine cables for both SingTel and its Australian subsidiary Optus. The NBN will be operated by a separate company, Nucleus Connect, a subsidiary of StarHub.

33  David Thodey

CEO of Telstra

What an act to follow. Until May the CEO of Telstra was the unmatchable Sol Trujillo, but he served his term in Australia and decided to head back to the US. Thodey has taken over what even insiders call the toughest job in corporate Australia at a time when the political and media spotlight on it is even brighter than it was in Trujillo’s time. He took over in the penultimate year of a ground-breaking end-to-end business transformation, which has given Telstra the world’s fastest mobile broadband and an advanced fixed IP network, but at the start of a period of intense negotiations which could see the company change even more, or be split up by the Australian government.

34  Steve Pusey

Group CTO of Vodafone

Responsible for all aspects of Vodafone’s networks, IT capability and supply chain management, but most of all is the engineer in charge of the largest international mobile communications group’s efforts to expand 3G HSPA mobile broadband and to develop LTE — long term evolution — to 4G. In particular, he’s working closely with his opposite number at Verizon Wireless, in which Vodafone has a 45% stake, on the LTE programme. Vodafone has equity interests in operators in 31 countries and has around 40 partner networks worldwide, so Pusey’s technology decisions will impact not only the vendors he’s working with but millions of users over the next decade or so.

35  Didier Lombard

CEO of France Telecom Orange

One of the oldest CEOs of a major telco. Reports suggest that, at 67, he’s set for another two or three years, though an heir apparent has been suggested. Lombard has worked for most of his life either in the French government or France Telecom — entities that at one stage were hard to untangle. In 2008 he made what perhaps was his last attempt to acquire more European business when he tried, but failed, to buy TeliaSonera. This year he’s agreed with Deutsche Telekom to merge their UK operations — perhaps under a completely new brand. The UK was where the Orange brand, now used by France Telecom worldwide, started. Orange’s new focus appears to be emerging markets, and particularly Africa: we’ll hear more in 2010, no doubt.

36  Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo

CEO of Nokia

Taking over from Jorma Ollila, the man who took Nokia from being a diversified manufacturer in 1992 to the world’s largest mobile phone company, was always going to be a challenge, but Kallasvuo has managed to keep the Finnish company in the lead, with a 40% market share for phones. The company was open at the start of 2009 about the effect of the recession on phone sales — shocking the industry with its downward revision of forecasts — but it appears to be increasing its share of the smartphone market.

37  Josh Silverman

President of Skype

It’s been a memorable time for Skype, since Silverman joined the eBay operation in March 2008 and watched as some of the flaws in eBay’s original purchase were exposed. The founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, still want their ball back and apparently hold the patents that are crucial to Skype’s operation, while eBay has negotiated a sale to new owners, headed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen — so whatever happens Silverman will have to work with new owners. Meanwhile 350,000 new users are downloading Skype software daily, and the company has a new partnership with Nokia and has an iPhone application.

38  Mark Hurd

Chairman of the Board, CEO and president of Hewlett-Packard

Hurd has revitalised HP since he became CEO in April 2005 — and chairman since 2006 — after the company had a troubled period under the previous team. It has been a significant force in the business for many years but until this year Hurd put together all of its telecoms interests into a single, new division, headed by a young executive, Erwan Ménard — who is surely a future candidate for the Power 100.

39  Lowell McAdam

President and CEO of Verizon Wireless

McAdam is conducting three juggling competitions at the same time. First, he’s steering Verizon Wireless from the world of Qualcomm’s CDMA to the GSM’s long-term evolution — a shift of more than technology but of culture and relationships. Second, he has constantly to remember that the Verizon group is just a 55% shareholder in Verizon Wireless, and he has to balance the interests of Vodafone, with 45%. Third, he is being tipped as the next COO of Ivan Seidenberg, first to take over from Denny Strigl — who used to run Verizon Wireless himself — and second as the unspoken heir apparent to group CEO Ivan Seidenberg, should he ever decide to retire, though that probably won’t be soon. He’s someone with a world perspective, having been VP of international operations for AirTouch, the company that brought Arun Sarin into Vodafone, and ran the technology for operations in Europe and Asia.

40  Chua Sock Koong

CEO of SingTel

As group CEO since April 2007, she oversees SingTel’s three key businesses, Australia, where the company owns Optus; Singapore, the home country; and SingTel’s international operations. She’s also on the board of Bharti Airtel, the Indian mobile operator in which SingTel has a stake — and thus has a role in Bharti’s long-drawn out negotiations to merge with the South African operator MTN. Chua is an accountant by training, and spend a long time as SingTel’s CFO.

She heads the company with footprints in the two Asia-Pacific countries that are building national broadband networks — Singapore and Australia. If those two bold experiments work, other operators round the world will be wanted to learn from her experience of such carrier-neutral FTTH projects.

41  Bhaskar Gorti

Senior vice president and general manager of Oracle’s communications global business unit

Gorti has driven the realisation of Oracle’s industry strategy, by expanding the company’s product portfolio into offerings which span OSS, BSS and service delivery space. By leading the development, sales and integration of acquired products into the Oracle portfolio, he has helped reshape the industry, the way software applications can be purchased and the flexibilities now available for operators.

42  Matthew Key

Chairman and CEO of Telefónica Europe

Key is a former Vodafone executive — financial director for the UK operation — who is now in charge of the challenging task of turning Telefónica into a multinational services provider. He’s come into this role through a move to become CFO of O2’s UK business in early 2002, followed by promotion to UK CEO three years later, months before Telefónica bought the whole O2 group. Another three years, and he replaced Peter Erskine to run what was then Telefónica O2 Europe. O2 is a fabulous brand in the consumer sector, but Key’s task is to make Telefónica a name that’s recognised by IT directors and CIOs across Europe.

43  Barry West

President of Clearwire International

West, a former BT Mobile executive, is a staunch advocate of WiMax. He supported the technology as CTO of Sprint and took it through the merger of Sprint’s WiMax project with Clearwire’s. Now he is the international face of Clearwire, pounding the world trying to create an infrastructure for international roaming — something WiMax desperately needs if it is to compete with LTE, which has the ready-made support of the 800 members of the GSM Association. But WiMax still has patchy coverage around the world: West is talking with operators in Russia, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia and Pakistan.

44  Michel Combes

CEO of Vodafone Europe

The heart of the original Vodafone, its European operation, now has 113 million customers and annual revenues of £30 billion — a substantial operator in its own right. Combes started his career at France Telecom and returned in 2003 as CFO, and became part of its group strategic committee. He moved to TDF in 2006 and was hired by Vodafone in 2008: interestingly, France is one of the major countries in his patch where Vodafone does not have a direct presence, as it is a minority shareholder in French mobile operator SFR. Clearly, it will be an advantage that he can deal with the management of Vivendi, which controls SFR, is their own language.

45  Sureyya Ciliv

CEO of Turkcell

Ciliv, a former Microsoft man with a Harvard MBA, pioneered the launch of 3G technology in Turkey despite the global economic crisis, legal challenges and objections from the competitors in a highly competitive three-player market. He has transformed Turkcell from a mobile operator to a leading technology and communications company. Though Turkcell became the first Turkish company to be listed on the NYSE before he arrived, he has developed it into a widely-based service provider. It not has 61.4 million customers in eight countries — Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Turkey, Georgia, Northern Cyprus and Moldova.
 

46  Chris Gabriel

CEO of Zain Africa

The future of Zain is not entirely clear at the moment — especially the African operation, which has been linked to at least one possible acquirer, keen to expand its operations in this fast-growing region. But Gabriel is acknowledges widely as the person who has led Zain’s operations in Africa with enthusiasm. Colleagues say that he is decisive, has a passion for community development and is accessible to all staff in all levels. He has instigated a culture of performance and ownership of the business and its results.

47  Sanjay Jha

Co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of its mobile services division

The future of one of the best known — but most struggling — brands in the mobile industry is in the hands of this former Qualcomm executive. Motorola revived as a mobile brand with the RAZR but then since lost its way. Now it has thrown in its lot with the Android community and has launched its first smartphone using the Google-backed operating system: time will tell.

48  Leonid Melamed

President and CEO of Sistema

His company owns Russian mobile operator MTS, which is merging with Comstar-UTS and its associated MGTS, the former government-owned local fixed network in Moscow. Active outside Russia in parts of the former Soviet Union, but is also investing in India’s Shyam, where it is using the MTS brand — perhaps a brand we’ll see in other parts of the world in years to come. Sistema is diverse: it also controls Intourist, the former monopoly travel agency for the USSR, and IT and telecoms vendor Sitronics.

49  Mike Quigley

Executive chairman and CEO of NBN Company

This lucky former Alcatel-Lucent executive didn’t get the least coveted job of 2008 — taking over from Pat Russo as CEO of Alcatel-Lucent — but he has won the political hot potato of 2009, setting up and running Australia’s National Broadband Network, a carrier-neutral venture that is supposed to connect 90% of homes and businesses with direct fibre and the other 10% with wireless and satellite.

He’s only just starting in the job — but Australia’s bold strategy is unmatched in any other developed country and Quigley’s success or failure in the role will be watched closely by the industry and by governments around the world, from the US to India.

50  Jon Fredrik Baksaas

President and CEO of Telenor

Telenor is more than the incumbent of Norway. With 12 mobile businesses from Europe to Asia it now lays claim to the status of the seventh largest mobile operator worldwide. A former CFO of a range of companies before joining Telenor in 1989, he has been CEO since June 2002. Today, Telenor has interests in the four Scandinavian countries, plus several in eastern Europe, including a stake of about a third in Russia’s VimpelCom, and in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia.

51

Hannes Ametsreiter

Group CEO of Telekom Austria

Ametreiter has taken over from Boris Nemsic as group CEO, following Nemsic’s departure for Moscow and VimpelCom. A US-educated Austrian, Ametsreiter is a marketing man where Nemsic was an engineer. He was an international brand manager with Procter & Gamble before joining Mobilkom Austria, of which he became marketing manager in 2000. He became CMO of the group’s Austrian incumbent operator and then overall head of the fixed network business. As group CEO since April 2009, he is also both CEO of the fixed and mobile operations within Austria.

52

Eli Katz

Founder and CEO of XConnect

Computer whizz from Imperial College who understands more about IP and voice over IP than almost anyone else. He created XConnect as a venture-capital funded company to set up peering relationships between VoIP operators to avoid their need to route calls through the local TDM operator — and has won deals in South Korea, the Netherlands and places he prefers not to talk about. Most recently XConnect has formed a relationship with the GSM Association, to interconnect with its Neustar-operated PathFinder project.

53

Håkan Eriksson

CTO of Ericsson

As Ericsson has grown to dominate the wireless broadband market, pushing up HSPA speeds to 21 megabits and beyond and entering the future world of LTE, the memorably named Eriksson has played a prime role, first in R&D — where he was responsible for core network development, radio network development and service network and applications, as well as for Ericsson Research — and later as CTO of the whole company. He is a key individual helping to plan where telecommunications is heading in terms of standardisation and technology.

54

John Chambers

Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems

Talk to many a global telecoms executive in 2009 — Telstra, Reliance and others — and they will enthuse about using their Cisco TelePresence systems to hold meetings without the grind of international travel. Chambers has been CEO for 14 years and in 2007 spent $3.2 billion on WebEx, a company that facilitates web-based business meetings.

55

Keith Willetts

Chairman and CEO of the TM Forum

He’s a believer in “the lean communications provider”, though what was the Telemanagement Forum has grown under his leadership to absorb a number of other telecoms organisations, not only in OSS and BSS but in related spheres, to become one of the most influential in the business. He says that telecoms operators should learn from companies in other industries, including budget airlines, and has succeeded in building the TM Forum’s membership — after a slump in the early part of the decade — up to 700 and continues to urge them to think of telecoms as something that extends beyond the bitstream to include the media that the bits carry and the businesses that depend on them.

56

Darren Entwistle

President and CEO of Telus

In nine years as head of Telus, Entwistle has transformed it from a Canadian regional telephone company into a national operator through a strategy focused on data and wireless, which includes a $53 billion investment in technology and innovation across the country. He began the project in 2000 with the purchase of Clearnet, a Canadian nationwide mobile operator. Since then the company has added QuebecTel, Williams Communications, PSINet and Emergis. Before taking up the Telus role, Entwistle spent seven years on the senior leadership team at Cable & Wireless in the UK. A couple of years ago he came close to bidding for Bell Canada, potentially creating a dominant Canadian operator, but it just escaped his grasp.

57

Walter McCormick

President and CEO of the United States Telecom Association

A journalist and lawyer who lobbies professionally for the US telecoms industry among government and politicians in Washington DC. He joined USTelecom in 2001 and has helped to make the organisation into a trade association with clout. In tune with the times, it is now calling itself “the broadband association”, though numerous statistics show that the US is lagging many developed countries in both fixed and mobile broadband speed.

58

Ad Scheepbouwer

CEO of KPN

Scheepbouwer is the first CEO of a national telco that has embraced the open network approach. He fully understands the concept of a trans-sector approach and KPN has become the first incumbent to invest in R&D to study this concept in more detail. He is actively involved in building FTTH networks in the Netherlands that can be used, on a wholesale basis, by a range of different, independent operators.

59

Steve Largent

President and CEO of the CTIA

The Cellular Telephone Industry Association but now prefers to be “CTIA: the Wireless Association”. It’s almost the US equivalent of the global GSM Association, though the guys from the GSMA require allegiance to GSM technology or its successors, while the CTIA is technology-neutral. It’s also a more cross-industry association, with operators, vendors and other companies represented on the board. The CTIA is a lobbyist, for which Largent is well suited as a Republican politician: he sat in the House of Representatives for Oklahoma for seven years until 2001.

60

Vinod Kumar

President of global data and mobility solutions for Tata Communications

Though Srinath Narasimhan is the CEO, Kumar is the Tata executive that other telecoms operators — Tata’s communications customers — are more likely to meet. He’s recently picked up a wholesale contract to work with BT on termination of its voice calls worldwide. He runs 300 points of presence, enabling the company to offer a global content delivery service on a single global IP network throughout Europe, Asia, North America and India.

61

Sanjiv Ahuja

Chairman and CEO Augere

Since stepping down from his spell as global CEO of Orange in 2008 Ahuja has become a full-time entrepreneur, largely focussing on emerging markets. His first venture, Augere, aims to provide WiMax services — and he wants to be one of the largest operators in the world. He has recruited a management team, raised $125 million and acquired spectrum in south Asia and Africa. Augere has launched its service in Pakistan and Bangladesh and is running trials in Uganda.

62

Andy Halford

Group CFO of Vodafone

An accountant, of course, who’s been with Vodafone for 10 years and has done his time as CFO of Verizon Wireless — at a particularly difficult time, for he was in the US when Verizon preferred not to think that Vodafone owned 45% of its mobile business and many in the UK were lobbying hard for Vodafone to divest its interest and return the money to shareholders. That’s over, and Halford is still a member of the board of representatives of the Verizon Wireless Partnership.

63

Robert Pullen

President and CEO of Tellabs

Pullen had been with Tellabs for 23 years before he became CEO in February 2008, so he’s seen considerable changes in the company’s activities. Carrier revenues from traditional landline services are declining, but demand is still high among consumers for new media and content such as video and internet services. Pullen’s company is still highly focussed on North America, but he has started to put more emphasis on other parts of the world: now they account for 40% of revenue. BT Wholesale, for example, has picked its ethernet backhaul for mobile operators.

64

Greg Brown

President and co-CEO of Motorola, and CEO of its broadband mobility unit

Shares with Sanjay Jha the role of finding salvation for Motorola either as a single company or as two separate entities. Brown’s business includes home and networks mobility and enterprise mobility solutions businesses, leaving Jha with mobile phones. He has headed four different businesses at Motorola including the government and public safety business, and he led the $3.9 billion acquisition of Symbol Technologies, the second largest transaction in Motorola’s history.

65

Ralph de la Vega

President and CEO, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets

AT&T has converged its wireless operations — which De la Vega used to run — with its consumer operations. Now he heads all consumer marketing, sales, content and converged services for the company, and is about to be chairman of the CTIA, the US mobile industry association.

66

Mark Greenquist

President and CEO of Telcordia

Greenquist has strengthened Telcordia’s position in software and services, despite a loss in legacy revenue from its old relationship with the US fixed operators. Highlights include a share with Syniverse in India’s mobile number portability project, probably the biggest such project in the world, due to go live from September 2009.

67

Rajiv Mehrota

Chairman, CEO and founder of VNL

Perpetual Indian telecoms entrepreneur for 35 years. Founded Shyam Telelink, now part of the Russian-owned Sistema group and operating under Sistema’s MTS brand, and is a director of Sistema. But his latest venture is VNL, which is called a “zero opex” network, using solar-powered base stations so that operators can build a business case for telephony to remote areas where ARPU is less than $2 a month. Aim: to provide connectivity to the 800 million people in India who are not covered by a phone network.

68

Ingrid Nordmark

Head of LTE product development in Ericsson

LTE will be the world’s first true global mobile communications standard — even WiMax fans have been known to admit that — and Ericsson has put Ingrid Nordmark in charge of the development programme. She has built her team in less than a year and has gathered a group of young engineers along with the world’s most experienced in order to secure a quick and high-quality deployment of LTE — but Ericsson is up against Huawei and ZTE as well as Alcatel-Lucent and NSN in this fight, so the challenge is for the future of the company.

69

Ronald Spears

President and CEO of AT&T Business Solutions

The business arm of AT&T provides telecoms for about four million organisations, including small companies in the US and global multinationals. The division is creating a single IP-based global network carrying data, ethernet, VPNs and other services such as hosting.

70

Stéphane Richard

Chief of staff to Christine Largarde, French finance minister

Not an obvious candidate as one of the Power 100 — not yet, at least. But in May 2009 Richard was named as someone who would join the France Telecom board later in the year, as the intended heir to Didier Lombard, the CEO. Given the remarkable revolving door in Paris between government and French business this seems more than likely: Lombard’s predecessor was Thierry Breton, who went on to be an earlier finance minister before leaving to run Atos Origin. Richard’s task at France Telecom will be international development, but many expect him to take over from Lombard in a couple of years.

71

Lee Theng Kiat

President and CEO of Singapore Technologies Telemedia

ST Telemedia is a Singapore investor, backed by government-controlled Temasek, with substantial investments in Global Crossing as well as StarHub, PT Indosat and — from mid-September 2009 — Eircom, Ireland’s incumbent operator. Lee is a lawyer by training, but helped set up ST Telemedia in 1994, initially as an alternative provider of telecommunications services in Singapore and the region. The same year it set up ST Teleport, a full-service satellite and broadcasting solution provider, and rolled out the first GSM network in New Zealand with BellSouth — now Vodafone New Zealand.

72

Jeff Ganek

CEO of Neustar

Jeff Ganek is credited with steering Neustar’s development for 10 years and has led the growth of its revenues away from the original service area of number portability — 90% now come from other applications. Ganek’s vision of global interoperability has propelled Neustar towards a deeper exploration of IP-based offerings and so is responsible for creating one of the biggest and most essential directory services to the global communications and internet industry to date. The company is developing a close relationship with the powerful GSM Association — particularly with its contract for PathFinder, the trade association’s project to interconnect IP data services.

73

Peter Chou

CEO of HTC

Said to be the driving force behind HTC, a company that has helped shape the PDA and smartphone market since it was founded in 1997 and which claims the first palm-size PDA in 1998 and the first smartphone in 2002. Originally HTC hid its brand, making phones for operators to sell under their own brand, but it now proudly sells Windows and Android HTC devices. In 2009 it launched the HTC Hero, the first Android device with a bespoke user interface, which was designed from the ground up by HTC.

74

Pradeep Sindhu

Vice chairman, CTO and co-founder of Juniper

With a background at Xerox’s awe-inspiring Palo Alto Research Center — home of much of today’s IT and telecoms technology — Sindhu founded Juniper in 1996, initially as CEO. One of his enthusiasms is to improve the performance of the internet: back in 2003 he and Juniper founded a project called “the Infranet”, which then became IPSphere Forum and is now part of the TM Forum. His latest is the Stratus Project, set up this year to deliver the next generation in technology for data centres fabric to improve scale, performance and simplicity.

75

Tarek Robbiati

CEO of CSL

Telstra subsidiary CSL operates the largest mobile network in Hong Kong, following the merger in 2006 with New World Mobility. Robbiati joined in 2007 and completed the operational integration of the two as well as an entire network swap-out. He is a former deputy CFO of parent company Telstra, but was previously head or corporate finance at Orange in the UK, shortly after its takeover by France Telecom. Under his leadership CSL has installed the first all-IP mobile broadband network, running on 3G technology but also piloting LTE — and therefore, potentially, giving Telstra useful experience for the future.

76

Jagdeep Singh

President, CEO and co-founder of Infinera

Infinera is not quite the best-kept secret — but it is an enthusiasm for the CTOs of high-performance telecoms operators. Singh helped to set up the company in 2001, at the bottom of the dotcom crash, to build photonic integrated circuits and then to build the switching equipment around them for telecoms operators: every line card can provide 100 gigabits a second of DWDM capacity, and the technology has just been expanded to submarine networks. It’s his fourth start-up — others are now part of Shiva, Ciena and Qwest, having been acquired for $650 million in total — and Infinera’s market cap is already more than $700 million.

77

Martin Creaner

President and COO of the TM Forum

Until his promotion, Creaner was CTO of the TM Forum, responsible for overseeing the success of now de-facto industry standards including the eTOM business process framework, the SID information framework and the TAM applications framework, part of the NGOSS solution frameworks, which today deliver significant cost savings and risk reductions in key transformation projects. He also advises the boards of a number of telecoms companies, and is the chairman of Selatra, a mobile games developer and publisher.

78

Yong Ying-I

Chairman of Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority

As head of the IDA, Yong is running the organisation responsible for Singapore’s next-generation national broadband project. She’s also permanent secretary — the senior official — in the republic’s ministry of health, though was previously CEO of the IDA, and she has served in a number of other government departments. But the NG NBN is Singapore’s plan to push its technology into a world leading position.

79

Michael O’Hara

Chief marketing officer of the GSM Association

The GSMA is more than a trade association, and O’Hara is responsible for its global marketing and communications strategy, working with the organisation’s membership on strategic marketing issues for the industry. He comes from the vendor side — Nortel, Sonus and then Microsoft’s communications sector — and he’s brought some of his marketing experience from there to the GSMA. His most recent project is Mobile World Live, an online portal that will serve as a information resource and provide networking opportunities for the industry away from the intensive jamborees of Mobile World Congress and Mobile Asia Congress.

80

Tony Holcombe

President and CEO of Syniverse

With three years at Syniverse, Holcombe has negotiated takeovers of ITHL and BSG Wireless plus, most recently, VeriSign’s messaging business — a deal billed at $175 million. Syniverse straddles messaging technology and number portability — with its half share, with Telcordia, in India’s mobile project the star of that portfolio so far. Messaging — including SMS and MMS as well as instant messaging, email and the rest — is rising fast in volume, so Syniverse’s market isn’t going to disappear.

81

Kathryn Morrissey

Executive VP at AT&T Business Solutions

Morrissey leads sales in AT&T Business Solutions’ international and domestic wholesale and has now the added responsibilities in US federal government plus government, education and medical operations. She’s active in representing AT&T Wholesale’s interests in international meetings, at the Pacific Telecoms Council and elsewhere. — and she is now on the PTC board of governors.

82

Kevin Kennedy

President and CEO of Avaya

Kennedy joined Avaya — after five years at JDS Uniphase — in January 2009, the beginning of an eventful year for his new company. For just as he was getting used to his new role, one of his biggest competitors, Nortel, went into bankruptcy protection and began to sell off its assets. Avaya succeeded in its $915 million bid for Nortel’s enterprise communications assets in early September: now he has the formidable task of putting together two rival companies, with different customer sets. Earlier on he’s been at Openwave, Cisco and — like many others — Bell Labs, in the days that it was owned by the old AT&T.

83

Chris Gilbert

CEO of Ubiquisys

As CEO of femtocell pioneer Ubiquisys, Gilbert is transforming traditional mobile network architecture with the most disruptive new technology in the industry today. He led Ubiquisys to win the world’s first 3G femtocell deployment with SoftBank and says he will be announcing the world’s first enterprise femtocell deployments in the coming months. He has also forged partnerships with NEC, Netgear and Nokia Siemens Networks and has attracted funding from the likes of Google and T-Mobile’s Venture Fund.

84

Sergey Lipatov

President of TTK

In seven years Lipatov has transformed TTK — or TransTelecom — from the telecommunications arm of RZD, the Russian railway company, into a key player in the Russian telecommunications market — one with the valuable resource of a terrestrial network that reaches from central Europe to the edge of south-east Asia. Under Lipatov, TTK has secured joint projects with operators throughout the region, including BT, TeliaSonera, NTT and China Unicom, and has started provisioning data delivery services between Europe and Asia. Its EurasiaHighway now has a capacity of 100 gigabits a second between Hong Kong and London with latencies well below 200 milliseconds. Under Lipatov, TTK has built a sea link between Russia and Japan, despite the two countries’ frosty political relations. There’s another reason to take him especially seriously: he used to be a senior official in Russia’s tax police.

85

Safra Catz

President of Oracle

In her current role for almost six years, and CFO as well for nearly half that time until September 2008, during which time Oracle has grown and grown in importance in the telecoms industry. Under 50, and is sometimes tipped as a candidate for the top job in time.

86

Michelle Senecal de Fonseca

Director of telecom, media and technology at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

EBRD is a financial institution whose remit is to finance projects which contribute to development of market economies in central and eastern Europe, the former CIS countries and Turkey. She joined the bank after many years in telecoms, including a spell looking after US West’s cable strategy and then working with Sprint on its central and eastern European strategy. Her role today is to shift the focus of EBRD to expanding its investments into the full range of the telecoms and media sector in order to start building knowledge-based economies which can use the highly educated science, technology, engineering and mathematical talent in the region. She is one of the driving forces of change in a region severely hit by the economic crisis.

87

Andrew Gilbert

President of Qualcomm Internet Sevices and Qualcomm Europe

Qualcomm’s first ever executive vice president to come from outside North America, and the first regional manager to be given such an important and wide-ranging remit. He is helping to extend the company’s heritage as a wireless innovator and visionary in the sphere of chipsets and devices to include software and mobile services.

88

Ekwow Spio-Garbrah

CEO of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation

Politician and diplomat from Ghana who has encouraged the CTO to develop new roles in education and training of telecoms personnel in Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific and elsewhere. Under Spio-Garbrah, the CTO has become is an international development partnership involving countries inside and outside the Commonwealth, involving governments, business and civil society organisations. It has a prominent role in promoting the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

89

Mats Olsson

Head of Ericsson in China

When China finally started its 3G rollouts in 2008, that was good news for Ericsson, which has won a huge share of the business. The nationwide coverage of mobile broadband in China will change demographics and increase the economic development in China, and the volume of orders there will affect prices and technology choices in the rest of the world.

90

Matt Desch

CEO of Iridium Satellite

Former Telcordia CEO Desch has steered Iridium out of the era in which people giggled at the name — remembering its catastrophic business collapse at the start of the decade — into its second and even third generation. Iridium still has its old fleet of satellites, but business is now booming and finances are now good enough for the company to plan to replace all 66 — plus some spares — in 2014-16. It long ago recognised that it will never provide mobile phones to travelling executives: but Desch has carved new markets in transport tracking, machine to machine services, and maritime and aircraft communications. He’s now looking forward to a reverse takeover with private equity investors which should see the company’s shares listed.

91

David Storrie

CEO of Nucleus Connect

The company — a subsidiary of Singapore’s StarHub — is unknown so far, because his network is still being built by OpenNet. But Nucleus Connect will be the island republic’s next generation national broadband network, which will be available on an equal basis to all telecoms retailers. Storrie is an ex-BT staffer who has been with StarHub since 1997 — before it had a licence. After it won its licence, he became head of integrated network engineering, responsible for the day-to-day operations of its fixed, mobile and cable networks. Like his Australian opposite number, Mike Quigley, he will face challenges from rival customers — though with Singapore’s customary politeness instead of Australia’s more robust way of doing busines

92

Kris Rinne

Senior vice president of architecture and planning at AT&T

Rinne, former CTO of Cingular before it was absorbed into AT&T, is the wireless engineer who is tweaking the US giant’s 3G and 4G strategy. She’s rolling out HSPA networks running at up to 7.2 megabits a second maximum — good, but not as fast as Rogers is planning in Canada — and now appears to be moving faster than before into LTE, about which AT&T was initially cautious. The stimulus provided by Verizon Wireless’s wholehearted enthusiasm for LTE, backed by contracts with vendors, no doubt supports her strategy.

93

Carol Bartz

President and CEO of Yahoo!

Took over founder Jerry Yang’s job running this challenging role in what was formerly the world’s favourite search engine in January 2009, after a long spell at Autodesk. The future of Yahoo! still isn’t clear: more than cost cutting is needed if it is to reassert the role it had in the internet before Google took it over.

94

Ibrahim Gedeon

CTO of Telus

Under Gedeon’s direction, Telus has invested heavily to turn itself into one of the first all-IP networks in the world. It now runs an IP-based network stretching 11,000 kilometres across Canada. He’s a favourite speaker at the TM Forum’s events on the importance of the right IT to implement and manage advanced networks. In his role as CTO he is responsible for the wireless-wireline service and network convergence, enterprise applications and network infrastructure strategies and evolution. And he’s the only telecom CTO known to have written a cookery book.

95

Salah Al-Fouzan

Chief business development officer of Zain

Though Zain’s immediate prospects are confused, with conflicting reports and rumours about new investors or even divestment, Al-Fouzan is the executive who has overseen its mergers and acquisitions, geographical expansion and adjacent business development activities for the group, including wireless broadband initiatives. He started in the network engineering division of what was the Kuwait operator MTC in 1997 and moved to group business planning and strategy development in 2002. There, he has managed $15 billion worth of international M&A acquisitions on behalf of the Zain, including the $3.4 billion purchase of Celtel, the $1.05 billion acquisition of V-Mobile in Nigeria, the $1.33 billion acquisition of Mobitel in Sudan and the $1.2 billion acquisition of Iraqna in Iraq, as well as the greenfield licenses in Bahrain, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. He has also worked on a variety of equity offerings and debt financings for Zain.

96

Kazuhiro Gomi

COO and CTO of NTT America

Gomi has become very much the international face of NTT, the Japanese former incumbent which owns NTT Com, its global data and IP services arm which is one of the global tier-one internet backbones. NTT America is the group’s largest international subsidiary, and Gomi has a wide range of responsibilities, including technology procurement and vendor selection, industry relations and standardisation efforts, and overall product portfolio management. He’s an engineer, with patents in the areas of voice signal processing and voice answering systems, but is now pushing the business side of the company’s global IP network, which now carries 200 gigabits a second across the Pacific.

97

Grant Seiffert

President of the Telecommunications Industry Association

Seiffert oversees the policy, standards, tradeshow and marketing efforts for the leading vendors’ advocate for the industry in Washington DC. The TIA and the USTA — which represents the operators — have a sometimes difficult relationship, particularly in the annual Supercomm show which they run jointly after a failed attempt to run rival events.

Seiffert joined TIA in 1996 as director of government relations and lobbied on behalf of vendors as the FCC implemented that year’s Telecommunications Act. Like many of his fellow top lobbyists in the industry, he’s a Republican: until 1996 he was on the staff of John McCain, the Arizona senator who lost the 2007 presidential election against Barack Obama. How effective that makes him and the other lobbyists in a Democrat Washington remains to be seen.

98

Wim Sweldens

Vice president of Alcatel-Lucent Ventures and Network Technology

In these dual roles he in responsible for taking the Alcatel-Lucent applications enablement strategy from paper to practice. He brings together people into teams to generate ideas and work directly with customers to test concepts and understand what works. He listens to customers, the market and the people around him. He is disciplined in his approach, pays attention to excellence, and is an accelerator.

99

Gavin Young

Technical chairman for the Broadband Forum and chief architect for access at Cable and Wireless

Young is a founding director of the Broadband Forum, which has played a leading role in seeing broadband become available to the mass market around the world. The Broadband Forum — formerly the DSL Forum, but now with a wider brief — focuses on fixed broadband, helping to develop multi-service networking specifications addressing interoperability, architecture and management. Young was CTO of Bulldog Communications until it was bought by Cable & Wireless and at C&W he works on the design and architecture of its national broadband network.

100

Malin Frenning

President of TeliaSonera International Carrier

With 10 years of experience of senior management positions in the carrier business and international strategy and product management, Frenning has spent two years in her present role, growing the global carrier business both in revenue and market share. Now TeliaSonera International Carrier is one of the largest IP carriers in Europe and number five globally.www.globaltelecomsbusiness.com