ICT2010 Roundtable panel discussion

The plenary talks were delivered by key representatives of the European Commission (EC), the European Parliament, the Belgian Parliament and the industry outlined the goals and vision of the EC’s Digital Agenda. The digital agenda lays down high level goals for European ICT sector for the 2010-2020 period in order to make Europe more advanced, more competitive, more .... The talks were followed by a panel discussion which involved CEOs of several large, international companies and a few EC and regional politician. The Digital Agenda is online and other bloggers will probably write about the plenary talks so I don’t waste valuable batter power on those.

I rather share a few interesting thoughts with you that I captured during the round table panel discussion. Despite all of the panel presenters agree and support the digital agenda, these thoughts show gaps between the views/goals of the commission and of the industry:

• CEO of Ericsson pointed out that the “Web of things” mentioned by the vice-president of the European Parliament in her talk is already happening. By 2020 it will include ~50billion devices. The 1995-2015 period is the installation phase of a new infrastructure, the Internet (and particularly it’s mobile broadband version.) By the end of 2015 there will be ~93% global coverage, there will be ~8 billion mobile phones/subscriptions. The following 20-30 years will be the deployment phase – deployment of applications, services on this infrastructure. This is a typical agenda with all the large-scale infrastructures.
• SAP’s vision of the next generation internet is the Businessweb. A robust, secure, mobile network – where companies can connect together and can make better business, can deliver better business for consumers. Just one use case: trucks packed by multiple companies would result better usage of resources, would help to reduce CO2 emission. (Which is one of the goals of the digital agenda)
• Senior VP of HP: Education is an important contributor for success in ICT. The quality of students is decreasing in all ICT related fields (programming, technology knowledge, mathematics,...). We (Europe) should investigate and understand the roots of the problem. We must learn from those regions, countries who are more successful on this front – e.g. China where large-large number (can’t recall the number, sorry) of highly educated students leave universities each year.
• Support for Small Enterprises is good – but small enterprises should not be the goal! Think big, act big, grow big and grow number one. No survival on today’s competitive market for those whose target is staying small.

Neerie Kroes, vice-president of EC liked the panel, invited participants for another meeting - either F2F or by telephone. Given the number of CEOs on the panel I doubt they would find a timeslot which suits them all...