My Experience from the Telecom Mainstream Industry

After my “academic” phase we decided to move to one of the (at that time) few HQ for Telecom Product development in the world. The Bavarian city of Munich has since been my hometown.
The integration into a huge development organisation became for me a sort of“culture clash” being used to an “independent” development organisation and the freedom in an academic environment. I changed with this also my perspective from breaking down complexity for a SW product to the breaking down of complexity on a system and perhaps more important network level.
Some of the experiences I made by Siemens and later Nokia Siemens:
Concepts for the Intelligent Networks which turned out to be a good solution for centralised services like 800 and prepaid cards. But failed to deliver the early promise and vision of flexible service logic which should overcome the limits of the complex digital switches with slow development of new features.
BISDN which promised to overcome the limitation of ISDN for data services turned out to be a vision turning the focus and energy by the telecom industry away from the solutions successfully decided by the market, the IP routers. The telecom industry tried to enter the router market, but for most companies with limited success.
With perhaps the most successful standardisation supported Vision for the Telecom Industry, the GSM standardised mobile networks based on the early implementation in the Nordic countries, a market success for the telecom industry took off! I was involved in system level discussions on how to reuse the control structures from the fixed market in the mobile solution as well as several conceptual discussions to the fixed mobile convergence solutions.
Head of system architecture, responsible for building a solution where the control structure from the digital switches are kept in the VoIP arena. I was responsible for a team mainly in Munich and US.
Head of the technical part of the IPTV solution by Siemens. Here I integrated a start up company bought by Siemens in Seattle with a worldwide technical organisation (Germany, US, India, and several European countries).
Head of the Network Evolution team with reponsible for evaluation of Visions like SDN, NFV and the road to Cloud services.