When: Wednesday, 6 May, 9am - 1pm
Where: Apollon, Agora 2
Click here to view the Keynote Schedule
 | Sanjiv Ahuja
Chairman, Augere; Former CEO, Orange Group & Former President, Telcordia
Sanjiv is the founder and Chairman of Augere, a new venture aiming to provide broadband access for all. He is also the founder and Chairman of Eaton Telecom Infrastructure. In addition, he is the Chairman of Orange UK, a position he has held since stepping down as CEO of Orange S.A. in April 2007. Sanjiv served as CEO of Orange S. A. for three years from March 2004 - April 2007. Prior to that, he was the company’s Chief Operating Officer from April 2003 to March 2004.
During his leadership, Orange increased the number of countries in which it operates from 17 to 23 and has more than doubled the number of its mobile customers from 48 million to over 100 million worldwide. Sanjiv has also overseen the successful extension of the Orange brand from its mobile origins so that it now embraces France Telecom’s broadband, fixed line and IPTV services in its largest markets.
Sanjiv’s previous industry experience includes the role of President of Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore), the world’s largest provider of operations support systems, network software and consulting and engineering services to the telecommunications industry. Prior to that, he spent fifteen years at IBM in various executive roles. His last responsibility included leading IBM’s entry into the telecommunications software industry. Watch Video  Back to Top
|  | Rory Sutherland
Vice Chairman, Ogilvy Group
Rory Sutherland was born in Usk, Monmouthshire, in 1965 and educated at the local Haberdashers’ school and at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
At this point, promising early parallels with the life of Sir Martin Sorrell begin to break down.
He joined OgilvyOne as a graduate trainee in September of that year. After six months cross training, and thirteen months spent as the world’s worst account man (in a last remedial effort he was booked on a time management course, but got the date wrong) he was moved to the Planning Department. Soon afterwards he confessed an interest in copywriting to his line manager, who was (glad to see the back of him) thought this was a very good idea.
At this point things improved. Working for the legendary Steve Harrison, Rory was promoted to Head of Copy in 1995 and Creative Director in 1997. He won some awards. It didn’t hurt that his brother was an academic, which meant Rory had first used the internet in 1986 – and so was an early advocate of new media. Most people would have used this combined knowledge of new media and marketing to make a fortune - instead Rory managed to lose £29.50 by being the first person in the UK to have their credit card details stolen online. All the same, he has been rewarded by watching OgilvyInteractive grow into by far the most formidable digital arm of any traditional agency group – and by OgilvyOne’s capture of Campaign’s Agency of the Year title in 2007.
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Watch Rory's Meet the Boss TV Interview from Management World Back to Top |  | Simon Wright
CEO, Virgin Entertainment Group
Simon Wright is the Chief Executive Officer for Virgin Entertainment Group, Inc. based in North America. Wright has directly headed up the North American Retail operations since 2005 while also being responsible for the Group's International Retail and Cinema Operations. During this time he split his time between Los Angeles and London. In October 2007, having turned around the US business successfully he succeeded in selling the North American retail business to US investors and remained with that business and relinquished his other responsibilities. Now based in Los Angeles, he is currently focused on overseeing the business plan resulting from that transaction.
Wright has been with the Virgin Group of Companies for seventeen years holding a variety of senior positions with the Group over that time. In the past he has been Managing Director of Virgin Megastores UK and the Group CFO for Virgin Megastores Worldwide. In addition he was responsible for the development of Virgin Cinemas in both the UK and Japan.
Wright is the former President of GERA (Global Entertainment Retailers Association). He is also a member of the UK Music Hall of Fame Committee. Wright has also been a Board Member of The Official Charts Company, the organization responsible for compiling the Official Music Charts in the UK and has been a member of the UK Government Retail Task Force. In Los Angeles he is a founding member of BritWeek, working with the UK Government and prominent British nationals in Los Angeles to promote the British influence on Los Angeles and Southern California. In addition he has held a number of non-executive directorships.
Wright is from Cambridge, England.
Watch Video Back to Top |  | Marc Davis
Chief Scientist & VP of ESP, Yahoo! Mobile
Marc Davis is Chief Scientist and VP of ESP (Early Stage Products) of Yahoo! Mobile. His work focuses on creating the technology and applications that will enable the billions of daily media consumers to become daily media producers. His research encompasses the theory, design, and development of sociotechnical systems that leverage contextual metadata and the power of community to enable people around the world to produce, describe, share, and remix media, and to connect to each other in new ways. As Chief Scientist and VP of ESP at Yahoo! Mobile, Marc and his team invent and help realize the future of mobile, social, media, monetization, and platforms. ESP has been involved in innovative products from Yahoo! Mobile such as oneConnect, which reinvents mobile communications by aggregating a user's social networks and communications tools into a socially connected address book.
From 2002 to 2006, Marc Davis served as Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information where he directed Garage Cinema Research and co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for New Media. In 2005, Marc Davis worked with Yahoo! Inc. and UC Berkeley to create Yahoo! Research Berkeley where he served as Founding Director. At Yahoo! Research Berkeley, Marc Davis and his teams produced breakthrough public prototypes in mobile social media: ZoneTag, context-aware mobile photo capture and tagging software; TagMaps, a collective map of human attention created by analyzing the millions of geocoded Flickr photos; and Zurfer, a context-aware mobile photo browser. In 2006, Marc Davis joined Yahoo! to bring his vision of social media and mobile media to billions of people around the world. Marc Davis earned his B.A. in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, his M.A. in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory.
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|  | Kevin R. Peters
Exec Vice President - Global Network Operations, AT&T
Kevin is responsible for the health and maintenance of AT&T’s world-wide network across the full suite of local, national and global wireline and mobility services.
Prior to his current position, Mr. Peters was senior vice president of enterprise systems and software engineering at AT&T Corp., with responsibility for managing the convergence of network and business systems and the related information technology infrastructure. Mr. Peters also served as vice president for business and operations planning and chief engineer at AT&T Global Network Services, where he was responsible for the transformation of the global AT&T network.
Mr. Peters began his career at AT&T Corp. in 1986 in the Information Technology organization, and has held numerous positions in technology development, sales, finance/billing, strategy development, and network operations and engineering.
Mr. Peters received his B.S. from Fairfield University, M.S. in Information and Technology Management from Stevens Institute of Technology, M.B.A. from Columbia University, and completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard University.
Watch Video Back to Top |  | Matt Desch
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Iridium
Matt Desch has more than 27 years of experience in telecommunications management, and more than 16 years in the global wireless business. Desch joined the company in 2006 as chairman and CEO of Iridium, and CEO of the parent company, Iridium Holdings LLC. Previously, he was CEO of Telcordia Technologies, a telecom software services provider. He spent 13 years at Nortel Networks, and before leaving in early 2000, was president for its fast-growing Wireless Networks business and was responsible for its global carrier customers in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Desch has served on a number of boards including SAIC, Inc., Flarion Technologies, Starent Networks and as the chairman of Airspan Networks. He has a Bachelor of Science in computer science from The Ohio State University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Chicago.
Watch Video Back to Top |  | Albert Hitchcock
CIO, Vodafone Group Services Limited
Albert was appointed into the role of Chief Information Officer in August 2007.
In this role Albert is responsible for the Vodafone Technology Information Services Organisation within Vodafone and its Operating Companies. Albert is accountable for the IS Strategy and the Operations of all IS functions across the group.
Prior to joining Vodafone, Albert was Global CIO with Nortel a Canadian multinational Telecommunications Solutions Provider and lived in the US and Canada. Albert was with Nortel for 14 years and worked in a variety of roles. He was Global CIO for 4 years.
Before joining Nortel, Albert was with Racal Radio Group LTD and British Aerospace Dynamics PLC.
He is a member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, Incorporated Engineer and in September 2006 was named to the Information Week list of most innovative users of IT.
Albert holds electronic engineering and systems engineering degrees from South Devon College of Arts and Technology and a dipMBA from the Centre of Management Studies at Exeter University.
Albert is based in Newbury, Berkshire, UK at Vodafone’s World Headquarters.
Watch Video Back to Top |  | Werner Vogels
CTO, Amazon
Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com. His role there is to help develop technologies that increase the reliability and scalability of the organization's operation. Before joining Amazon, Vogels was a research scientist at Cornell University, where he was a principal investigator in several projects researching the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has also acted as VP of Technology and CTO in companies that have specialized in taking academic technology and applying it to industrial situations. Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. In addition to being a regular speaker at technology conferences, he is the author of a large number of journal articles, the bulk of which have been on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.
Watch Video Back to Top |  | Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi
Chairman and CEO, 2020 Venture Partners
Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi is Chairman and CEO of 2020 Venture Partners, which provides technology and operations consulting to private equity firms and venture capitalists in the area of telecommunications infrastructure.
For nearly two decades, Dr. Eslambolchi led the transformation of AT&T’s network, systems and services. He left AT&T soon after its merger with SBC in late 2005. Upon his departure, BusinessWeek called him “a critical player in maintaining AT&T’s status as a technology leader” (Dec. 30, 2005) and noted that he is “a bold, but pragmatic, visionary.”
Dr. Eslambolchi served as Chief Technology Officer and advised its top leaders on the formulation and implementation of a strategic technology vision from 2001 to 2005. Early on, he predicted that IP would “eat everything” and advocated an architecture that would allow all services to run on IP and work together with connectivity to any device. His recent published book “2020 Vision” has set the foundation of communications industry over the next two decades.
Watch Video Back to Top |  | Matt Bross
CEO BT Innovate & BT Group CTO, BT
Matt Bross, CEO BT Innovate and BT Group Chief Technology Officer is responsible for driving and optimising BT’s innovation ecosystem. He sets the BT Group technology strategy and the vision and direction of innovation across BT.
In his role at BT Matt is responsible for BT’s research and venturing efforts globally.
Matt is the leading force behind BT’s multi-billion pound, 21st Century Network transformation, and is leading innovation for BT.
He has served on the Boards of many companies providing strategic technology and business leadership.
Matt has been a commissioner of the Global Information Infrastructure Commission (GIIC) since December 2005, as Regional Director for Europe. And in 2008 was appointed Vice Chairman for a two-year term. GIIC is a confederation of CxO level executives engaged in the development, deployment, operation, financing, and use of ICT services and products.
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