Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers said he’s optimistic about where the global economy is going because groups that traditionally haven’t worked together are now learning to do so.
Chambers told the opening forum at the Telecom World yesterday: “Public-private partnerships for a country are based on education, broadband access, the ability to create innovation and a supportive government, and for those groups to work together in ways they haven’t done before.”
Incoming Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg agreed that there is definitely cooperation to be done in the ICT sector to enable growth and the entire network evolution. “But if all the stakeholders don’t take care to ensure the technology is enabled with security, we will not see that growth.”
He pointed that that what we’ve seen in the last decade will be nothing compared to what we’ll see in the next decade. “We’ll probably have 3 billion broadband connections and 7 billion mobile subscribers, who will be able to access all applications, which will lead to socio-economic development and improvements in efficiency.”
He insisted that everyone here has a huge responsibility to see that “platform, the social highway, that we are building together is secure.”
Chambers reiterated his point about cooperation. “No of us can solve this by ourselves. You can create the most secure network in the world, but if you don’t have governments working together or if you make the mistake of doing regulation without considering the consequences, it won’t work.
“We as a society have to learn how to come together with the best minds in business, government and NGOs to solve these problems, because there always will be aggressive hacker communities and rouge states that will try to upset the political and economic stability.”
He pointed out that successful public-private partnerships have five common factors: a clear statement of vision; multi-phase, multi-year approach – most projects take three to five years to implement; clear definite of roles and responsibilities; a program manager with regular communications; and finally defined roles for each of the partners on how they enter and exist. “This is the agenda for successful public-private partnership.”
Vestberg said by 2020 “we won’t talk about subscribers. We’ll talk about 50 billion connections. Those will be extremely important as they will be via e-health, e-gov, e-education and more, working on the network that drives efficiencies.”
He said the solid infrastructure base was the foundation and would be a huge creator of jobs and efficiencies.