19 February 2008

Interview - Bob Iannucci,
chief technology officer of Nokia

Bob Iannucci has been in the IT industry for the last three decades. Bob joined Nokia in 2004 as Head of Nokia Research Center's Computing Architectures Laboratory.

Before joining Nokia, he held a variety of research and development management positions at Cosine Communications, Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Exa Corporation, and IBM.

Since Jan. 1, he is the new chief technology officer of Nokia. He is also the first member of the board who is not based in Finland, remaining in Palo Alto, California, where he has headed the Nokia Research Center since 2004.

In this interview, Iannucci shares his impressions of the industry. First of all, he believes the mobile OS has not yet made its debut – and of course he hopes that Nokia and its partners will develop it – sorry Microsoft! But his main mission is to help Nokia achieve the company’s new dream, to succeed in its transition from a mobile company to an Internet service and appliance provider.

In other words, as mobile phones become a commodity, it is time for Nokia to give up that market and reinvent itself once again, just as it has many times since 1865 when the company started as paper mill. That’s Bob Iannucci’s mission. So beware, Google and Apple.

Computerworld: Which are your responsibilities/challenges heading Nokia Research?

Iannucci: My responsibility for Nokia Research Center, which is about 850 people out of the total R&D population of the companies 14,500. We have laboratories in Beijing; Tokyo; Palo Alto, where I’m based; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cambridge, U.K.; Germany and Finland.

CW: Some IT industries focus their work based on a 10 year road map. Could you describe the road map for wireless technology development for the next 10 years?

Iannucci: It’s a good question. The way that we work in NRC is that we take a seven-year time horizon for our strategy and we try to adjust it to Nokia strategy and the challenges, and also look beyond that.

CW: So what do you envision seven years from now?

Iannucci: It’s pretty difficult to predict business that far out. What we believe is going to happen in the next period is that the devices will become increasingly invisible. The communication will be pervasive. We won’t think about wireless bandwidth speeds, because bandwidth is readily available, and probably the biggest change is that we see value shifting from devices for services and software, and that is one of the main reasons why we are reorganizing the company.

My own personal background is that I come from the computing world. I used to work at IBM, I used to work at Digital Equipment Corp., and I show people this is like seeing a movie for the fourth of fifth time. I saw what happened with mainframes as value went from hardware to software to services, and then with minicomputers and so on.

And now it feels very much the same except that for mobility it’s kind of like it happened in the PC world, it’s like 1982 or 1983. The standard platforms, the IBM PC of the mobile world haven’t emerged yet. So what would happen then over the next seven years? Some dominant platform will emerge. It will garnish substantial investment from third parties in building up a very significant space of software.

When we talk about application dot-coms right now, it’s a tiny fraction of what’s going to happen in the next seven years. Much of the services, if not most of the services, will be tied in the Internet or what the Internet becomes; this will be the heart of your digital identity for transactions or your personal life, for example.

What we see in devices right now will move more in the direction of file and fashion as differentiators rather than core functionality. In the seven-year period, everyone will have high bandwidth, everyone will have low power, and everyone will have long battery life.

Read the whole interview

.:[ right here ]:.