Deutsche Telekom and Reliance Communications ‘C’ level executives appointed
Morristown, NJ – April 21st, 2008 – The TM Forum, the world’s leading industry trade association for enabling on-line Information, Communications and Entertainment services, announced that it had appointed two new executives to strengthen its Board of Directors. They are Andreas Kindt, Chief Technology Officer for Products and Innovation division at Deutsche Telekom and Sumit Chowdhury, Chief Information Officer at Reliance Communications, India's largest private sector information and communications company. The TM Forum’s Board is critical in determining and delivering the strategy and direction on behalf of its nearly 700 member companies in 71 countries.
The blurring of communication, entertainment and information services industries continues to drive change in the industry. With further market developments, which specifically include: the growing need to provide management standards between players across service delivery value chains; growing convergence between OSS, BSS and SDP (Service Delivery Platform) technologies; significant growth of large-scale business transformation programs; and ever increasing market speed, the make-up of the Board members continues to reflect the necessary vendor and Service Provider expertise to deal with these challenges.
“I am pleased to join the TM Forum Board to help shape the direction in this time of massive change in our industry. Deutsche Telekom is undertaking some major transformations and a close relationship with the TM Forum is strategically important to us” said Andreas Kindt.
Sumit Chowdhury, based in Mumbai India where he leads Reliance Communications’ IT for Indian operations and the FLAG global undersea cable operations echoed these thoughts. “The markets that Reliance Communications serves around the world are developing very rapidly. The TM Forum is a great vehicle for helping the industry cope with this change and I am very pleased to help shape the industry’s direction by joining the Board”.
“Our Board members are critical in providing us with deep industry knowledge and guidance as an organization”, stated Keith Willetts, CEO and Chairman TM Forum. “This unique board make-up enables us to gain access to resources and information across a quickly changing industry, so we can provide our members with the timely, relevant information and output from our 80 technical programs.”
The new TM Forum Board members join an already strong Board:
• Jaakko Aho, Head of Industry Development, Nokia Siemens Networks
• *William Ahlstrom, Vice President, Cisco,
• *Mikael Ahman, Corporate Director, TeliaSonera
• *Jonathan Anderson, Vice President, Time Warner Cable
• *Michel Burger CTO, Microsoft
• *Giovanni Chiarelli, CIO, Telecom Italia
• Jonathan Collins, Vice President, Telcordia
• Philip Dance, CIO, BT
• *Alpna Doshi, Vice President, Satyam
• Mark Francis, Vice President, AT&T
• Philippe Lalande, Sun Microsystems
• *Bhaskar Gorti, Senior Vice President, Oracle
• *Michael Lawrey, Head of Networks, Telstra
• Johanne Mayer, Director, Alcatel-Lucent
• Karl-Wilhelm Siebert, Director, Vodafone
• Ananda Subbiah, Vice President, Hewlett-Packard
• Joseph Ziskin, Vice President, IBM
*Denotes director recently elected in Board elections
