Rolling Clouds – My Move into the Mobile Cloud

As many of you saw in my last note, I have officially left Digital Realty Trust to address some personal things.   While I get those things in order I am not sitting idling by.   I am extremely happy to announce that I have taken a role at Nokia as their VP of Service Operations.  In this role I will have global responsibility for the strategy, operation and run of infrastructure aspects for Nokia’s new cloud and mobile services platforms.

Its an incredibly exciting role especially when you think of the fact that the number of mobile hand-held’s around the world are increasingly becoming the interface by which people are consuming information.  Whether that be Navigation-based applications or other content related platforms your phone is becoming your gateway to the world. 

I am also very excited by the fact that there are some fierce competitors in this space as well.  Once again I will be donning my armor and doing battle with my friends at Google.   Their Droid platform is definitely interesting and it will be interesting to see how that develops.  I have a great amount of respect for Urs Hoelze and their cloud platform is something I am fairly familiar with .  I will also be doing battle with the folks from Apple (and interestingly my good friend Olivier Sanche).  Apple definitely has the high end hand-held market here in the US, but its experience in Cloud platforms and operations is not very sophisticated just yet.  On some levels I guess I am even competing against the infrastructure and facilities I built out at Microsoft at least as it relates to the mobile world.  Those are some meaty competitors and as you have seen before, I love a good fight.

In my opinion, Nokia has some very interesting characteristics that position it extremely well if not atop the fray in this space.   First there is no arguing about Nokia penetration of hand-held devices across the world.  Especially in markets like India, China, South America, and other emerging Internet-using populations.    Additionally these emerging economies are skipping past ground-based wired technologies to wireless connectivity.   As a result of that, Nokia has an incredible presence already in those markets.   Their OVI platform today already has a significant population of users (measured at least in the 10s of millions) and so scale at the outset is definitely there.    When I think about the challenge that Google has in getting device penetration out there, or Apples high-end (and mostly US) only approach you can see the opportunity.    I am extremely excited to get going.

Hope you will join me for an incredible ride!

\Mm