mike.hibberd@informa.com
Big spender
In his first interview since becoming Group CTO of Vodafone, Steve Pusey talks about
the breadth of the role, his technology choices and a high speed roll out in India.
�hat every telecoms vendor in
the market should want to
cultivate a relationship with
Steve Pusey is unsurprising. As global
CTO of Vodafone he wields massive, if
unspecified, financial resource. Pusey
will reveal only that his total budget
for 2008 is “a very large number”,
easily large enough, indeed, to inspire
tokens of respect from suppliers eager
to win themselves a portion.
Unfortunately for Pusey, the rules
dictate that he can accept no such
offerings. He once jokingly told a supplier
in a meeting that the only thing
he could accept was a cup of tea, he
says. Soon after, an ornate urn full of
tealeaves was delivered to his office.
Such inducements used to be familiar
elements of the pitch—in all
likelihood they’re still well used by
many companies. “But back when that
was a regular part of the game,” says a
faux-rueful Pusey, “I was a vendor.”
In 24 years at Nortel, Pusey rose to
become the Canadian supplier’s president
for EMEA. In September 2006, he
crossed to the other side, bringing the
technical breadth acquired at Nortel
to a Vodafone that was beginning to
stretch itself beyond the familiar territory
of cellular operations into other
forms of connectivity.
He reveals that it was four months
into his job at Vodafone that he began
to feel comfortable with the “size and
scope of what we’re doing.” Certainly
from the outside it looks like a big
job: Vodafone has equity stakes in 25
operations worldwide (18 of which
are wholly owned) and a further 40
partners across five continents. More
than 240 million customers depend on
the decision-making and operational
performance of Pusey and his team
for their connectivity.
Adding to the workload is the fact
that, at Vodafone HQ, the CTO doubles
as the CIO—a job spec that is mirrored
at the individual properties.
This is not, however, a specified
company policy, says Pusey. “It’s just
Mobile Communications International | First for news, best for business
Pusey says that four months into the role at Vodafone he became comfortable with
"the size and scope of what we're doing."
matured that way, it’s common sense.
Our world is a collision of network
and IT and web-based services. All
the enablers that allow us to bill and
support our customers, the authentication,
authorisation—they’re all
applications in data centres that need
the IT department in sync with the
network. We very much have one voice
for that in Vodafone,” he says.
Vodafone has built its success on
cohesion and standards and Pusey is
in no hurry to devolve responsibility
for key technology choices down to the
individual properties. “We’re not happy
just to let different operations try out
different things,” he says. “We’re much
more joined up than that. Of course
we’ll try different things, like WiMAX
and LTE but we’ll do it together, so
MCI INTERVIEW
everyone will get to see the results of
the trials as a community.”
Pusey calls his team of in-country
CTOs together once a month to share
ideas and experiences, leading to
debates on the future technology
strategies of the group as a whole that
he characterises as “quite aggressive”.
The latest trial that Vodafone is set to
embark upon is IPTV. “We’ll do that in
one country and all the CTOs will fly in
and have a good look and, collectively,
we’ll form our opinion,” he says.
The Vodafone that Pusey and his
senior management colleagues see
going forward is a firm providing total
communications. “Suddenly we’re in
lots of spaces all at once,” he says, a
development that leads him to identify
a financial trend at Vodafone going »
33
To view a Ceros magazine you need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser and have the flash player 8 or higher installed. To install the latest flash player, click the icon above, install the flash plugin and then click here to refresh this page.