Delivering the keynote address for this week’s GSMA Mobile World Congress event in Shanghai, NTT Docomo CEO Kaoru Kato emphasized the importance of strategic alliances in helping to foster innovation.
Given Docomo’s status as an unusually innovative telecom provider, Kato’s position doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Kato outlined a number of recent agreements indicating the seriousness with which his company pursues this approach. In addition to deals with Japanese convience store and duty free chains, Docomo has also forged an agreement with General Electric that will see the two companies develop their own Internet of Things alliance, with an aim to integrate GE’s wireless router technology into Docomo’s network, allowing for real-time industrial analytics.
That agreement puts the telecom company at the forefront of an expanding IoT frontier, but it isn’t the only way in which Docomo has proven to be pioneering. It also recently joined the FIDO Alliance’s board of directors, giving it a great amount of influence over authentication standards in the mobile industry; and its place was well-earned, given that Docomo recently became the sole provider of the world’s first iris-scanning smartphone.
Docomo has shown a certain tolerance for risk in pursuing such technologically complex frontiers, but in his keynote address, Kato kept it pretty simple. “The key is to continue with innovation,” he said, “and it will later become essential to users.”
Source: Mobile World Live
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