The Dukes of Decibel

Introducing THE MEN of telecom (see Sticking it to the Men).

I have a feeling we will be seeing these telecom executives more and more across the technology spectrum beyond telecom. As they take on net neutrality, as mobile applications take off, as SaaS and hosting needs explode, as global trade grows, as they get more into systems integration they will become broad based tech players and many are already bigger than the biggest tech vendor, IBM.

BusinessWeek writes about Ed Whitacre of AT&T
NY Times on Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon
Wikipedia on Arun Sarin of Vodaphone
Macworld on Kai-Uwe Rocke of Deutsche Telekom
Daily Youimuri on Norio Wada of NTT

and plenty more on this ballot for Most Influential Communications executive in 2005.

A sign of the growing global and inter-locking market: Arun is an US citizen, born in India. His Vodafone recently sold its Japanese mobile business to Softbank, and still holds a chunk of Verizon Wireless.