13 - 19 April 2000

Nortel Networks to participate in e-event of the year

by Franco Aloisio

Nortel Networks, the international company which last month signed a US$24m deal with Maltacom's mobile subsidiary Mobisle, will be participating in what is being referred to as the e-event of the year - the e-engineering conference which will be organised by the Chamber of Professional Engineers later this month.

The chairman of the conference, Alex Tranter, told The Malta Business Weekly that the vice-president of Wireless Internet Strategy of Nortel Networks, Kenneth Blakeslee, has been confirmed as the key foreign speaker during the conference.

Until now, Mr Blakeslee is the only foreign speaker during the conference. Mr Tranter said the emphasis of the conference will be on the local perspective of e-engineering and the vast majority of speakers will be from Maltese companies.

The list of speakers is as follows: Arthur Azzopardi, Senior Consultant with PriceWaterhouseCoopers; David Spiteri Gingell, Chief Information Officer at the Office of the Prime Minister; Ivan Zammit, Senior Engineer at Vodaphone Malta; Frank Leiter, Chief Executive Officer at Melita Cable; Godfrey Vella, Chief Executive Officer at DataStream; Vince Vella, Technical Manager Software Division and R. Debattista, System Engineer at Computime Ltd; Raphel Micallef Trigona, Director and Ray Debattista, System Engineer at Intercomp Ltd; Alex Rizzo, Operations Engineer and Antoine Psaila, Project Engineer at Water Services Corporation.

Mr Tranter explained that the majority of speakers will be engineers, who are at the forefront of the development of the electronic technology.

"Internet and e-business are powered by engineers. Hence this profession has a lot to say on this subject," Mr Tranter said.

He said that this year's conference will be different as it will have a higher profile. In fact, the topic of e-business and e-engineering will not be approached from a wholly technical point of view, but will address the issue of bringing change through IT.

"E-engineering is the modern buzz word for what was previously termed as 'business process re-engineering'. Anyone who wants to incorporate new ways of doing business should attend this conference," Mr Tranter said.

He added that, however, one of the basic issues which has to be addressed is that of the backward telecommunications infrastructure of the Maltese islands.

"Although the situation is improving, especially after the introduction of ISDN and eventually ADSL, the telecoms infrastructure has still to develop further in order for the country and its businesses to become competitive. The imminent liberalisation of this sector is a welcome development," he said.

The main aim of the conference is to provide participants with a better understanding of how the worldwide web is reinventing the way people do business, and how it is also empowering consumers by giving them increased choice and better value.

He said this conference, which will be held in the Portomaso Conference Hall at the Malta Hilton, is targeted at attracting a very wide spectrum of participants who want to keep abreast with the latest developments in the telecommunications sector and the internet.

The full day conference will be divided up into three sessions, two in the morning and one in the afternoon. The first morning session entitled "Setting the Scene", will deal with providing the conference participants with an overview on what is electronic business and how it is currently developing, what local government is aiming to achieve by adopting a government on-line approach to delivering its services and the IT legislative framework that is being designed to support the fruition of electronic business.

The second morning session entitled "Enabling the Technology", will basically present the views of the three main telecommunication providers in Malta with regards to the further deployment of the internet related services. This session is expected to generate substantial interest in view of the pending liberalisation of the local telecommunications sector.

The final afternoon session entitled "Applying the Technology", will look at how local companies are adopting the technology to improve their operating efficiencies and competitiveness. In this session, three leading local companies - two private and one government-owned - will present their individual case studies on how their companies are successfully implementing e-services.

The conference is being sponsored by The Malta Business Weekly, Nortel Networks, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Intercomp, Vodafone, Computime and Melita Cable.