The IP Expo ‘09 keynotes and sessions offered insights not only to the current state of the industry, but also the drivers and challenges in the years to come, as Lord Carter’s opening address illustrated.

The “bedrock” of a series of lectures on trends in the IT industry is surely the future of infrastructure – whatever that happens to mean in the context – followed by a sufficiently robust service architecture and delivery mechanisms.

With this in mind, Stephen Carter – created a life peer (Lord Carter of Barnes) under Blair regime, former head of NTL and lead author of the Digital Britain report chose a wide-ranging brief to set the debating ball rolling at IP Expo ’09.

The former Communications Minister in Gordon Brown’s cabinet, now resigned from Downing Street and possibly heading towards Brussels, Carter described his own peripatetic career as “carrier, operator, regulator, fake politician and advisor”.

Views of the world

Showing the famous cover of The New Yorker, March 29th 1976; The world as seen by from New York’s 9th Avenue, Lord Carter made the point that our perspective depends entirely on where we start from. President Obama writes of the challenge in life to avoid being “a prisoner of one’s own biography”: in other words, to understand the perspective of another. This is never truer, he said, than in technology markets.

Carter’s varied career, he pointed out, has enabled him to examine several contrasting perspectives. An operator’s focus, for instance, is customers and cash – assessing the commercial position, now and in the future, relative to the competition. As an advisor, new perspectives are his stock in trade.

The regulator tries to solve complex puzzles, find reasonable and acceptable alignments for parties that find it difficult to work together and act occasionally as policeman and referee. His task is to create a framework in which people can make investment decisions with confidence. In front-line politics, the sheer pace in which issues are presented and the consequent challenges outstrip anything in the conventional business world.

In Arthur C Clarke’s book Profiles of the Future (Victor Gollancz 2001; original edition first published in 1962) concludes that it is impossible – and, in truth, ridiculous to even attempt – to predict the future. However, Clarke did a pretty good job with envisioning, for example, the “orbital post office”: in effect it is today’s Internet. He discusses the challenges of content distribution and licensing issues for the book industry – remarkably pertinent for today’s multimedia creators. He considers what we would do with this information and entertainment, who might make money from it, plus patent and piracy issues – all over 40 years ago.

Rapid global change

Carter believes we are living in world that is changing more rapidly than ever at the macro level of geopolitics, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In China, we are seeing a speed of change (in politics, commerce, economics and more) and a willingness to embrace multilateralism at a pace not seen since Nixon in 1972.

* As a UK government minister negotiating on IP issues and protocol development, says Carter, he sat with his opposite number over lunch. The Chinese minister said that clearly, the UK had issues with the way business is done in China, but you appear also to admire some things because you are copying them. ‘I asked what he referred to and he said “un-elected ministers!”’

We are now seeing the US engaging with Russia, the Middle East and Asia in a different way from the past eight years – in effect, a new global framework is emerging. This is matched by a shift in the position of the dollar in these key markets and where the economic power lies now and in the future.

He talked of  “the dogs that have not yet barked” – in particular, Southern and Central America which will is witnessing explosive growth in many sectors. Only Africa – “a stain on our consciousness” has not been brought into that global world of engagement and economic power. However, the power (of African countries) in resources will give them an increasingly important political position in the future.