Fujitsu expert talks technology

By Federico Grandesso

Fujitsu Chief Technology Officer, Europe, ME, India and Africa Dr. Joseph Reger, (pictured) attended the recent Fujitsu world tour 2015 in Belgium, and he spoke about important issues such as the European single market and the new digital agenda strategy.

What do you think about the European single market and the new digital agenda strategy?

I thought everybody in Brussels was working already to create that and if not they should but let's make it concrete; you could argue that in some areas we have already achieved a lot. However, there is a new market segment emerging as a result of digital transformation, which we could call (incorrectly and inaccurately) the digital market. The problem is that there is no such a thing as EU digital market, because countries' legislations and national regulations are such that there isn't even much cross-border online shopping - there is some, but it's still very vague.

About the new digital agenda, I think we need a next step; it doesn't have to be perfect to start, but we need this next step in terms of creating that market and consumer protection across borders, and the transport of goods and services is another important issue. The payment systems are also vital, because we definitely need something that could facilitate payments - the currency is one thing, and it's a multiplication of factors while you are doing a transaction. After that, we need easy digital-oriented mobile payment systems as well, and this needs to happen very soon.

Any potential problems with US companies?

In this context, there is the big problem of the influence of the telecommunication language over the top operations of American companies; just to explain, we have the networks that we need to build, and our networks and the technologies that we are using for them are both good, however what's happening currently is that the internet services are such that we end up with the infrastructure costs here, our telecom companies are building it and at this moment the US companies are come in not maintain the network but they offer value-added services like Google on Facebook and so on so at the end we end up with the costs and they end up with the profit.

We need to do something about it, I'm not talking about forbidding doing business, but we just need to set up some rules that I think do not yet exist. This needs to be done now and I would expect a bit more activity in this respect. If you took a random 10,000 people from the EU and ask them about what they think is important and vital for the future of the European economy, they will say that internet and internet services, the digitalization of services, copyright management and payments are all important, so we definitely need to address these.

Will it be necessary to have more multilateral agreements that include the US and Japan?

This is my personal opinion, I'm a big fan of the EU and I'm working for Fujitsu, which is a Japanese company and I see how important, useful and beneficial it could be if we achieve more integration with other regions such as Japan or the US. The main problem is that certain things are by nature global and digital markets are global, because they are based on the internet, so I don't see how we could restrict that to a region and how that would be useful.

There are enormous benefits if the EU is working closely with Japan and there are ongoing projects, so that's good. I believe that we don't need any boundaries of any kind and I don't think that a Schengen internet is a good idea but I do think that there is the need for clear rules so that the interests of European people are guarded.

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