Ari Virtanen, Executive Vice President, Wireless Solutions, Elektrobit Corporation (EB) - "SDR Evolution in Commercial and Dual-Use Telecom Products"

Even though SDR technology has been introduced and widely used in commercial market, especially in carrier grade network equipment, the revolution to use de facto standards like SCA has not been seen yet. In high performance commercial telecom equipment, it is still customary to use proprietary middleware, or even hardware configurations when driving force is for example power consumption instead of software portability.

While new more powerful chips are coming to FPGA's and DSP's, it can be foreseen that more and more commercial products, even tiny handsets, can be produced by using SDR technology. In this evolution the need for a capable and widely used common architecture is essential in order to fully capitalize the benefits from the technology transition.

Standardized, open architectures and software can be seen as the winning techniques in future telecom market, as we have seen them to be in information technology market in general.

Biography
Ari Virtanen heads the Wireless Solutions Business Unit, with the global responsibility of EB’s mobile infra, terminal and platform solutions, including the mobile solutions for the defence sector.

Ari joined EB from Nokia, where he hold several executive positions during his tenure of almost two decades. Before moving to EB, Ari was in charge of the Convergence Products business, including Nokia’s Internet Tablets as well as Linux based Open Source activities.

Before that position, Ari led Nokia Networks’ System Technology Unit with the global responsibility of network related end-to-end system functionalities, architectures, R&D and technology strategies as well as the regulatory and standardization activities. Prior to that he was in charge of Nokia’s Mobile Packet Core and Service Control Systems businesses as well as the Intelligent Content Delivery program.
 
Some years ago Ari had the global responsibility of Nokia's network platforms. During the latter half of 1990s he established a business unit to build packet switched network elements for GPRS and 3G, and before that he was in charge of Nokia's GSM switches and subscriber registers.

Ari Virtanen has a master's degree in computer science and industrial economics.