Interview: Vodafone CTO juggles legacy network and cutting-edge technology
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“I joined Vodafone from Cisco, really to manage the transformation to internet protocol (IP), and I remember meeting my colleagues at Vodafone and saying ‘guys, the future is all IP’ and being laughed at,” says Jorge Fernandes, UK CTO at Vodafone, as he reflects on 15 years at the mobile operator.
Steeped in both computing and networking, Fernandes started his career working with mainframes before moving to Cisco as an IBM specialist in the late 1990s.
“This was a time when Cisco was entering the IBM space and challenging the IBM networking environments,” he tells Computer Weekly, “moving from systems network architecture (SNA) and synchronous data link control (SDLC) to transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP), so it was that transition that I picked up and it went from there.”
Fernandes joined Vodafone in 2002 and has moved around the company since then, spending time in its engineering and operation functions, as well as serving as CTO in Portugal and Turkey prior to taking up the UK post in 2015.
Of course, the advent of TCP/IP was a big deal in the 1990s,…
