Kai Grunwitz is an innovative and established executive with a high impact career in conceptualizing, developing and driving business strategies on behalf of dynamic enterprises. A key driver of business performance with 25 years experience in developing and managing a solution, consulting and/or professional services business with a track record of managing a large P&L and successfully launching new brands, service products and new organizations.
Kai Grunwitz believes in society 5.0 and the critical urgency of digital transformation and the importance of starting step by step to enhance people adoption to tech and processes. Be quick or adopt or die was always the threat but now is increasing and changing the scale and demand in new velocities. We have a new normal and the changes with digital transformation will accelerate – the remote world will be the normal.
Some of Kai Grunwitz skills include: Managing Sales and Delivery Teams, P&L responsibility, International Management, Business Strategy Planning, Consulting & Service Business (Infrastructure and Software Solutions), Leading large Teams, Organizational Development and Change Management, Experiences with merging companies & teams, Business Development, HR, People Management.
Kai Grunwitz Interview focus
1. Introduction – background, overview, education…
2. Career
3. NTT company and focus
4. How can we Accelerate digital business transformation with Intelligent Business, secure by design.
4.1 Intelligent Business; Intelligent Workplace; Intelligent Infrastructure.
6. How do you see building an Intelligent Cybersecurity
7. Cybercrime – Global costs will exceed $6 Trillion In 2021
8. With Covid-19 how can you look at this as a way to redesign our society tech infrastructure
9. Future vision
Quotes
· About NTT
· hidden giant – 300k people, 120 years company – biggest IT companies infrastructure,
· Revenue 125 billion usd year,
· Strong focus on R&D,
· New solutions on AR, smart connectability, mobility, smart solutions,
· Help society to create smart digital infrastructure,
· Provide data centers,
· Own network level 1 carrier,
· Customer experience,
· How to collaborate in the world of Pandemic,
· Intelligence innovation.
· Society 5.0 can be defined as a human-centered society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space. That means that all efforts are focused on society and not tech.
· Society 5.0 achieves a high degree of convergence between cyberspace (virtual space) and physical space (real space). In the past information society (Society 4.0), people would access a cloud service (databases) in cyberspace via the Internet and search for, retrieve, and analyze information or data. In Society 5.0, a huge amount of information from sensors in physical space is accumulated in cyberspace. In cyberspace, this big data is analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI), and the analysis results are fed back to humans in physical space in various forms. It is all about creating tech that makes the world a better place.
· Society 5.0 blends tradition with vision and it was first proposed in the 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan as a future society that Japan should aspire to. It follows the hunting society (Society 1.0), agricultural society (Society 2.0), industrial society (Society 3.0), and information society (Society 4.0). We need to think as a global citizen – combine business with responsibility and ethic position.
· Although it started in Japan, it will be exported and adopted to the rest of the world. In that regard, Japan and Germany’s angle to achieve Society 5.0 is very different, but below the surface, they share similar mindsets and challenges. For example, Germany and Japan both have an aging population, digitisation, engineering, robotics, automation, etc.
· Likewise, Europe and Japan have worked around an agreement to sharing values and working on a collaborating way.
· But technology advancement is raising some concerns, especially as people are starting to not trust technology and one area that is really problematic is automation and robotisation – about their future jobs.
· Other concerns include data – data protection – tradition in germany of ownership of data.
· How can we Accelerate digital business transformation with Intelligent Business, secure by design.
· Intelligent Business – Accelerate digital business transformation with Intelligent Business, secure by design. Agile infrastructure – think about the future – healthcare – sports – data to improve flows for big events, chatbots for hospitals, AI to handle that. Create smart solutions with better value to create intelligence business based on customer intelligence. Solutions for specific industries – example a car is a data center with more code and interfaces and needs to be protected.
· Intelligent Workplace – Empower and connect your workforce to deliver the best customer experience, with an intelligent digital workplace, secure by design.
· Intelligent Infrastructure Drive business agility with intelligent IT infrastructure solutions, secure by design.
· Move away from traditional structure and change the way we manage our data and look how we manage our data – IT and IOT, hospitals.
· Digital transformation has one component that people forget – it is about the people – processes, environment and level where people feel comfortable, and adjust models to digitalisation. Moving away from infrastructure to agile environments, we need flexibility to respond to new challenges, become intelligent and we need new boxes. More agility, automation and resilience.
· Society 5.0 and smart cities, smart societies – how to use technology to help build better cities and communities:
· One example is smart mobility and smart cities:
· How to use the data of a city and the flow of the traffic,
· How to monitor smartly this mobility,
· Smart cities mean smart mobility – cars, transports and pedestrians and all ecosystem, hotspots, surveillance.
· Healthcare is critical for smart cities, especially with an ageing population:
· Support with robotics,
· Japan has a big acceptance to robots, not so much in Germany,
· Keep people’s mind fit.
· Smart agriculture – how to optimise fields, crops, water:
· NTT implemented in Japan – a smart rice plant.
· Important start step by step and look at how people can adapt to these steps. Readjust systems and data with small solutions where people can see value and after you can go bigger.
· Society 5.0 how the technology can create value and the steps from digital transformation to get the buy the people and how they see the value for themselves.
· With Covid-19 how can you look at this as a way to redesign our society tech infrastructure:
· COVID accelerate velocity,
· We will have to build strategy and do it in the best ways and get all people onboard now that the door is open,
· Think about strategy special for companies, state – strategy not just tech,
· Until now was a fight to change and accelerate digital transformation but also moving patterns – if you change things at home create disruption.
· Cybercrime – Global costs will exceed $6 Trillion In 2021. This is a big chunk of the world economy. Intelligent Cybersecurity is one of the answers to fight that back.
· One of the biggest challenges as people can get away and the challenge is to detect and protect,
· Ransom risks and the environment around that – the criminal intentions and the simplicity to do it even if criminals are not prepared for that,
· Cybersecurity is an invisible threat and companies prefer to pay ransom that to prepare their companies for the risks,
· Importance of back ups,
· Better to prepare than to pay a cybersecurity ransom,
· Hackers when they get in they just need one hour of two,
· Early warning systems – requires smart detect infrastructure that put in place systems and automated systems that looks at data and algorithms that detect these risks,
· There is a massive market for cyber criminal.
· Future vision
· We will see a future tech and data driven.
· Technology discussions will be about ethics and philosophy.
· We will have a society based on sustainability and technology.
· I want to build a society where my kids can live and technology will play a critical role on that.
· Technology and sustainability have to walk side by side.
· Vision – infinity loop – get information from society and the process starts and we take and provide.
· Singularity AI will play a role but the if we manage in a smart way tech will create much more benefit than risks.
· Use robotics in a smart way.
· You can always use tech for wrong systems but overall society is behind that and we are on the right track even if it is a journey.
Kai Grunwitz Bio
Kai Grunwitz is currently the Country Managing Director of Germany at NTT Ltd. He is responsible for both the business and the development of go-to-market strategies in the consulting and managed security areas of NTT Security. In addition, he is responsible for the global Consulting Governance. He has 25 years of experience in the IT industry, business management and top management positions in leading companies like NTT, Oracle and Sun Microsystems among others.
As Country Managing Director – Germany NTT Ltd., he is responsible for the Development of the NTT Security Business in EMEA, the cooperation with NTT Group Companies, Managed Security Services PreSales and Consulting Services.
Prior to joining NTT Security, he was Vice President at Oracle Consulting and Member of the Board of Oracle Germany. At Oracle, he was responsible for the Oracle Consulting Business in Germany and Switzerland with the focus on customer projects covering the whole Oracle Solution Stack (Cloud, SaaS, ERP, HCM, PLM, Engineered Systems (Exa), Big Data, Business Analytics, SOA, Security, Webcenter and Database Solutions). Managing the full P&L and a team of 180 people in Sales and Delivery.
At Oracle, he was also Vice President, Technology Consulting Northern Europe. In that role, he was responsible for the Oracle Technology Consulting business in Germany, Switzerland and Nordics with the focus on customer projects covering the whole Oracle solution stack (Engineered Systems (Exa), Big Data, BI, SOA, Security, Webcenter and Database Solutions). Managing the full P&L and a team of 200+ people in Sales and Delivery.
Prior to that, he held the role of Director Professional Services Central Europe at Sun Microsystems. There, Kay Grunwitz was running the Professional Services Business (Project and Managed Services) with P&L in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Czech, Slovakia and Hungary. Responsible for the sales and delivery (180 employees and 150 partner resources) of a US$110M global services P&L across Sun’s top accounts in industries that include Telecommunication, Finance, Government, Commercial, Healthcare and Education.
Likewise, he was managing Sales and Delivery with full P&L responsibility for Professional and Managed Services in Germany. With the PS team providing solutions based on Sun’s Storage, Systems and Software product lines to Sun’s customers. As Manager of the German PS Organization, he managed a 50m$+ P&L with over 120 employees and 100 partner resources.
Kai Grunwitz is a Cyber Security leader and influencer. He is a regular guest and speaker at events like the Gartner Security Summit, Handelsblatt Jahrestagung Cybersecurity and active blogger on various cyber security and digital transformation topics.
About NTT Ltd.
NTT Ltd. is a global technology services company. They partner with organizations around the world to shape and achieve outcomes through intelligent technology solutions. As the company states, intelligent means data driven, connected, digital and secure. As a global ICT provider, NTT employs more than 40,000 people in a diverse and dynamic workplace that spans 57 countries, trading in 73 countries and delivering services in over 200 countries and regions. Their motto “together we enable the connected future.”
It was known as de facto holding company of all companies that operated under NTT outside of Japan. The major operating companies of NTT in Japan, such as NTT East, NTT West, NTT Docomo, NTT Communications (Japan), NTT Data, NTT Comware, NTT TechnoCross, NTT Electronics, NTT Advanced Technology, NTT Urban Development, basic research and development laboratories in and outside of Japan, and NTT Venture Capital are not included in NTT Ltd. The company also doesn’t include global operations (oversea subsidiaries) of NTT Docomo and NTT Data.
Links and sources
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaigrunwitz/
https://twitter.com/KaiGrunwitz
https://www.comparethecloud.net/author/kai-grunwitz/
https://www.securityinformed.com/people/kai-grunwitz.html
https://www.it-business.de/kai-grunwitz-wird-ceo-von-ntt-in-deutschland-a-869981/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTT_Ltd.
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