Cloudstreet founder and CEO, Mika Skarp is an awarded telecom network technologist, entrepreneur and executive. After a decade and a half developing groundbreaking technology-enabled business models for Nokia, Mika consolidated his learnings, experience and patents to launch Cloudstreet, the world’ first application-aware network slicing platform.

An executive engineer at Nokia both in Finland and later in Silicon Valley, Mika was the founding president of the WiMAX forum a consortium of companies and business leaders focused on supporting and promoting the standard. While at Nokia he headed up Village Connection a novel program dedicated to expanding wireless coverage in remote regions in the developing world.

A guest member of 3GPP, Skarp is active in the telecom industry as a writer, commentator and mentor focused on digital transformation in support of net neutrality and a common, free and open internet. The founding president of the WiMAX Forum, an industry-led, not-for-profit organization that certifies and promotes the compatibility and interoperability of broadband wireless products based upon IEEE Standard 802.16, Skarp has built a strong international network of players focused on leveraging technology to connect the world and the people in it, wherever they are. Skarp lives with his wife, son and two daughters from their home in Espoo, Finland.  

Though widely professed to be a panacea for all that ails operators, network slicing will not arrive in a flash but rather a trickle of uniquely-tailored, solidly-modeled services. By the economics of telecom, these pioneer business models will live or die not by blueprint boxes or baffling diagrams, but by the financial value and operational efficiencies they can deliver. Certainly, there remain complex technological hurdles to enabling the kinds of intelligent, adaptive, automated slicing ecosystems we all envision, but the greater and more immediate challenge is where to begin and how to prepare our human business, marketing and operational functions for this enormous shift. Looking at the opportunity from the 30,000 feet level, Network Slicing Innovator, Entrepreneur and Cloudstreet Founder and CEO Mika Skarp shares his vision on what, in the language of business will come to be “the thin edge of the wedge” that drives open a sea of new, high-value, high-return network slicing based business lines.