Executive Summary
On 22-25 April 2025, the IOWN Global Forum hosted its Annual Member Meeting 2025 in Stockholm, Sweden, welcoming 246 registrants from over 59 organizations representing 19 different countries. Additional attendees joined both in-person and online on Thursday 24 April for the FUTURES Stockholm event, a Member Meeting session open to the public. With key themes of collaboration and innovation throughout the week, members made great strides toward the Forum’s vision and celebrated what they’ve accomplished over the past five years.
Opening Message, 2025 Re-elected Directors, Keynote
The IOWN Global Forum President and Chairperson Dr. Katsuhiko Kawazoe welcomed Members and expressed appreciation for their efforts to support the Forum during its fifth anniversary year. He noted the Forum’s achievements over the past five years and discussed his own vision for the future of the Forum, including “Beyond Digital.”
A summary video of all of the Forum’s important work was presented.
Forum Members then heard a Keynote Address from Håkan Jevrell, State Secretary to Minister for International Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade, Sweden. Håkan shared with members the importance of working together with other countries to ensure ongoing innovation.
Following the address, five Directors with a wealth of experience and expertise across the communications ecosystem were re-elected to the IOWN Global Forum Board of Directors:
- Eric Hardouin, VP, Networks and Infrastructures Research, Orange
- Michiaki Hayashi, General Manager, KDDI Corporation
- Shingo Mizuno, Corporate Executive Officer, EVP, Vice Head of System Platform Business, Fujitsu Limited
- Ralph Rodschat, Vice President, Global Sales Engineering, Ciena Corporation
- Jefferson Wang, Chief Strategy Officer, Cloud First, Accenture
IOWN Global Forum Contributor Award Ceremony
In 2022, the IOWN Global Forum Board of Directors introduced an annual award program to recognize individuals who provided outstanding contributions to the Forum’s Steering Committee and Working Group activities. Recipients are nominated by the Chairs and approved by the Board of Directors.
Four individuals from the Marketing Steering Committee (MSC) were awarded based on their outstanding contributions to the IOWN Global Forum booth and half-day session at MWC Barcelona in 2025:
- Prasad Dhananjaya, Fujitsu Limited
- Maiko Imoto, NTT Corporation
- Yutaka Komai, Sony Group Corporation
- Hiroki Takahira, Fujitsu Limited
Six individuals from the Technology and Use Case Working Group (TUCWG) were awarded based on their outstanding contributions to the Group:
- David Hillerkuss, Nokia Corporation
- Jun-ichi Kawasaki, KDDI Corporation
- Hiroshi Miura, NTT Corporation
- Masayoshi Nanba, MUFG Bank, Ltd.
- Kenya Takashima, Accenture
- Jia-an Tsai, Chunghwa Telecom
Member Presentations
Nine Member Presentations were given during the meeting.
On Day 2, Francois Moore of Fujitsu Limited presented “Emerging Optical and Compute Services in the Era of AI & Compute as a Service,” which touched on the need for new optical services as we usher in this new era of AI. David Neilson of Nokia shared “The Optical Network: A Foundation for the Intelligent Future,” where he discussed how optical networks are foundationally necessary for a smarter future. Representatives of Intel, NTT and Red Hat presented “Offloading Network Functions to DPU/IPU in OpenShift/K8s: A Use-Case Study with IOWN Deterministic Networking over the Open APN,” and Nokia’s Johan Bäck shared the abilities of dynamic capacity allocation to reduce network power consumption. Lastly, representatives from Fujitsu, NEC and NTT discussed deterministic latency computing.
On Day 3, Ryosuke Kurebayashi of NTT gave a talk on DCI (data center interconnect) technologies that were displayed at various industry events. Kazuo Ninotaka of NTT also shared a presentation on DCI, titled “Activities and Achievements Related to DCI with Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure.” Teresa Monteiro of Nokia presented “Operationalization of APN – Solving Coherent Optical Pluggables in Disaggregated Environments,” and Hiroaki Nishimoto of Sumitomo Electric Industries discussed wavelength path economics in Open APN.
Discussions, Breakout Sessions, Workshops, and Networking
Rich Member discussions, workshops, and breakout sessions for Steering Committees, Working Groups, and Task Forces took place during the meeting, on topics such as energy efficiency, data center interconnect, reference implementation models and more. Those in-person also enjoyed a variety of networking opportunities to connect with fellow IOWN Global Forum Members.
FUTURES Stockholm 2025
On 24 April, the Forum’s FUTURES Stockholm event was held to envision a photonics-based future of next-generation communications and infrastructure technology, and how it will impact business strategy and innovation. Open to the public, the event welcomed over 250 in-person and 70 online participants in the optical and wireless network technology space to listen to presentations and panels by experts on the Forum’s important work.
Closing Remarks
The last day of the meeting featured two keynotes from industry experts. Dr. Ioannis Tomkos of the University of Patras shared his presentation titled “Federated x-Haul and Wireless Access in 6G Era.” Alonso Millan-Mejia of SMART Photonics presented “InP Pics: The Green Engines Behind High Speed Connectivity.”
Lastly, attendees heard a closing message from IOWN Global Forum Alternate Board Director Yasuhiko Aoki of Fujitsu Limited, who shared exciting trends towards turning the Forum’s Vision to Reality, and expressed his gratitude to the attendees and participants. He also announced the next Member Meeting location, which will take place 30 September – 3 October 2025, in Dallas, Texas, USA.
The Forum would like to thank all participants for their support and involvement in making this Member Meeting a success. We would also like to thank our sponsors, Ericsson and NTT, for their support. We look forward to future Member Meetings with IOWN Global Forum Members.
Many presentations, photos, and recordings from the 2025 Annual Member Meeting are available to the IOWN Global Forum Members via the Member Portal. If you are interested in becoming a member, learn how to join today.
