During his 11-year tenure at Nokia and its subsidiaries, David Eckard has journeyed from design engineer to chief technology officer to his current position: vice president of strategy and technology of North America. With 2021 ending, Eckard recently joined Nokia Today podcast host Tyler Kern to discuss the latest trends in the telecommunications industry and what may lie ahead in 2022. The telecommunications industry used to be a “layered cake,” as Eckard described. Everyone in the market was responsible for something, whether that was chipsets, product components, product creators, or service providers. When the iPhone era arrived, services decoupled, causing these layers to interconnect. Decoupling brings concerns with reliability, security and who will make everything work while providing performance, speed, scalability, and centralization. “At the end of the day, the big challenges we are seeing is who actually owns that customer?” Eckard said. “Because in the past, these service providers were the ones who truly owned those customers. Now, with the webscale companies coming in such as Amazon and Microsoft, they all have such a huge and immense suite of resources, of applications and tools that they are now opening up for others to build upon,” he continued. The main innovation challenge is how well teams, companies and individuals will bring things to market and execute them. Consumer acceptance is the easy part. Eckard stated, “The pace of acceptance of innovation, the acceptance of new technology into those spaces is just phenomenal.” Obsolescence of rapidly certain technologies also presents the challenge of how to carry data forward and not lose it. Eckard also touched on a dilemma that innovators face: How will they address disrupted technologies versus sustained ones? Large companies will need to bring technologies to scale to allow sustenance. For more information on the current trends and state of the telecommunications industry, visit nokia.com or subscribe to the Nokia Today podcast on Apple iTunes or Spotify.