UH Chief Information Officer elected PTC president and board chair

Lassner to serve as first PTC president from Hawaii since the 1980s

University of Hawaiʻi
Contact:
Larry Wiss, (808) 956-9393
UH Information Technology Services
Posted: Jan 20, 2006

University of Hawaiʻi Chief Information Officer David Lassner has been elected Chairman of the Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) Board of Governors and President of PTC.

PTC is a Hawaiʻi-based international membership organization formed in 1980 that promotes the advancement and use of information and communication technologies within the Pacific hemisphere. The organization has more than 400 members and hosts the largest annual telecommunications conference in the Pacific.

As the newly elected PTC board chair and president, Lassner will help to create new ways to integrate and reach out to the unofficial members of the PTC community. "This will help us to chart a future for the new competitive and rapidly converging Internet-based information and communications technology environment in the Asia-Pacific region," stated Lassner in a recent statement to PTC members.

The 28th annual PTC conference recently took place on January 15-18 at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikīkī. More than 1000 delegates attended PTC ʻ06, and at least 2000 additional members of the telecommunications sector have joined them for a variety of bilateral business meetings that are scheduled around PTC each year.

PTC brings more high tech executives and managers to Hawaiʻi on an annual basis than any other annual in the state. This benefits Hawaiʻi businesses, educators, students and policy-makers who enjoy opportunities for learning and networking with an international community that would otherwise be unavailable in Hawaiʻi.

"PTC‘06 continues the resurgence of the PTC annual conference that began in 2005," said Lassner. "The conference enjoys greater attendance than in any year since the downturn at the beginning of the decade in the telecom and dot.com industries." Attendees have reported that PTC‘06 has the strongest and most relevant conference program in many years.

Featured speakers in Honolulu for PT‘06 included: Vint Cerf, now VP and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google who is considered one of the fathers of the TCP/IP protocols that underlie the Internet; (Retired) Admiral Tom Fargo; Vinod Kumar, President of VSNL International; Brad Garlinghouse, VP of Communications Products at Yahoo!; Ruoqi Guan, President of China Network Communications Group; Dato' Abdul Wahid Omar, Group CEO of Telekom Malaysia; and David McGlade, CEO of Intelsat.

Lassner is only the second PTC President from Hawaiʻi and the first since Bob Engelbardt of GTE Hawaiian Telephone served in the 1980s. Other officers elected to the board are: Robert Mao, CEO of Nortel Networks China; Ken Zita, Managing Partner of Network Dynamics in New York; Robert Walp, Chairman Emeritus of GCI, Alaska; Tim Shea, VP of Asia Pacific Sales for Loral Skynet, Singapore; and Bruce Drake, Executive Director for the Pacific Region of Industry Canada.

For more information on the Pacific Telecommunications Council, visit www.ptc.org. To learn more about David Lassner, visit www2.hawaii.edu/~david.