Executive Board Election

The term for the following RIPE NCC Executive Board member expired:

Frode Greisen

Voting for the appointment of one RIPE NCC Executive Board member took place at the meeting

The two confirmed candidates for the post were:

Frode Greisen is Chief Internet Officer of Global TeleSystems Group Inc., a company that delivers a variety of telecommunications services in Europe. He has worked with computers since 1963 and with computer networks since 1984.

In 1997 he was elected to the founding board of the RIPE NCC Association, a new legal body continuing the work to allocate IP numbers in Europe previously done under the umbrella of Terena.

He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society from 1992 to 1998 and served as its treasurer from 1992 to 1997 and as the chairman of the Society from 1997 to 1998.

He was the president of the European Research and Education Network (EARN) from 1989 to 1995. At the merger between EARN and Reseaux Associee de la Recherche Europeenne (RARE) in October 1994 into the Trans-European Education and Research Networking Association (TERENA) he was elected president of TERENA and he served in that position until May 1995.

Frode Greisen was born in 1940 and obtained his M.Sc. in electrical engineering in 1964 and a Ph.D. in solid state physics in 1968 from the Technical University of Denmark. He was at the Technical University of Denmark first as a research assistant and later as an assistant Professor from 1964 to 1970, with IBM Denmark from 1971 to 1977 and with the Danish Computing Center for Research and Education from 1978 to 1996. From 1992 he served part time as general manager for the Ebone consortium and when in 1996 the consortium was transformed into an association with a fully owned subsidiary Ebone Inc. he joined the company as managing director. By the purchase of Ebone Inc. by GTS in 1999 he became Chief Internet Officer with GTS.

Richard Nuttall, – SVP Sales and Business Development, Interoute , has a BSc in Computing and Information Systems from Manchester University (1985). He worked at a number of companies in software development, including writing knowledge processing engines for expert systems (Alcatel ESC in Harlow), porting Fortran 77 programs to C under very early versions of Windows (Amazon Computers in Milton Keynes) and developing the first X Windows systems for UNIX Sun Workstations (Torch Technology in Cambridge), before taking the X Windows technology and joining Unipalm Ltd in March 1990. He managed the Research and Development team there and went on to do a number of high profile project management roles.

With Peter Dawe, he started the PIPEX (The Public IP Exchange) company from scratch in 1991, building PIPEX (as General Manager) from an idea to a successful 52 person operation, becoming the first commercial Internet Service Provider with more than 50% market share of the fast growing Internet market. Particular innovations introduced at PIPEX included a flat monthly fee based on bandwidth (the first time this had been done in the UK), the PIPEX DIAL dialup service with automatic software updates and free web space (First in the UK).

In 1994, Richard co-founded and the London Internet Exchange (LINX) https://www.linx.net, a not-for-profit organisation which is the largest neutral interconnect in Europe for a group of more than 100 Internet Service Providers, and handles 2Gbit/s of Internet traffic. Until Jan 2000, Richard was Company Secretary and Treasurer of the LINX.

Following the successful start-up of PIPEX, Richard moved on to a wider Business Development role within the larger Unipalm Group, developing the first Electronic Commerce project in the UK (1995) which allows merchants to authorise and process credit card transactions over the Internet in real time.

In October 1997, Richard founded Flute Limited to install submarine fibre optic networks. Flute is now part of Interoute, and the combined network covers 18,000km of cable around Europe. The network will have one of the biggest IP backbones in Europe, with a 10Gbit backbone, POPs in 46 cities and fibre rings around 20 cities.