Walter Legrand graduated as an Engineer from the National Institute of Polytechnics in Toulouse, France, where he also gained a PhD in Telecommunications.
He is presently in the CTO office of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), in charge of standardization and new technologies.
Previously he worked for ITT in the US, Alcatel, Telesystems and Orange UK before joining EADS. His responsibilities covered software development and integration management, product line management, system design and institutional marketing management. He led large projects such as the digital System 12, satellite Telecom1, digital PCS, land mobile radio TETRA and the EU project EGERIS. He is also a specialist in Mobile Secured Information and Communications Technologies Interoperability, specialising in access to middleware and application levels, and has several publications in conferences, forums and SDOs.
He is presently:
- Vice chairman of the worldwide ‘Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC)’ gathering the major US and EU ICT manufacturers
- Member of the ‘European Security Advisory Board’ (ESRAB) for innovation and standardization, for FP7, at the European Commission in Brussels
- Co-author of the ‘Communications for disaster’ handbook at the ‘International Telecommunications Union (ITU)’ in Geneva
- Member, raporteur, project leader and former chairman of CEN, ETSI, WWRF for the BT161, PCS SIM, EMTEL and TETRA projects
- Contributor to various conferences such as Pulver VoIP, AFNOR, 3GPP, SoS.