As executive director of global security at NEC Corporation, a manufacturer of telecommunication equipment and components, Hiroyuki Watanabe has responsibility for cybersecurity, secure manufacturing, new business, and sales at the company.

He has extensive knowledge and experience across various business categories. Among his notable contributions are his successes in architecture design for an exchange system, which resulted in $1B business in the 1990s. During the 2000s, Watanabe-san initiated an open-source community called “Open Daylight” as a member of the board with IBM, BROCADE, and CISCO among others, for creating and expanding the market of software-defined networking (SDN).

His recent research interests include revolutionizing legacy supply chain management and the evolution of the manufacturing industry using dual-use space defense technologies.