Etienne Defontaine

Services Project Manager at Irdeto Access, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Central point of contact, coordination & management of end-to-end DVB solutions including Set-Top-Box Software integrations and Back-end deployments for major broadcast companies worldwide, in a multi-lingual, multi-territory environment

Scope & Define, Initiate, manage, control and close customer projects following Prince2 methodology : Client facing role from pre-sales phase to delivery of end-to-end products and services meeting customer requirements and schedule, ensuring quality standards are achieved, whilst operating within the agreed project budget.

Participate in pre-sales activities, assessing project scope and budget based on the understanding of the business requirements and priorities of the customer expectations, evaluating associated effort and delivery scenarios, as well as acheivable project milestones.

• Agreeing the project brief with the customer and internally, for both technical and budgetary scope, delivery approach, dependencies, assumptions, exclusions, constraints, engagement models with the project partners and suppliers, detailed project plan, project budget and resource requirements.
• Managing actively multi-discipline, multi-cultural, multi-location project team (Irdeto engineers, sub-contractors or external suppliers), assigning work packages and actions, tracking progress and evaluating risks and issues,
• Ensuring project plans and project documentation are kept up to date, producing progress reports to project team and senior management teams, initiating and managing change control process, maintaining project risk registers and escalating issues to Project Board when project tolorances are exceeded.

Main project achievements :
• SunDirectTV, India : System Integrator Project Manager for Direct-To-Home (DTH) DVB-S deployment of an end-to-end solution, including Irdeto CA solution and managing 3rd party vendors OpenTV middleware (Core2, Network Package, EPG and applications), Set-Top-Box manufacturers Coship, Homecast and Samsung, sub-contracted indian Integration & validation Test team, Harmonic Head-End, Siemens/Oracle Subscriber Management system.
• Project Manager for first OSF DVB-H and T-DMB mobileTV broadcast deployments of Irdeto mobileTV products in partnership with strategic partners Thomson, Envivio, LG, Samsung, Quantum, ZTE, Gemalto, OCS, G&D, for SFR/Vodafone (France), African countries (MCA, DMTV, MTN, Monicash), China Mobile (Beijing, China), OPG (Shanghai, China)
• VTC, Vietnam : Project Manager for DVB-T deployments of Irdeto CA solution (Head-End, and Smart Cards) in VTC network

Working relationships and Team working in a matrix-based structure within Irdeto :
• Manager Professional Services as Primary reporting interface.
• Sales & Account Management for project scoping, bid reviews, new customer projects.
• Product Marketing for product lifecycle and roadmap, strategy updates, product development requests, partner/manufacturer liaison.
• Engineering Teams for product development and release, product ‘expert’ consultancy.
• Customer Support for system installation, technical product expertise or product training.
• STB Integration Team for device integration & testing facilities, device manufacturer co-ordination, device verification and control.
• Logistics for smartcard production, system initialisation & distribution, supplier liaison.
• Finance regarding project budgeting, purchasing and invoicing

Software Project management for mobile phone embedded software delivery : Philips 655, Philips 162, Haier Z100/Z160, Haier Z300/Z360. Main objective : management of a development team for customisation of plateform software into customer dedicated software for sales and production.

• Manage software team from MMI/look & drivers developments to integration & validation : define and build project software plans in accordance with quality process for software milestones & delivery ; plan, negociate with skill leaders, setup and manage resources allocation during projects life ; plan and request all material needs for development team ; setup software configuration through Clearcase ; manage weekly CCB (Change Control Board) meetings and set the priority, acknowledgement to team members, status and delivery of Problem Report or Change Request ; report customer updates and main issues faced in the project to platform project leader and team members ; manage software certification (FTA, CTA, GCF, PTCRB).

• Manage customer relationship (Philips Mobile, Haier Mobile) on software issues : support pre-sales team for product design & answer to RFQ ; define functionnal specifications upon customer requirements and platform features ; organize and manage weekly meetings to report main software issues and maturity level evolution to customers ; plan meetings with customers to align on technical issues (delivery contents, support plan, maintenance plan) and define project software milestones ; analyse and negociate Problem Report raised by customers and asign priority ; deliver software & present milestones to customers

• Manage multi-sites communication and work organisation between France and China : coordinate software developments and deliveries for the projects ; anticipate hardware needs and modifications in relation with software implementation ; synchronize production requirements and software delivery ; go to China to synchronize software activities and main project milestones (hadware update, Proto-run production, mass production start, customer acceptance).

2002/2004 “Solution dpt” Manager at Oberthur Card Systems, in Beijing, China.
Creation of the new « SIM/UIM cards Solutions » department in Beijing (China) ; Project management for Asia-pacific region (China, India, Philippina) ; Recruitment of team members ; Internal trainings for technical and marketing teams.

• Coordination between french R&D teams and chinese technical support teams : analysis of the local needs expressed by the customers, transcription of the needs into internal development process, and validation of the product releases according to the client expectations.

• Adaption and localisation of the european solutions to chinese needs : java applet for dynamic menu update and download on GSM and CDMA smart cards (WML download), mobile email application on smart cards (POP3 client) ; interoperable (ETSI 03.48) applet download on SIMs.

• Installation and validation of the test and demonstration environments (smart cards & servers), connected to China Mobile and China Unicom GSM and CDMA networks (Beijing, GuangXi, JiangSu, GuangDong).


1999/2002 ALTRAN Consultant working on a project bases for Oberthur Card Systems, in Paris, France.
As Project Manager, specifications, analysis, implementation, tests and integration of a JAVA smart cards administration server (OTA plateform) for JAVA applets download, Over The Air or on a Card Reader, according to the ETSI 03.48 standards (Security Mechanisms for the SIM application toolkit) :

• Project Manager for MobilROM project (Orange, Romania) and Wind (Italy): installation and setup of
UNIX server for OTA management of JAVA SIMs (rebranding, remote applet management), in operator
environments ; installation and configuration of Oracle database ; customisation of interfaces with operator billing and provisioning modules ; integration of High-Availability and Load Balancing ; Training and customer support of the services.

• Specification and development for "JAVA applet download" server and administration & user management servers, connected to Oracle database. MMI design and development (CGI Perl, Python & JavaScript) for server administration through WEB interfaces.

• Interoperability workshops and tests handeled : Integration of Gemplus and Orga interoperable SIMs, for generic Remote File Management and Remote Applet Management.

• Technical support during all the phases of the sales cycle from pre-sales to after-sales. Technical
consultant for architecture and design of the solutions. Support and Training to European Operators :
Wind, Omnitel in Italy ; France Telecom Mobile in France ; Telefonica in Spain ; Paegas.