Messaging  |  2019-11-15

CMA Appoints Dietmar Gollnick as new President

Source: The Critical Communications Review | Gert Jan Wolf editor

The international Critical Messaging Association (CMA) has a new president: Dr Dietmar Gollnick, CEO of the e*Message WIS group from Germany and France, was appointed as the successor of Derek Banner at the beginning of November in Brussels.

The longstanding and esteemed president had already made a prior announcement that he would no longer be running for the office due to his age. At the suggestion of the board of directors, Dr Dietmar Gollnick was unanimously elected as the new president. Ron Wray of Multitone Ltd. from the UK and Jurgen Poels from the nationwide operator of the public safety network in Belgium were also unanimously elected as new executive board members of the globally active CMA.

The election took place during an extraordinary general meeting before the annual CMA Summit. One of the new board members needs to get in addition approval by employers' management.

“It was a great honour and pleasure for me to have had the opportunity to lead this unique organisation for so long and to collaborate with my colleagues”, said outgoing president Banner. “Dietmar Gollnick is a particularly innovative and disciplined colleague. He has presented me with a lifetime membership to CMA. I am pleased to make my contribution and will continue to support him and CMA.”

The new president has a clear vision:

“We all want to have choice in our daily lives. That also goes for wireless communication. CMA is the organisation advocating for secure messaging in critical situations. No one should depend on just a single (SIM) card. Our members are making a major contribution to alternative mobile infrastructure on four continents”, says Dr Gollnick.

The new president was born in Berlin, studied mathematics and worked for many years at a large software company. He has been working at e*Message WIS in France and Germany since 2000 and has also been active in various management roles at CMA.

The services of CMA, in particular mobile communications, are very widely accepted, irreplaceable in many parts and now already well combined with standard ‘cellular’ services, such as LTE and 5G. While the original focus was almost exclusively on paging, today there are many other applications that complement paging or expand it with NP2M (narrowband point-to-multipoint/see ETSI TR 103 102), such as with ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute/Antipolis, France).

For example, the services of CMA members are used to alert fire brigades in the Dordogne, Marseille and Paris, in all of Belgium, in Zurich, Berlin, Moscow, and in Australia. CMA members are guarantors for mo- bile alternative infrastructure, one that still works when nothing else does. CMA has a strong affinity with healthcare not only in the US and the UK, and with energy companies in the US, France and Germany. More than 1,000 hospitals work with CMA members and hundreds of en- ergy providers throughout the world.

The new Board of Directors has many plans for the future. One of its priorities is to ensure the availability of the corresponding frequency ranges to fire services, healthcare, energy, industry and other important customer groups in Europe and worldwide, and to provide them with even more. It intends to support the efforts made by the European CEPT, the FCC and the other national regulatory organisations. Accessibility is key, especially in critical cases, and even in situations where conventional mobile networks fail or power outages occur.

The organisation’s well-established annual summits will continue to be held. Cooperation with other associations will be strengthened. Various working groups are currently being established in which basic documents and a proprietary quality seal, where appropriate, are being developed. The focus is always to ensure the economically configurable security of critical communications, availability even in crisis situations and business continuity through independent mobile infrastructures.
The next regular summit of the CMA will take place in spring 2020. The location and date have not yet been determined.

Others than mentioned members of the CMA Board are:

  • Linda Cox (UK, Pagers Direct)
  • Jim Nelson (USA, Prism IPX Systems International)
  • Kirk Alland (USA, Unication)
  • Angelo Saccoccia (Switzerland, Swissphone )
  • David Villacastin (France, TPL Systemes)