3Q Radu Popescu Zeletin, founder of E-CAESAR R&D Institute in Bucharest

3Q Radu Popescu Zeletin founder of E-CAESAR R&D Institute in Bucharest, founded by Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute in Berlin

Why did Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute establish E-CAESAR in Romania?

One of Fraunhofer’s main focus points is ICT for the public sector. Since we are an R&D institute, we needed to find an environment in which our technologies could be put in place, and in Romania two-three years ago it was necessary to look into the future. A lot of companies we work with, such as IBM, Siemens and Microsoft, have projects in the public sector in Germany and offices in Romania. Our role in Germany is to be a neutral technological entity for the government, and we thought this could also be the role of E-CAESAR in Romania – advising the government and municipalities.

What projects do you have under development at E-CAESAR?

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As cloud-computing becomes big in all European countries, major companies are starting to deploy infrastructure on this platform. One of the big questions is: should a company trust putting data in the cloud? So we developed eSafe, an idea born in our institute but the project was done with E-CAESAR. We have developed it for Microsoft Azure and Amazon and we are trying to develop it for IBM as well. We also have a project called PRO. In countries like Germany and Romania, a big problem is that companies need to supply data to various ministries and agencies about their activity. The idea is to come up with a system that automatically provides these data to the state agencies directly from the company’s ICT. The target is SMEs.

How well is Romania doing in e-government implementation?

A project like e-Romania is very good. I think there is a will to go in this direction and to coordinate. After two years with E-CAESAR in Romania, I can say progress is slow, probably because you don’t have an e-government CIO.

What we learned in Germany and Austria is that if you take e-government seriously, you need a CIO for the whole of Romania, one person who has the power to go between the ministries and provide a coherent view of what needs to be done. You need a master plan. There is a lot of talent in Romania.

Education is still one of the bigger assets you have here.

otilia.haraga@business-review.ro