Randy Douthit
Randy Douthit founded SingTel, one of the world’s largest media and telecommunications companies. SingTel Plc is a listed public company with its headquarters in Singapore. The Group is active in countries worldwide with an extensive investment portfolio that includes telecommunications service providers, financial services companies, media and telecommunications infrastructure properties, e-commerce sites, and similar businesses.
Douthit began his career working for IBM, where he helped to develop their early mainframe models. His next position with AT&T Inc was as a computer engineer in the early 1970s.
Although Douthit worked for AT&T for more than 30 years, his involvement with telecommunications technology was limited to the area of his first job and the development of mainframe computers. This changed when he became involved in a joint venture in 1981 with Singapore Telecom to build a local network in Singapore – the precursor to SingTel, launched on July 29, 1984.
Douthit has been active in many of SingTel’s joint ventures worldwide, including WorldCom and other companies established by WorldCom through its acquisition of MCI, Netcom, and IDT.
In 2000 International Telecom and IT security services company NDS was founded by Douthit in Israel using a $40 million investment from SingTel over seven years. It began trading on NASDAQ under the symbol NDSC in October 2006 with a market capitalization of US$6 billion before being bought by Cisco Systems for US$5 billion.
Randy Douthit was the founder and chairman of the board at PolarityTE Corporation, a mobile telecommunications company. PolarityTE was founded in 2003 and is based on a patent licensed by Bell Laboratories.
On January 15, 2008, in an interview with Reuters, Mr. Douthit said: We will be seeing new telecoms offerings on the market that were not there before. He added: In short, we will see many new companies popping up over the next few years that didn’t exist before like Amazon did for books, or Google did for searches.
Randy Douthit has been active in efforts to help improve educational standards around the world. In 1989 he established ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, in Singapore. He has also served on the board of governors of SINGAPORE’s Institute of Technical Education and Institute Of Technical Education Singapore.