Nokia sold Here to BMW Mercedes-Benz and Audi last year in a €2.5 billion deal. Overbeek, a cloud computing expert, has been hired to help Germany’s self-driving vehicles mission by developing high-definition mapping systems, which link self-driving cars to wireless networks.
The connection enables ultra-precise navigation to be performed and other functions, such as recalculating a route to y developing the nearest electric charging station, or around a traffic jam or accident.
Overbeek held several senior executive roles at Cisco, including SVP of Cisco services and was also responsible for the global services organisation. He became a strategic advisor in June 2015, when Cisco’s CEO Chuck Robbins named an executive leadership team to lead the company from July 25, 2015.
"The Here location cloud is poised to be at the heart of new kinds of services that will genuinely change people's lives - everything from autonomous cars and smart cities to digitising enterprises,” said Edzard Overbeek.
Prior to Cisco, he held leadership roles at Fujitsu and Siemens. In January 2016, Overbeek was also appointed to the board of directors of Infoblox, a network control company.
