As a young girl, Lory remembers taking apart a microwave oven on her way to becoming an engineer. She worked for 24 years in the telecoms industry both on the supply side with Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia and with Vodafone. She moved to IBM in 2021 and is now working on quantum computing helping IBM fulfil its roadmap. She has a degree is psychology form the Open University.
Lory Thorpe speaks English, Italian, French and Spanish. Born in Canada she attended secondary school there before moving to Italy to study IT and Computer Science then Telecommunications Engineering. After a stint simultaneously as an interpreter, she joined Ericsson in Rome. She stayed for 13 years and worked on some of the early developments of mobile phones. She helped pioneer pre-paid and virtual network services.
Following this, she moved to a ‘totally different culture’ with Huawei as a solution director in the UK. Within three years she grew the business by 200%: she was helped by having a colleague, a native Chinese speaker who worked on the internal aspects of her job and she on the external aspects.
A move to Vodafone saw her appointed Head of Internet Things Innovation and Strategy where she bult a new team and took on, somewhat reluctantly, the role of manager. Her five years there were followed by working for Nokia Software when it was a separate part of the company and focused on enterprise software. She moved to IBM into a team for the telco sector then into quantum computing. She says IBM has hit every one of its targets to build a successful quantum computer.
Lory Thorpe was interviewed in May 2024 by Richard Sharpe for Archives of IT and her full interview should be available in June.
Lory Thorpe on Quantum
Lory Thorpe on IBM
Lory Thorpe on Ericsson and Huawei
