Christiaan De Backer has over 25 years' experience in the IT management in telecom and high tech companies. In 1984, this Master's graduate in civil electro-technical engineering and business engineering began his career at ITT Bell Telephone. There, as an IT specialist, he gathered IT expertise, until he was hired by Belgacom in 1996. Chris streamlined the Belgacom IT department into a well operating service department.

Toby Wright is Chief Technology Officer at Telegraph Media Group and has worked in the technology and media sectors for 25 years.  Leading a team responsible for the digital products and propositions around and including Telegraph.co.uk, Toby also oversees software and product development, technical strategy and the move to SaaS platforms. 
 

Mary is the Chief Information Officer and IT Partner for Deloitte in the UK.  Her background is in IT, but she is keen to stress she is not too 'techy': 
"Technology is my area of expertise, like Tax or Corporate Finance" she says, "but my job is efficiently managing a fundamental part of our business while finding ways to use IT as an enabler, not a barrier, for our people to serve our clients."
 

Peter Bradley served as navigator and operations officer in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, with active service during the Falklands conflict.
In 1984 he joined the RNLI as Inspector of lifeboats. Recently he has run the RNLI trials section and prevention programmes and now manages RNLI Operational requirements for radio communications and IT.

Joan Miller joined the Houses of Parliament in Sept 2005 to establish the new Parliamentary ICT organisation to support services both in Westminster and constituency offices across the country.  As the Director of the new joint Department, uniquely owned by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, she sits on both management boards.

Miles Gray is a Technical Architect in the NHS Technology Office where he is responsible for the development of the Green IT Strategy for the NHS.  Miles is also a member of the Green ICT Delivery Unit within the Office of the UK Government CIO where he has lead the data centre work and incorporated the EU’s Code of Conduct for Data Centre Operations into the workbook for Public Sector CIOs.  More recently Miles has lead the Technical Architecture work strand to support UK Government’s strategy for Data Centre Migration, G-Cloud and the Application Store for Government.

Bryan is the Chief Information Officer from Rentokil Initial plc. He joined in 2007. Formerly, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Society of International Telecommunications and Aeronautics, having previously been UK Managing Director of James Martin, held board positions at Vertex (part of United Utilities) and executive roles at Computer Science Corporation, Allied Maples and ICL.

 

Over 25 years working in IT and more than 15 years focused on Architecture. Stuart is defining the architecture for the IT transformation at Royal Mail. Previously he built a world class architecture capability at Nokia and led the enterprise architecture at Schenker. While in consulting at Capgemini Stuart ran the global architecture practice and co-developed the architecture framework some of which has had an influence on TOGAF9. His core interest is transformational IT and developing business value through this transformation. He is passionate about developing the capability of people in IT to be able to deal with the complex landscape of IT.

Marc Olesen is responsible for defining and executing the strategic direction for the McAfee Content & Cloud Security business. Olesen leads the engineering, marketing, and sales functions that drive worldwide growth for this area of the business, including McAfee’s email and Web security and data loss prevention products.  The Content Security solutions span on-premise software, gateway appliances and cloud-based Security-as-a-Service offerings.

Gordon Penfold, 55, graduated in Economics and Law from the University of London in 1975, and subsequently gained postgraduate qualifications in Computer Science from Brunel University.   The early part of his career was spent in the defence industry, and from 1981 until 1997 he was employed by Fujitsu Inc. undertaking a progressively more senior Sales, Marketing, Operations and Business Management roles in the IT Services, Telecommunications, Defence and Aviation sectors.  During that time he worked on assignment in the UK, Europe, Japan and North America, and on long-term postings in South Africa and finally Hong Kong.

Bryan is the editor in chief of Computer Weekly, the UK’s best-known and longest-established business technology publication. He is responsible for managing and developing all of Computer Weekly’s editorial content, covering the 90,000-circulation weekly newspaper, Computerweekly.com web site, blogs, video, podcasts, web seminars, social media, events, community and the CW500 IT leadership group.

Having worked in information security for more than 10 years, Joerg started his career with startup technology consulting company based in Germany, followed by a journey through the IT landscape including writing code for high-speed multi-gigabit packet switches. Before joining Barclays Bank PLC in 2008 as the Attack Monitoring Manager for the global Intrusion Detection Programme he was the CSO of infoServe GmbH, a Internet Service Provider offering creative solutions around managed security services and customized gateway developments.

Jamie Erbes leads the Chief Technology Office for Software & Solutions as the chief technology officer, driving the company-wide, software strategy for Business Technology Optimization (BTO)--our IT management software--and Communications & Media Solutions, with offerings for the communications, media and entertainment industry. She works closely with other HP senior chief technology officers, HP Labs and HP Business Management to bring innovative thought leadership into HP Software products and services.

Martin Buhr is European Business Director for Amazon Web Services. His role is to drive increased awareness of Amazon’s cloud computing offerings in the European market, grow the customer and revenue base, and oversee all public facing activities including business development, sales, marketing, and evangelism. Martin joined Amazon Web Services in January 2006 to drive awareness and adoption of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

 Robert Whiteside manages Google's Enterprise business in the UK, Ireland and Benelux regions. Robert joined Google in 2005 to establish the business having previously worked in various technical, consulting and sales roles in Enterprise software companies and as a practitioner of IT within industry.

Charles joined BAE Systems Head Office in 2000 as Head of e-Business Strategy following the company's investment in the creation of Exostar, the aerospace and defence industry e-marketplace (co-founded with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Rolls-Royce).  At the beginning of 2005 he moved to become IT Director, Head Office & Shared Services. In his 3 year tenure of the post delivering services to 2,000 users, he achieved a 25% reduction in the operational IT budget whilst improving service delivery (40%) and customer satisfaction (15%).

Steve Garnett is Chairman of Europe at salesforce.com and has truly had one of the most distinguished careers of any European executive in the software industry. Garnett has been a member of the executive management team of three software startups that have each turned into some of the most successful software companies in history.

Ian Osborne is Director of the Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network, a Technology Strategy Board funded programme operated by a consortium led by Intellect with QinetiQ and National Physical Laboratory. The Digital Systems KTN launched in October 2009 and is initially comprised of three programmes: Cyber-Security, Location & Timing and Scalable Computing. The new KTN is working closely with Digital Communications KTN and leading industry suppliers and innovators with a brief to address the needs for promoting ICT-based innovation in private and public sector organisations. See www.digitalsystemsktn.org for more information.

Philipp Huber is the co-founder of SymetriQ and former CTO of XCalibre Communications and driving force behind the first European Cloud FlexiScale.  He had his formative years as a senior consultant and architect in HP's Swiss IT Professional Service Organisation, focusing on very large scale email backbones and complex Systems & Network Management projects. 

Currently CIO for Westminster City Council, David is driving forward an exciting new ICT strategy based on the principles of customer centric service delivery, a zero infrastructure technology environment and transformational change.

David was previously CIO at the London Borough of Waltham Forest, with responsibility for the Council’s access to services strategy, transforming service delivery, all ICT and the Project and Programme management profession.

Richard is a Chartered Accountant with specific interest in technology and all aspects of Cloud Computing. He writes extensively on the subject and believes business success depends on combining forward planning, ongoing development, cost effective inter-office communication and central administration with all technology has to offer.

Iain joined the Information Commissioner’s office in 1996. During his time with the Commissioner he has dealt with a wide range of areas, including health service compliance, new technologies, international issues and privacy at work. Iain worked for a couple of years on the freedom of information side of the Commissioner’s office, before moving back to data protection in 2006 to deal with information-sharing policy. Iain worked on the recently published ‘Privacy Notices Code of Practice’ and is now working on two codes of practice, one that deals with personal information on-line and another on data sharing.

 

Richard advises on the strategic transformation of technology & business process sourcing, outsourcing and offshoring business models. Current clients include sourcing consultants Alsbridge, and the UK Government, on the development of ‘Cloud’ sourcing. Former Group VP IT of chemical major ICI (acquired by Akzo Nobel in 2008), he is a Board member at Intellect (the business association of the UK IT, Telecoms & Electronics industries) having chaired their Outsourcing & Offshore Group and their initiative in Outcome-Based Agreements.

As Director of Cloud Global Practice, Marc is responsible for the Cloud Portfolio & Strategy across HP Software Services. The Cloud Global Practice is responsible for identifying and creating repeatable solutions, best practices, artifacts, and intellectual property to accelerate the adoption or provision of cloud solutions and improve the time to value for the customer. 

He has 30+ years experience in the world of IT related finance. 10 of those years were spent as a partner in a Britsh firm of Chartered Accountants with a tax and IT remit. The remainder of his time was spent in a variety of industries including construction, steel fabrication, build to order manufacture and light engineering in progressively senior finance related roles.

Dr Johnson holds a PhD in Parallelism in Computational Logic from Queen Mary College, University of London, which was followed by several years of post doctoral research. He started out in financial software houses covering both global and boutique businesses before joining the exotic derivatives desk at Tokyo-Mitsubishi International in 2000. He is now Head of Front Office Technology at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International, where he is responsible for all technology issues that affect the Front Office trading environment. He introduced the first grid instance in 2003 and has had a continuing involvement with HPC since.

 

Mark began his career in 1992 at CERN, birthplace of the Worldwide Web, before switching to a similar facility (SLAC) in California in 1998. At SLAC he managed a major intranet redevelopment project, and this inspired Mark to form his first company, Surfability, in 2000 with the help of an Enterprise Fellowship award from The Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Ken Hertzler is a 23-year technology industry veteran, with extensive software and hardware product experience spanning cloud, grid, HPC and virtualization solutions. Prior to his current role at Platform Computing, he spent six years developing NEC’s enterprise solution strategies. Before that, he served as vice president of product management for Gridion, a provider of parallel processing grid software platforms; and Performant, a provider of large-scale IT software performance diagnostics tools for enterprise application servers.

Owen Garrett joined Zeus in 1999 initially as a member of the software development team. More recently, Owen’s primary responsibility has grown to include product management, strategy and new product delivery. Owen is also deeply involved in the research and development needed to ensure Zeus continues to launch next-generation software and application technologies, based on current and future customer and market demands.

David Wartell is the founder of R1Soft. Prior to BBS Technologies, Wartell was the President and CEO of Righteous Software Inc. Wartell has over 10 years experience in software development and Internet infrastructure and has held positions ranging from software engineer and network engineer to CEO. Before starting R1Soft he worked as the Sr. Network Engineer for EV1Servers/ThePlanet in Houston, Texas where he was responsible for one of the largest computer networks that supported over 20,000 Linux and Windows servers.

Mark Beaumont is group manager of product management/development and marketing for the IT Solutions portfolio at Verizon Business. He leads a global team providing data centre services, managed hosting, application Management and IT solutions to customers operating in sectors including education, government, finance, retail, and manufacturing. The solutions enable large enterprise customers to enter new markets and compete in a global world, supported by a hosted, IP-enabled network. Beaumont’s role includes instigating new hosting and managed hosting solutions and services, reviewing existing solutions, cloud services and expanding the data center capabilities.

Adrian’s an Information Technology visionary, with extensive knowledge and practical experience in various I.T., Security, Strategy & Quality Management positions internationally.

Peter Laudenslager is the Sr. Manager for Cloud Solutions at Double-Take Software.  He oversees ongoing projects to bring Double-Take Software’s existing on-premises workload management software to the cloud.  Peter has been a hands-on technologist for more than 25 years, with the last 12 focused on high-availability and disaster recovery solutions. 

As Product Manager for Information Worker Online Services at Microsoft Ltd, Gill Le Fevre is responsible for the management of the company’s online productivity products; currently Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online and Live Meeting. Gill responsibilities include planning the UK strategy, defining above and below the line marketing activity and developing the sales and partner ecosystem within the UK.

John is a chartered Engineer with more than 25 years cross-industry IT and General Management experience in the Energy, Industry and Public Sectors. Having fulfilled a variety of roles including IT management, Programme and Account management and Operations management, John is now responsible for developing and implementing the Siemens IT Solutions and Services sales and delivery strategy within the North West Europe cluster of countries.

Simon Abrahams is Head of Product Marketing for Rackspace EMEA, with ownership of the EMEA product strategy, market positioning, and delivery of all new products. In this role Simon is responsible for aligning Rackspace’s product innovation initiatives with the needs of European customers, as part of Rackspace’s Fanatical Support commitment.

Werner Knoblich is responsible for developing and implementing Red Hat’s business strategy in EMEA. He has full P&L responsibility with a primary focus on sales, marketing and services. His goals for the region include exceeding sales targets, developing and implementing an effective go-to-market strategy, strengthening demand generation and field marketing capability, improving
operational efficiency and creating a customer centric culture.

Ian Wells is the Regional Director for Veeam’s operations in Northern Europe. This territory includes the UK, Ireland, Nordics, Benelux and South Africa and Ian is responsible for sales, marketing, presales and operation in these areas. Ian joined Veeam in April 2010 from EMC where he was responsible for both the Backup/Recovery and Unified Storage business in the UKI for the last 3 years. He was also instrumental in building EMC’s content management business within the Public Sector.

Niall Sclater oversees elearning services and the development and roll-out of innovations in distance learning at the Open University UK.  From Oct 2005 to July 2008 he directed the university’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Programme which developed a new VLE based on the open source system, Moodle.  This now forms the centre of the learning and teaching systems at Europe’s largest university with nearly 200,000 learners.

Cedric Huesler joined Day Software in Jan 2009 and is the Solution Evangelist and Product Marketing Director at Day Software AG. Prior to Day Software, Mr Huesler was the Engineering Director at Local.ch, Switzerland’s phone book and Yellow Pages, responsible for architecting and building a scalable, cost-efficient and easy-to-use search engine built on open-source technologies. Mr Huesler has over 10 years of experience in the content management space working at Obtree Technologies and OpenText. He graduated from Handelmittelschule (HMS) in Liestal, Switzerland with a degree in business.

 

Andy is responsible for discussing the “Enterprise Cloud”  journey with EMEA VMware customers, he has over 8 years virtualisation experience and has been involved in small to very large VMware deployments. Key experience has been in regulated computing environments and the processes that need to change in the data centre for a successful deployment. Previous positions in VMware have included Senior Evangelist, before that Andy was a customer of VMware virtualising data centres all over the world for a large multinational organisation.”

 

Sharon Forder (MCIM) is the founder and Managing Director of Redberry Solutions, an organisation that optimises business value by combining professional business management consultancy with On-Demand (SaaS) technology solutions.   

Steve Sydes joined NetSuite in June 2009 as Vice President and Managing Director, EMEA. Mr Sydes has more than 30 years experience of the technology industry, working in a range of sales, marketing and management functions across electronics, engineering and computing firms. Prior to joining NetSuite he was a main board director for Acal Plc, responsible for over $150m of customer revenues across thirteen countries in EMEA, the US and AsiaPac.

Dave leads NetApp’s UK business with single-minded focus on establishing NetApp as the leading UK storage vendor by 2012. Dave is responsible for planning business strategy and overseeing its delivery to ensure outstanding sales performance and customer satisfaction.

Sage Research and Development Director, accountable for the technology strategy and long term product direction for the UK and Ireland region.  Over  25 years experience in the software industry all of which has been spent in software development.  Ian has held leadership positions at GEC, Thorn EMI as well as operating at board level in a number of UK based software houses.

Bill Goodwin is an acclaimed award-winning journalist with an outstanding record of achievement as an editor and journalist on the web, magazines, newspapers and television. Bill is a specialist in reporting on business and information technology.

Vincent DiMemmo is a technology services and marketing veteran and has a broad range of expertise in managed services, applications infrastructure, telecommunications, disaster recovery & business continuity, and data center infrastructure. He is responsible for the strategy, planning, commercial development, and program implementation of the developing Cloud Infrastructure and SaaS markets at Equinix.

Brian Klingbeil is the EMEA MD of Savvis, a global leader in IT infrastructure services and cloud computing for the enterprise and public sector. Prior to this, he served as VP of Finance and Strategic Planning for Savvis in the US for five years and has also held key positions at GTS Telecommunications & Qwest Communications." 

 

Simon is the founder of Foundation IT Ltd and has over 20 years experience of delivering enterprise IT solutions. Simon has a deep technical understanding of both Virtualisation and SharePoint technologies and is a highly respected industry speaker on both subjects. As an ex IT manager he understand the challenge that customers face and is able to quickly create solution options. As a passionate IT industry player, Simon is in touch with the latest developments and is able to covert this understanding into practical solutions.

Mark Rivington has deep knowledge of the systems and network management vendor space having served in numerous technical and marketing roles at key software organizations over the last twenty years. At Candle, Boole & Babbage, BMC and RiverSoft, Mark gathered significant understanding of how management software can be developed and deployed to maximize customer returns in terms of business benefit.  In his current role this understanding helps drive the direction of the Nimsoft technology towards maximum customer benefit.

Cory is responsible for Astadia’s platform and integration business.  Cory has 10 years experience designing, implementing, and improving enterprise business applications.  Cory began architecting custom enterprise solutions using cloud technologies while working for salesforce.com in 2005, and has provided technical enablement to leading cloud application development firms and ISVs. 

Sriram Chakravarthy is Head of Cloud Services and Product Strategy at TIBCO. He has more than 10 years of experience in the designing and implementing high performance messaging servers, integration and on-demand platforms and has helped design scalable, high-performance middleware architecture for Fortune 500 customers. Sriram holds several patents in distributed computing and Web Services. Prior to joining TIBCO Chakravarthy held senior management positions at Rearden Commerce and Fiorano Software. He received his Masters of Science degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science.

 

Justin Pirie is Mimecast’s Director of Communities and Content. Justin is a leading SaaS and Cloud specialist- he authors the influential “This Week in SaaS”, blog and runs the largest SaaS community in the world, with over 19,500 members. Justin has been in IT over ten years, gravitating towards SaaS over the last five. This last year he’s been consulting to companies large and small, helping them create successful SaaS products and strategy, and before that he was an officer at Endeavors Technology, the inventors of Application Virtualisation.

 

Jeremy is responsible for the strategic direction of FinancialForce.com. He was the driving force behind the creation of the Company in 2009 with investment from UNIT4 and salesforce.com. He began his career at IBM, after which he joined ISV Lychgate, where he held senior systems engineering and sales roles. Jeremy joined Science Systems (now SciSys) as Commercial Director in 1990 and was a core member of the team that led the acquisition of CODA in March 2000 and two years later he became CEO of the CODA Group. In 2005 he helped establish the European Software Association and spent three years as Chairman, promoting software best practice and cooperation across the business community.

Peter Glock has 30 years broad-ranging experience in ICT ranging from design and engineering to business and general management. He is especially experienced in change programs. He is currently managing the consulting business for Orange in UK & Ireland and is practice expert in Cloud Computing and IT transformation.

Bernard Golden Bernard Golden is called a “cloud guru.” He is CEO of HyperStratus, a Silicon Valley cloud consulting firm that helps its clients plan, design, and implement cloud initiatives. HyperStratus clients include the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, HelloWallet, Sun Microsytems, and Hewlett-Packard.

As principal analyst, William created and drives 451’s user research program with IT early adopters and innovators across a range of vertical markets for the CloudScape service. He has tracked the adoption and maturation of grid and virtualization from 2000 with enterprise users – and since 2007 has been principally focused on cloud computing.

Klaus is the former Director of Sales and Marketing at Hostworks and built the team that helped Hostworks treble its revenues in 5 years prior to the sale of the company in 2008 for $68.9m. Klaus has 25 years in the IT industry having previously held senior positions with DMR Consulting (now Fujitsu Consulting), Aspect Computing, Ajilon Consulting and others delivering solutions for global clients.

Richard Prodger is a founding Technical Director of Active Web Solutions with more than 25 years experience in the R&D and computing sectors. Richard’s primary responsibilities are technical strategy and systems development. Richard is the Director responsible for the AWS Technology Centre.

Gregor Petri is Advisor Lean IT, responsible for the European go-to market strategy around Cloud Computing, Virtualization and Service Automation for CA. Prior to this, Gregor helped implement Just in Time Manufacturing at Philips and worked as a management trainee in the office of the CIO at Akzo.

Glenn is responsible for our datacentre strategies and offerings, including the delivery of large-scale datacentre solutions for such organisations as HMRC, NHS and Lloyds TSB. He has 25 years experience in the datacentre, spanning hardware and software development, project and operational management and solution architecture. His personal experience ranges from process re-engineering with large organisations’ boards to stripping asbestos cladding during the maintenance of air handling plant. Glenn is married with children, which leaves little time for pursuit of his other great love, West Ham United Football Club.

 

As a former ethical hacker with seventeen years experience in the Information Security industry, Jason has used his knowledge and expertise to create technologies that ensure organisations stay one step ahead of the security game. Jason continues to raise the profile of Information Security risks and solutions, including the introduction of the term CSO (Chief Security Officer) within business.

Mike Spink is a Research Director with Gartner.  His research topics include cloud computing, hosting and co-location - areas of increasing strategic significance to clients.
Mr. Spink has held a number of senior management positions within the IT industry – most recently as thought-leader and EMEA Practice Director for a large software and services vendor where he was responsible for data centre optimisation, green IT and utility computing.  Prior to that Mike was EMEA Director of Business Development for a systems management software vendor, where he incubated and developed new revenue streams for Service Oriented Architecture and Service Management solutions.

Mathieu Poujol, Director Technologies, joined PAC in 1999 as a consultant. He is in charge of the middleware business unit and markets for the group.

I always like to be in the middle of discovery when it happens. I also like that my actions help people go forward. Being a consultant in the IT market fulfills both of these roles and PAC,with its particular business model centered on the consultant, is the perfect place to do so.

David heads up D2C, a consulting firm which provides business and social media consulting as well as Cloud based solutions for accounting, content, collaboration, and web publishing.    He is Vice Chair of the Intellect Software as a Service Group and a director of EuroCloud UK.
 

Mr David Akka M.Sc, MBA, is the Managing Director of Magic Software Enterprises (UK) Ltd. Mr Akka has been with Magic Software since 1998 and is considered one of the organisation’s foremost authorities on Cloud computing and SOA methodologies. Prior to working with Magic Software, David held the position of CTO, Service Delivery Manager and worked in several Management Consulting roles.

Matt Davies is the Cordys Director of Product Marketing. In this role Matt is responsible for all components of technical evangelism of Cordys products to customers, partners, analysts and press to help shape Cordys’ strategic direction, as well as mapping industry trends and market drivers to Cordys solutions. Matt Davies came to Cordys from BEA/Oracle where he was their EMEA Director of Product Marketing. Prior to working at BEA, Matt worked at Elata, Broadquay Consulting, iPlanet/Sun, Netscape and IBM. With more than 15 years in the software industry, Matt has gained extensive knowledge of Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, Business Process Management and Service Orientated Architectures.

 

With over 20 years experience in the IT industry, Andy joins Systancia after spending the last 10 years helping to establish US and European thin client and virtualisation software start-ups in the UK and EMEA market.
With successful launches of Netier (acquired by Wyse Technology in 2001), Igel Technology and Appstream (acquired by Symantec in 2008), Andy brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise in the sale and support of application and desktop virtualisation solution.

 

Rhys works closely with SCC's customers to help develop their technology strategies so as to optimise the infrastructure and gain maximum benefit from their investment in IT. This approach helps SCC align its delivery capability with the needs of its customers.

Ron leads CSC’s Cloud Computing Services across CSC in EMEA. He has recently developed CSC’s Cloud Adoption Assessment Service which helps organisations reach the right decisions to make the move to cloud computing a risk-free and successful experience. Ron is also Chief Technology Officer for CSC in EMEA as well as heading up CSC’s Global Centre of Excellence for Business Process Management.

Gowri is a co-founder of Aspire Systems and currently serves as its CEO. In this position, he sets the strategic direction for Aspire and also oversees its day-to-day operations. Under his leadership, Aspire has grown at a CAGR of 63% over the past five years and has been ranked in Deloitte's list of fastest-growing companies in India and Asia-Pacific.

Ian McDonald has been a leader in IT for over 15 years working in a range of multinational companies such as BHP, DHL, Sitel and Ecolab. Ian has extensive experience ranging from national/regional responsibility for IT, leading software teams and being General Manager at a large outsourcing firm.  Ian is now global Head of IT for Symbian Foundation who provide the delivery and roadmap for the open source Symbian platform used in many smart-phones.