Autumn Symposium

As members will have noticed from the IAP’s LinkedIn group, this year’s Autumn symposium (title: ‘The Virtual World’) is to take place at the Churchill War Rooms, Westminster on 14 October. We’ve assembled an impressive group of IT industry leaders who have agreed to make presentations. They are (in alphabetical order, and, by a strange coincidence, in the order they’ll be speaking):

• Neil Cross, who has 30 years’ experience in the IT industry and is currently Managing Director at Advanced 365.
• Richard Hall, Managing Director at CloudOrigin, who was previously UK Chief Technology Officer and Marketing Director for Avanade.
• Henry Nash, a hugely successful entrepreneur who has built five successful companies with global reach and is currently Manager for IBM’s Cloud Solutions, following their acquisition of Transitive Corporation, his previous company.
• Simon Rice, who is Principal Policy Adviser (Technology) at the Information Commissioner’s Office.
• Dale Vile, who is Managing Director at Freeform Dynamics, a research company specializing in investigating the practicality of emerging or rapidly changing areas of IT. In a 25-year career, Dale has worked with major pharmaceutical companies, Sybase, JD Edwards, SAP and Nortel Networks among many others.

Here’s a brief outline of their presentations:

Neil will take a look back at how we have arrived at this point and forward to where we could be going. Along the way he will break the journey at the present time and consider the kinds of issues facing the modern IT director and what the software developer deploying to the Cloud can do to mitigate them.

Richard will review the journey from selling and developing traditional on-premise software to becoming a Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service provider.

Henry will consider how Public Cloud computing offers on-demand, flexible, “maintenance included” computing and storage for all, at a cost that is making every CFO sit up and take notice.

Simon will explore the impact that a move to Cloud computing may have on organisations, specifically from a data protection and information rights point of view.

Dale will round off the symposium by providing us with a ‘View from above the Cloud’, drawing together some common themes and considering their impact on different aspects of IT, particularly focusing on software design and development.

Full publicity material for the Symposium will be available shortly. Check back here regularly or keep in touch via the IAP LinkedIn group.