Stephen Russell

EMEA Practice Lead, Information Governance

After writing a thesis on ‘Managing Tacit Knowledge in Business’ for his Masters’ Degree at University of London in 2000, Steve has continued to work with enterprises across many disciplines and geographies to better manage risk and value in Information and Data. His career since then balances both large corporates and small consultancies. Steve remains passionate about the use of technology and teams to enable better business, recognizing that data is the currency which provides both value and risk to all businesses. For Veritas, Steve leads the EMEA Consultancy Advisory Practice which develops and delivers the go-to-market services around our technology solutions. Steve is based with his family near London, he has travelled and worked widely in EMEA and worldwide

Andy Meikle

Chief People Officer

Andy has been the Chief People Officer of JustGiving for 4 years. JustGiving is the world’s largest platform for giving, where people connect with causes they care about. Prior to that he worked in Stockholm as HR Director for Cint, a Swedish SaaS business. Andy comes from a background of psychology, holding a Ph.D in Experimental Psychology and having worked as an Intelligence Analyst for the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. Andy is passionate about developing company cultures and unlocking employee, team and organisational potential.

Shirley Wills

BI Business Analyst at Retail Assist

Shirley has worked in the IT and Finance industries for over 25 years. She is a Prince 2 Practitioner and certified Accountant with a wealth of experience in financial accounting/auditing, business intelligence, business risk/regulatory compliance and ERP/CRM. Shirley is currently BI Business Analyst at Retail Assist, supporting Karen Millen, COAST, Oasis and Warehouse.

Carl Wiper

Group Manager, Policy Delivery

Carl Wiper has worked at the Information Commissioner’s Office since 2010. He is currently a Group Manager in the Policy Delivery department. He is working on a number of policy issues in relation to data protection and freedom of information, including big data, profiling and outsourcing. He worked on the ICO’s discussion paper on Big data and data protection. Before joining the ICO, he was an information manager in local government, and his career has been spent working in information management and research in organisations in the public, private and third sectors.

Thomas Breach

Talent Acquisition Manager, Technology & Product

As Talent Acquisition Manager for Technology & Product, Thomas Breach is supporting a significant digital transformation at Elsevier. The company is harnessing big data, semantic web and cloud technologies to enhance the performance of global science and health professionals. With a focus on talent identification for London and Amsterdam he supports a team in North America and Europe seeking to bring on board in the next year in excess of 300 new technologists.

Omid Shiraji

Chief Information Officer

One of a new breed of next-generation IT leaders, Omid Shiraji is currently the interim CIO at Camden Council, previously holding senior technology leadership roles in the private and third sectors as CIO for Working Links and Director of Service for City University London.

Ray Hassan

Senior Solutions & Performance Engineer

Daniel Cameron

Research Director

Daniel joined Ipsos MORI a decade ago, and has managed and directed a huge range of research and evaluation projects for high profile clients in the public, private and charity sectors. In his current role, he is Head of Central Government research at Ipsos MORI, coordinating and overseeing projects for numerous public sector organisations. He specialises in working on large scale, fast-turn around studies, often investigating sensitive and contentious issues for clients including the BBC, Ofcom, the MOD and King’s College London. Daniel regularly authors reports and commentary about social trends and public attitudes in Britain. The team he leads focuses on cross-cutting issues at the heart of government, including public service reform, regulation and emerging policies challenges like the use of big data. Exploring public perceptions of data and data science has been a focus over recent years, including projects for the ONS, ESRC, Cabinet Office and the Royal Society.

Paul Groth

Disruptive Technology Director, Elsevier Labs

Paul Groth is Disruptive Technology Director at Elsevier Labs. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southampton (2007) and has done research at the University of Southern California and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on dealing with large amounts of diverse contextualized knowledge with a particular focus on the web and science applications. This includes research in data provenance, data science, data integration and knowledge sharing. He lead architecture development for the Open PHACTS drug discovery data integration platform. Paul was co-chair of the W3C Provenance Working Group that created a standard for provenance interchange. He is co-author of “Provenance: an Introduction to PROV” and “The Semantic Web Primer: 3rd Edition” as well as numerous academic articles. He blogs at http://thinklinks.wordpress.com.

Paul Fisher

Research Director

Paul Fisher is a Research Director with PAC UK. His research and analysis focuses on cyber security technologies and the market trends that affect the client and supplier communities. He works with global suppliers and the CIO and CISO communities at leading organisations, advising them on cyber strategies and market intelligence. Paul is an accomplished speaker and a regular host at industry events.

Guy Cohen

Strategic Relationships Manager

In addition to his work at Privitar developing research, policy and strategy, Guy is also a junior fellow at the University of Cambridge, Centre for Science and Policy. Before joining Privitar, Guy worked in various roles in the Civil Service; in the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health and HMRC.

Jeff Rothwell

Systems Engineer

Jeff Rothwell is a Sales Engineer at Cloudera, where he helps customers architect Big Data solutions that reveal insight from all types of data and all types of systems. He has a background in Business Intelligence and Big Data Analytics and over 20 years experience in the software industry across a diverse range of vertical markets.

Stephen Etheridge

Senior Solutions Architect

Stephen Etheridge built his first computer in 1978 and has managed to successfully pay the rent from computers since 1986. He’s also lucky enough to still have most of his hair. Easily bored, it made sense that he kept himself entertained with a bit of espionage as an Enterprise Architect in law enforcement, intelligence and security sectors. Describing himself as devastatingly handsome, he also swears that he manages to be a miserable git most of the time, albeit a very witty one. While he prefers pen, ink and paper to computers, this hasn’t stopped him having a long and successful history working at major system integrators before joining Basho. Stephen specialises in data, unstructured data handling, big data, giant data, data swamps and AI where he predicts it will all end up one day out of our control.

Olivier de Garrigues

EMEA Solutions Lead

Olivier is EMEA Solutions Lead at Trifacta. He has 7 years experience in analytics with prior roles as technical lead for business analytics at Splunk and as a quantitative analyst at Accenture and Aon.

Nicola Fulford

Head of Data Protection & Privacy

Nicola specialises in privacy and data protection, advising on the full range of related issues including international data transfers; responding to data security breaches and inquiries from data protection authorities; privacy policies; notices and consents; online profiling, cookies and marketing; subject access; interception; surveillance and monitoring; compliance strategies and projects; and dealing with sensitive data such as health data and personal data of children. Nicola advises clients on the use of personal information across a range of sectors, including technology, social media, financial services, healthcare, retail and travel. She also has extensive experience of outsourcing and complex technology transactions, acting for both customers and providers. She qualified as a solicitor in 1998 and in addition to private practice, has worked in-house for a global outsourcing provider and a major investment bank. Nicola holds the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP)'s certification: CIPPE as a Certified Information Privacy Professional. Previously at Bristows, Nicola joined Kemp Little as a partner in 2014.

Israel Camara

Technical Team Lead, Marketing Intelligence

Israel has worked at IG for six years. He leads the Marketing Intelligence Development team in the UK with a passion for Java and new technology.

Michael Pearce

Technical Architect, Messaging and Big Data

Michael has worked at IG for over six years, in the current role for the past four, working with Tomcat, Hadoop ecosystem, Kafka and JMS. Previous roles have been working as a developer and a specialist in the performance and reliability team.

Jochen Grünes

Sales Engineering Team Leader, EMEA

Jochen Grünes has been working at Datawatch for over 5 years. He started his role as a Sales Engineer for the German speaking market and he currently leads the Sales Engineering Team for EMEA. Prior to joining Datawatch, Jochen worked at Applix as a Presales Consultant with the product Cognos TM1, where he was responsible for presales, consulting and training in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Eastern Europe. During the Cognos TM1 acquisition by Cognos and IBM, Jochen led the German Competence Center for TM1 within the technical sales organisation for IBM Deutschland GmbH until October 2011.

Georges Gavelle

VP of Sales, EMEA

Georges Gavelle, VP of Sales, EMEA has more than 21 years of software industry experience. He specialises in areas of Business Intelligence, Financial Services, Corporate Governance and Life Sciences. Prior to joining Datawatch, Georges has worked for IBM, Cognos and Siebel.

Marc White

TimeXtender Lead Sales Consultant

Marc has been in the IT industry for 30 years, starting with sales of Sun systems into the financial and other markets. Marc has wide experience working for resellers and vendors, has sold solutions and services in network and ITSM, reporting and BI, telephony and hosted/cloud services as well as complete IT managed services and outsourced solutions. After spending 10 years as a sales director Marc now enjoys the challenge of bringing new and disruptive technologies to the marketplace… such as TimeXtender.

Mark Westhenry

IoT and Advanced Analytics Lead for Partners

Mike Bugembe

Chief Analytics Officer

Mike is an award-winning big data evangelist, author and executive advisor, helping organisations generate value from the deluge of data that is being produced today. Currently, Mike is working with the tech publishers O‘Reilly Media on a book that outlines a tried and tested algorithm that all organisations can follow to realise the game-changing value that big data and data science can bring. In his role as the Chief Analytics Officer at JustGiving.com (the world’s leading social giving company), he has used this approach to successfully transform the organisation. Establishing data and analytics as the lifeblood of the company, central to every operational and strategic decision. With this approach his team of analysts, statisticians and data scientists have used data science to build smart data-centric products that have had a significant impact on the world of giving. Much of his work can be found in technical magazines, press articles and a couple of recent bestselling big data books. He is also working with several leading universities on a big data programme for senior executives.

John Sands

Senior Qlik Evangelist

John has over ten years experience of working in the Analytics Marketplace and 20 years experience in the software industry. He has been involved with Qlik as it evolved into the platform of choice for many enterprise companies. His experience includes presenting to audiences globally talking about the BI Industry and how the Qlik platform has been such a game-changer. He is frequently asked to speak about the ever changing data landscape, sparked by Big Data and the Internet of Things. He actively contributes to Twitter (@QlikJohn) and to the Qlik Blog. His views are sought and published in many technical magazines across the globe. His role includes communicating sales messaging, product roadmap and future product direction. He has presented at industry events on subjects including IOT, Big Data and Cloud.

Cathy McCabe

Chief Information Officer

Cathy joined Jaeger, the pioneering British ladies and menswear fashion Brand, as CIO in December 2014. Prior to joining Jaeger, Cathy held the position of VP IT Customer & Payments at Burberry where she was involved in driving the customer strategies for both online and offline experiences, working alongside leading technology providers and start-ups alike. Cathy has over 30 years’ experience in the retail industry and is passionate about technology and hugely excited by the disruption data-driven innovation brings to a brand. Cathy enjoys providing expertise and thought leadership across the retail industry with a primary focus on customer experience, data architecture and digital innovation.

Ian Macdonald

Principal Technologist

Ian Macdonald is a data wizard, who has over 30 years’ experience in the Enterprise Business Intelligence market. Starting in Technical Support, training and consulting with Information Builders in 1986, he subsequently developed a career in pre-sales, product marketing and marketing, holding senior VP positions with companies such as Microsoft, Hyperion Solutions and HP. Ian has been working with Pyramid Analytics for five years, initiating their UK presence in 2011.

Matthew Robinson

Analytics Specialist

Matthew has over 25 years business analytics experience from a business and IT perspective, including working in utilities, manufacturing and retail. He has extensive knowledge of Performance Management, including tools such as the Balanced Scorecard, and Customer Relationship Management. His area of expertise is assisting organisations to identify pain points and requirements to develop a viable solution based on appropriate technologies.

Charles Adriaenssens

Business Analytics & IoT Lead, EMEA

Charles Adriaenssens is the Practice Lead for Business Analytics and IoT in EMEA at Splunk. He is responsible for the strategic direction of the practice, as well as ensuring all analytics engagements drive the maximum possible value from customer data. Charles has spent more than 20 years working in the fields of analytics, insight generation, business consulting and market research. Immediately before joining Splunk, Charles worked at the market research agency Ipsos MORI, where he specialised in generating insights to help customers improve the customer experience. Prior to this, Charles set up a strategy consulting business within the integrated marketing agency iris – where he used data to develop, implement and evaluate clients’ marketing strategy.

Duncan Turnbull

EMEA Business Analytics & IoT Technical Lead

Duncan Turnbull is the EMEA Business Analytics and IOT Technical Lead for Splunk. Duncan’s goal is to help people make better use of their data. Duncan has worked with Splunk for over 8 years and also has worked extensively with a variety of data technologies from accounting systems to transactional and analytical databases.

James Hodge

Principal Product Manager, Big Data

James Hodge is a Principal Product Manager at Splunk responsible for Big Data products. Prior to joining the product management team at Splunk, James led Big Data and Analytics technical consulting in EMEA. Before Splunk, James carried out similar roles at HP Autonomy and i2 IBM, giving him a him a wealth of experience working with data analytics within large public and private sector organisations.

Jos Driessen

Director, BI Demystified

Jos Driessen, worked as an external contractor for Sogeti for 34 years. In 2014 he started working for Vodafone and successfully changed the Business Intelligence Competence Centre (BICC) into a modern agile, (big) data-driven organisation, application and infrastructure. Jos is an independent consultant and a frequent conference speaker.

Brendan Moran

Sales Engineering Manager, UK & Ireland

Brendan Moran is the Sales Engineering Manager for the UK & Ireland at Cloudera, whose team of talented engineers helps customers choose and design the right mix of Cloudera and partner solutions, build amazing data and analytic-driven products to transform their businesses. Brendan has a background in creating and monetising big data analytic products whilst at WGSN and over 20 years in high technology companies across a diverse range of verticals.

Jez Clark

Co-founder – Director

Jez is a Co-founder and Director of Eden Smith, a specialist European data and analytics staffing company. Realising this market requires more than a job matching service Jez and Co-Founder Matt incorporated the company with one primary objective, to support businesses and help job seekers make sense of the #BigDataRevolution by sharing information, facilitating introduction and offering un-bias talent strategy and consulting services. Jez has been successful as a Consultant and Director in the staffing industry just shy of twenty years, he has helped many businesses adopt innovative strategies to attract niche talent and helped job seekers position themselves for hire. Ultimately the team at Eden Smith & their data and analytics consulting partners act in an advisory capacity, ensuring successful engagement between businesses and job seekers. We are here to help.

Matt Hawkins

Data Architecture & Integration Manager

Matt is an architect and developer managing Global Data Integration and Infrastructure in online retail at Surfdome.com. He covers the full Big Data stack from hardware design and implementation to end user delivery, insights and adoption. Prior to Surfdome, Matt has worked in banking for over six years, enabling Business Intelligence, data and infrastructure projects across core banking systems and reporting. Matt has also worked in a consulting capacity helping companies implement Big Data projects and turn data into insights.

Michal Rosik

Product Visionary

As Product Visionary for minit, Michal defines the Research & Development direction for this process mining solution, develops close ties to the academic community in this area and evangelises process mining benefits to enterprises worldwide. Michal previously lead Microsoft Consulting department in Siemens and was involved in several large enterprise projects as a consultant and project manager. In his free time, he is a passionate trail runner.

Justin Mullen

Co-Founder & Managing Director

Justin is the co-founder and managing director of Datalytyx, a leading provider of big data engineering, data analytics and cloud solutions. He has over 20 years of experience in deployments of data-driven solutions, and leading implementations into high performance data environments. Datalytyx is one of the few companies that provide a fully managed data operations service around Talend, AWS, Tableau, and Cloudera

Pete Grant

Principal Solutions Architect

Pete is an architect specialising in automated testing, deployment and team organisation for business intelligence.

Martin Hapl

VP Professional Services, EMEA

Martin Hapl has made a career out of bringing new technologies to the market. After starting out at Systinet, a company that helped to establish the idea of Web Services, he led SOA practice for Mercury Interactive and HP Software. In his current role as VP of Services (EMEA region) for GoodData, he is focused on helping customers build, implement, and succeed with Data Products that change the way that they do business.

Laurie Maclachlan

Regional Sales Director NEMEA

Laurie Maclachlan is the Regional Sales Director for Northern Europe and has an extensive 18 year career in IT, gained initially at Big 5 Management Consultancies and more recently within disruptive high-tech companies. Laurie leads a team of 8 Enterprise Account Managers in the UK, Nordics and Benelux countries.

Chris Sale

Technical Leader, Platform Engineering

Chris is a Technical Leader at Sky, Europe’s largest pay TV broadcaster. Working on the customer management platform supporting Sky’s 11.5 million customers, Chris has a very simple remit: to ‘Make Us Better’. Operating alongside the Performance Engineering, Test Engineering, Environment Operations and DevOps teams, many of the solutions that he builds have ElasticSearch at their heart.

Nick Bignell

Director, Cost Management & Analytics

Nick Bignell is the lead service analyst at UBS. He is responsible for building the reporting and analytics platforms for services provided out of the central back office functions of the bank. By utilising Alteryx and Tableau together he has been able to provide transparency and insight for the UBS business divisions to better manage their costs. Nick also co-leads the London Tableau User Group.

Steven Pimblett

COO

Steven is the COO of wejo, an innovator in connected car data and technologies. He runs all technology, data and analytics as well as the day-to-day company portfolio plans and operations. Prior to that Steven was CDO at online betting giant Betsson AB and previously at MoneySuperMarket as GM of Data.

Jason Foster

CEO & Founder

Jason is Founder and CEO of Cynozure, a consultancy helping organisations do great things with data through strategic advice and solution delivery. He has spent his career defining, shaping and delivering strategies that help organisations across multiple sectors get value from data. Jason led big data, analytics and marketing technology and solutions at Marks & Spencer, building out a Hadoop-based platform and engineering team See Jason's exclusive Interview with Big Data LDN on the event homepage.

Barry Green

Chief Data Officer

Barry has had 26 years in Financial Services with a brief two-year period in consulting. In this time has worked in a number of different roles (COO, CDO, Transformation Director, Reengineering, Business Manager and a number of global program roles). He has used data and process to understand and solve problems. In his current role he is the Interim CDO for the Bank of Ireland. His broad experience enables him to understand and work with all facets of the Business, being a conduit to drive collaboration around data and information.

Alexander Bartfeld

Vice-President, Professional Services EMEA

Alexander leads the Professional Services organisation for Cloudera in EMEA, with responsibility for the delivery of Cloudera’s Hadoop based Enterprise Data Hub to the European customer base. Prior to Cloudera, Alexander managed the Services practice in EMEA for Workday, a leading cloud enterprise software provider, and has also held positions as a technical consultant at Accenture and an R&D engineer at Benetton Formula 1 Racing. Alexander holds a Masters in Engineering, Economics and Management from Oxford University.

Russell Gee

Senior Technical Architect

Russell is a senior technical architect at EXASOL and helps organizations analyze and extract valuable information from data in order to drive their businesses forward. With over 20 years experience of working with data, Russell also has first-hand experience of the challenges of data manipulation, analysis and insight having worked at JP Morgan, Visa and Esso Petroleum.

Jonathan Woodward

Business Lead, Data Platform - UK

Jonathan Woodward is the UK Business Lead at Microsoft focused on the Data Platform covering: Data Platform - Business Intelligence - Analytics - Big Data - Data Science – IoT. An experienced market and product development leader and strategic technologist, Jon combines his extensive business development, commercial and management skills to develop visionary organisational strategies, continuous technology innovation, and the expansion of product portfolios, markets and operations. Jon has spent the last 20 years gaining wide and varied experience within the IT industry, with many of his roles centred on taking the latest technology solutions to the market, in both public and private sector.

Bojan Nikolic

Principal Research Associate

Bojan is the Project Engineer and Lead Architect for the Science Data Processor element of the Square Kilometre Array Telescope, and a Principal Research Associate at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, UK. His research focuses on technologies and techniques which enable next-generation radio astronomy telescopes and science more broadly. Within the SKA project, Bojan is the technical lead of the effort (of about 50 scientists and engineers distributed worldwide) to design a computing system that will transform the 1 Terabyte/second of raw, uncalibrated, data from the telescope into scientifically useful images. Previously he participated in the design, construction and commissioning of the Atacama Large [sub]Millimetre Array (ALMA), the largest ground-based astronomy project. There he helped develop the radiometric phase correction system that corrects for the disturbance to the received signal caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere enabling an improvement in resolution of more than a factor of 20 compared to previous telescopes. He has also developed specialised techniques for, and helped commission, the largest movable single-dish telescope in the world, the GBT 100-metre telescope. Bojan has also worked as a professional software engineer and mathematician in the commercial sector and has commercially developed open-source software packages.

Yiftach Shoolman

Co-Founder & CTO

Yiftach is an experienced technologist, having held leadership engineering and product roles in diverse fields from application acceleration, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS), to broadband networks and metro networks. He was the founder, president and CTO of Crescendo Networks (acquired by F5, NASDAQ:FFIV), the vice president of software development at Native Networks (acquired by Alcatel, NASDAQ: ALU) and part of the founding team at ECI Telecom broadband division, where he served as vice president of software engineering. Yiftach holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science and has completed studies for Master of Science in Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University.

Ellen Friedman

Author & Big Data Consultant

Ellen Friedman is a consultant and commentator on big data topics. Active in open source, Ellen is committer for Apache Drill and Apache Mahout projects. She has a PhD in biochemistry, years of experience as a research scientist and has written about a wide range of technical topics. She is co-author of many short O’Reilly big data books including the Practical Machine Learning series, Time Series Data Bases, Streaming Architecture and the latest, Introduction to Apache Flink. Follow Ellen on Twitter as @Ellen_Friedman

Ben Stopford

Engineer, Confluent

Ben is an engineer and architect working on the Kafka Core Team at Confluent Inc (the company behind Apache Kafka). He's worked with distributed data infrastructure for the last ten years, switching between engineering products and helping companies use them. His early career spanned a variety of projects at Thoughtworks and UK-based enterprise companies. Find out more at http://benstopford.com

Joe Hellerstein

Co-Founder & CSO

Joe is Trifacta’s Chief Strategy Officer, Co-founder and Jim Gray Chair of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. His career in research and industry has focused on data-centric systems and the way they drive computing. In 2010, Fortune Magazine included him in their list of 50 smartest people in technology, and MIT Technology Review magazine included his Bloom language for cloud computing on their TR10 list of the 10 technologies “most likely to change our world”.

Gary Richardson

Head of Data Engineering

Gary is the KPMG Head of Data Engineering and leads a team of data scientists and data engineers in the agile development of big data science solutions. The focus of the team is embedding machine learning, robotics andcognitive computing into businesses. He believes mainstream businessadoption of cognitive solutions are the key to accelerating innovation in the usability and productivity of the cognitive technology ecosystems and platforms.

Nikolay Manchev

Data Scientist

Nikolay Manchev has over 10 years of database experience and has been involved in large scale migration, consolidation, and data warehouse deployment projects in the UK and abroad. He is a speaker, blogger, author of numerous articles and a book on advanced database topics. For the last three years Nikolay has been working exclusively in the big data (Hadoop) space with focus on Spark and machine learning. He has an M.Sc. in Software Technologies and is working towards an M.Sc. in Data Science.

Wael Elrifai

Director for Enterprise Solutions, EMEA

Wael Elrifai is an avid technologist and management strategist, bridging the divide between IT and business as Pentaho's EMEA Director of Enterprise Solutions. He's been working in high performance computing, machine learning, the broader artificial intelligence field and the "Big Data" ecosystem for the past decade. Wael has served corporate and government clients cross North America, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia across a number of industry verticals and has presented at a conferences worldwide. With graduate degrees in both electrical engineering and economics he’s a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Special Interest Group for Artificial Intelligence, the Royal Economic Society, and Chatham House. Wael also serves on the boards of two charitable organisations and enjoys tinkering with “bleeding edge” technology, private aviation, and adventure travel.

Sean Owen

Director of Data Science

Sean is Director of Data Science at Cloudera in London. Before Cloudera, he founded Myrrix Ltd. (now the Oryx project) to commercialize large-scale real-time recommender systems on Hadoop. He is an Apache Spark committer and a co-author of O’Reilly Media’s Advanced Analytics with Spark. He was a committer and VP for Apache Mahout, and co-author of Mahout in Action. Previously, Sean was a senior engineer at Google. He holds an MBA from London Business School and a BA from Harvard University.

Patrick McFadin

Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra

Patrick McFadin is Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra at DataStax. He is one of the world's leading experts in Apache Cassandra and data-modelling techniques. Patrick has helped build some of the largest and most exciting deployments of Apache Cassandra in production. Prior to DataStax, he was chief architect at Hobsons, an education services company. There, Patrick spoke often on web application design and performance.

Charlie Hull

Managing Director, Flax

Charlie Hull is co-founder and Managing Director of Flax, specialists in open source search, analytics and Big Data. Charlie leads an expert team working with clients across the world to build accurate, scalable and high performance applications, using software such as Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, Apache Kafka and Hadoop. Flax are Confluent and Lucidworks partners and are Solr committers.

Eno Thereska

Software Engineer, Confluent

Eno Thereska is a software Engineer at Confluent, working on Kafka Streams, where he covers design, implementation, and drives adoption. Prior to Confluent, Eno was a senior researcher at Microsoft Research where he led the incubation and tech-transfer of several projects related to file and storage systems. He also researched and developed advanced system prototypes for storage and networks in Microsoft’s data centres. Eno received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and brings over 10 years of experience in computer systems to Confluent.

Simon Hayter

Chief Analytics Officer

As Chief Analytics Officer, Simon was brought into Close Brothers to introduce Analytics as a new function within its Retail Finance business and to help develop it across the wider Bank. Previously he was Group Head of Analytics at Countrywide PLC where he was responsible for bringing multiple data sets across multiple systems to provide customer insight and business performance within the wider property market. During his time at Countrywide, he worked closely with the Office of National Statistics and Government departments advising on the rental market and assisting with the official ONS rental index. Simon holds an MBA from Cranfield and a Post-Grad in Economics from Birkbeck, University of London.

Kostas Tzoumas

CEO, data Artisans

Kostas Tzoumas is co-founder and CEO of data Artisans, the company founded by the original creators of Apache Flink. Kostas is PMC member of Apache Flink and earned a PhD in Computer Science from Aalborg University with postdoctoral experience at TU Berlin. He is author of a number of technical papers and blog articles on stream processing and other data science topics.

Ted Orme

EMEA VP of Technology

Ted is EMEA VP of Technology at Attunity and is responsible for Attunity's technology alliances in EMEA including Cloudera, Hortonworks, HP, IBM, MapR, Microsoft and Oracle. Ted also plays a key role in shaping thought leadership at Attunity and presents regularly at leading industry events. Ted has been in the industry for over sixteen years and has a BSc in Economics from the University of Kent.

Ian Massingham

Chief Evangelist, EMEA

Ian Massingham is a Technical Evangelist at Amazon Web Services and has been working with cloud computing technologies since 2008. In his role works he works to increase the awareness of AWS cloud services and works with customers of all sizes, from start-ups to large enterprises, to help them benefit from the adoption of AWS.

Shawn Rogers

Chief Research Officer

Shawn Rogers is Chief Research Officer for Dell Statistica. Shawn is an internationally recognised thought leader, speaker, author and instructor on the topics of big data, analytics, cloud, data integration, data warehousing and social analytics. Shawn has more than 19 years of hands-on IT experience. Prior to joining Dell he was Vice President of Research for Business Intelligence and Analytics at Enterprise Management Associates, a leading analyst firm. He co-founded the BeyeNETWORK, a global publication covering business intelligence, data warehousing and analytics. He was also a partner at DMReview magazine.

Ric Howe

Data Solutions Professional

Ric Howe is a data solutions professional at Microsoft. He has worked with the big four and many of Microsoft’s biggest customers architecting data solutions, and is currently focused on public sector. Having spent four years studying creative writing at both Leeds and Exeter Universities, he is very interested in storytelling with data, and simplifying deeply technical solutions to the value they can provide modern businesses. In his spare time, he studies physics and cosmology.

Reza Rokni

Solution Architect Data & Analytics EMEA

Reza is a Solution Architect covering the EMEA region with over 12 years of experience in IT. Currently, he focuses on Google's Data platform, which incorporates Big Data solutions and Machine Learning. He specialises in partnering with customers to apply new Google technologies to solve old and new problems. He joined Google Enterprise in 2013 and has worked with many of the UK's key Big Data customers from a diverse set of verticals such as finance, retail, ad-tech and telcos. Previously, Reza held various roles in consultancy, engineering-aligned technical troubleshooting teams and product management.

Jeremy Hillier

Product Manager

With a background in software engineering and product management and a passion for the intersection between business and technology, Jeremy has been involved in the big data space, both in the utilities industry developing predictive models for customer activity and more recently financial services with Valo, a real-time streaming analytics engine.

Sebastien Fabri

Analyst

Sebastien Fabri was the first UK appointment for Looker's expansion into the European market. He helps companies develop data-driven cultures by changing their approach to BI, reporting, and data architecture. Prior to Looker, Sebastien worked for Ernst & Young (EY) consulting on projects advising FTSE 100 companies on meaningful data analytics and implementing data strategies leading to better business decisions.

Jo-fai Chow

Data Scientist

Jo-fai (or Joe) is a data scientist at H2O.ai. Before joining H2O, he was in the business intelligence team at Virgin Media where he developed data products to enable quick and smart business decisions. He also worked (part-time) for Domino Data Lab as a data science evangelist promoting products via blogging and giving talks at meetups. Before his data science journey, he was an EngD researcher at STREAM Industrial Doctorate Centre working on machine learning techniques for drainage design optimization. Prior to that, he was an asset management consultant specialized in data mining and constrained optimization for the utilities sector in UK and abroad.

Jonathan Ellis

Chief Technology Officer

As Chief Technology Officer and co-founder at DataStax, Jonathan sets the technical direction for the company and leads Apache Cassandra as project chair. Prior to DataStax, Jonathan led Rackspace's Cassandra team and built the Cassandra community into an open source success. Previously, Jonathan built an object storage system based on Reed-Solomon encoding for data backup provider Mozy that scaled to petabytes of data and gigabits per second throughput.

Kim Nilsson

CEO

Kim has a background in science, with a PhD in Astrophysics and also an MBA from Cranfield School of Management. She is the co-founder and CEO of Pivigo – the Data Science Hub. Pivigo is a data science marketplace and training provider based in London. Founded in 2013, Pivigo aim to improve the employability of PhDs by training them as data scientists, which is a highly in-demand commercial skillset. Kim with her team at Pivigo are passionate about bringing businesses and scientists together to harness the value and opportunities in data, by bridging the gap between the two fields using their bespoke training programme S2DS; Europe’s largest data science programme. Since the launch of Pivigo, Kim has been named a Rising Star among the Top 100 Influencers of Big Data in the UK and she is also the chair of a TechUK Big Data skills working group and member of the Government’s Data Skills Taskforce.

Ciaran Dynes

Vice President of Product

As Vice President of Products for Talend, Ciaran Dynes oversees the design of cutting edge open source integration technologies. Ciaran is responsible for Product Marketing and Product Management, including Talend’s Big Data products. He has over 15 years of experience in leading and developing teams of highly technical people and the development/implementation of product strategies impacting organisations on all levels.

Jessica Twentyman

Freelance Writer & Editorial Consultant

Jessica Twentyman is a journalist and editorial consultant with a 20-year track record as both a writer and editor on national newspapers and IT trade titles. Her work focuses on how smart companies use corporate IT to achieve real business results. In recent years, she's written about big data for the Financial Times, The Economist Intelligence Unit, Diginomica.com, I-CIO.com and Computer Weekly.

Ted Dunning

Chief Application Architect

Ted Dunning is Chief Application Architect at MapR Technologies and committer and PMC member of the Apache Mahout, Apache ZooKeeper, and Apache Drill projects. Ted has been very active in mentoring new Apache projects and is currently serving as vice president of incubation for the Apache Software Foundation. Ted was the chief architect behind the MusicMatch (now Yahoo Music) and Veoh recommendation systems. He built fraud detection systems for ID Analytics (later purchased by LifeLock) and he has 24 patents issued to date and a dozen pending. Ted has a PhD in computing science from the University of Sheffield. When he’s not doing data science, he plays guitar and mandolin. He also bought the beer at the first Hadoop user group meeting.

Bobby Gill

Data & Digital Analytics Director

Bobby Gill is a results-driven Data Specialist with over 10 years’ experience working with high-profile organisations. He has extensive experience of creating and delivering multi-channel consumer databases, whilst leading simultaneous projects aimed at increasing engagement, functional performance, expanding market penetration and driving sales.

Andy Cotgreave

Senior Technical Evangelist

Andy Cotgreave is a visual analytics expert who has been with Tableau in various roles since 2011 ranging from product consultant to social content manager. He is now Tableau's Technical Evangelism Director. Prior to Tableau he was a data analyst at the University of Oxford. As a technical evangelist Andy helps people see and understand their data using Tableau’s innovative products. He shares his passion for visual analysis and technology with his writing, (eg Computerworld, on tableau.com and his own blog), speaking at industry conferences like SXSW and Tableau’s own events. He's also active on Twitter @acotgreave. Andy’s role at Tableau gives him the opportunity to work with the media, analysts and customers across all industries to help them understand the trends in visual analytics and develop their own data-discovery skills.

Matt Aslett

Research Director

As Research Director Matt has overall responsibility for the data platforms and analytics research coverage, which includes operational and analytic databases, Hadoop, grid/cache, stream processing, search-based data platforms, data integration, data quality, data management, analytics, and advanced analytics. Matt?s own primary area of focus includes data management, reporting and analytics, and exploring how the various data platforms and analytics technology sectors are converging in the form of next-generation data platforms. Prior to joining 451 Research in 2007, Matt was Deputy Editor of monthly magazine Computer Business Review and ComputerWire's daily news service. Matt started in IT journalism in 1997 as a staff writer with monthly magazine Unix and NT News, where he became editor in 2000. Matt holds a BA in Multimedia Journalism from Bournemouth University in the UK.

Dave McCrory

Chief Technology Officer

A successful innovator and entrepreneur, Dave McCrory came to Basho from Warner Music Group where, as SVP of Engineering, he led the team that built their digital service platform. He was previously senior architect in Cloud Foundry at VMware and Cloud Architect at Dell, and also experienced successful exits from two companies he founded – Hyper9 (acquired by SolarWinds) and Surgient (acquired by Quest Software). McCrory holds nine technology patents in virtualization, cloud and systems management as co-inventor and created the “Data Gravity” concept which states that as data accumulates, it’s more likely other services and applications will be attracted to it.

Monty Widenius

Chief Technology Officer

Monty is the “spiritual father” of MariaDB, a renowned advocate of the open source software movement, and one of the original developers of MySQL, the predecessor to MariaDB. Monty continues to stay involved hands-on in the development of MariaDB. His work in developing and advocating for Free and Open Source Software spans to 1995. Most recently, Monty has served on the boards of MariaDB Corporation and the MariaDB Foundation, the non-profit organization charged with promoting, protecting and advancing the MariaDB codebase, community, and ecosystem, where he was also CTO. He was a founder of SkySQL, and the CTO of MySQL AB until its sale to Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). Monty was also the founder of TCX DataKonsult AB (a Swedish data warehousing company). He is the co-author of the MySQL Reference Manual, was awarded in 2003 the Finnish Software Entrepreneur of The Year prize and in 2015 Monty was selected as one of the 100 most influential persons in the Finnish IT market. Monty studied at the Helsinki University of Technology and lives in Finland.