Speakers

CHAIRMAN:

Peter Walker, Editor, FStech
Peter Walker is an experienced financial services journalist. Starting off as a reporter covering pensions and asset management for Institutional Investor Euromoney in 2010, he moved into retail financial services for the Financial Times’ FTAdviser and Financial Adviser website and paper in 2014. He now writes and edits across Perspective Publishing’s trio of technology titles – Fstech, Retail Systems and National Technology News.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Peter Jackson, Director - Group Data Sciences, Legal & General
Peter is Director Group Data Sciences at Legal & General, a FTSE100 financial services company serving 9.5 million customers with an annual revenue of $56.96 bn. Peter is responsible for the development and delivery of a data strategy for the group and driving transformation and innovation through data. Previous roles include Chief Data Officer at Southern Water, and Head of Data at The Pensions Regulator (TPR). Peter is a specialist in Data Strategy, Data Technologies, Master Data Management Strategies, Data Governance Frameworks, GDPR and Data Science Strategies. Peter is the co-author of ‘The Chief Data Officer’s Playbook’ published by Facet November 2017 and ‘Data Driven Business Transformation’ to be published by John Wiley in March 2019.

Tim Weber, Editorial Director, Edelman London
Storytelling has been the focus of most of Tim’s working life - for more than two decades at the BBC, where he was the business and technology editor of the BBC News website, and now as Editorial Director of Edelman UK. He leads a team of journalists and creatives, who help clients across our business to tell their stories using an editorial approach and with journalistic rigour. He has been fascinated by digital technology ever since he had to write a printer driver for his first computer, an Atari 1040 ST. Tim holds a PhD from Free University Berlin.

PANELISTS:

Stuart Fowler, DNO Commercial Manager, Centrica
Stuart has worked in the energy industry for 30 years. Prior to joining Centrica Distributed Energy and Power in April 2017, Stuart spent 10 years in consulting with a major focus on delivering innovation projects for WPD. He was the project manager for WPD’s Low Carbon Network Fund Project FALCON and undertook a number of other deliveries for WPD in the innovation space. Since joining Centrica Stuart has managed the platform delivery for Cornwall LEM and is now responsible for the Centrica deliverables within Optimise Prime. His role at Centrica gives him the opportunity to explore how Centrica solutions can work with DNOs and other innovators to deliver the energy future.

Lorna McAtear, Head of Supply, Royal Mail
Lorna joined E.ON as an IT Project Manager before moving to the fleet team to head up group-wide telematics and carbon reduction projects, subsequently being appointed Commercial Vehicle Manager. Having worked in Germany on a global fleet project she returned to the UK and joined Royal Mail in 2014. Having spent most of her time at Royal Mail as the Head of fleet supply she now has responsibility for owning the Electric Vehicle design and project lead for the group. She holds an international CPC, is a regular and respected contributor at conferences and industry round tables, including recent Clean Air Zone events and is a judge for the commercial fleet awards.

Suzanne Phillips, Head of Mobility Solutions, Hitachi Capital Vehicle Solutions
Suzanne has recently taken on the role of Head of Mobility Solutions, a role focussed on navigating HCVS and it customers through a period of unprecedented market change. Her team is accountable for delivering products and propositions which directly support an organisations changing needs around its future fleet mobility strategy; whether that be flexibility of financing, better use of technology and data, or as a means to accelerate the transition into electrification. As a qualified accountant with over 15 years’ experience within the fleet industry, Suzanne has held a number of senior roles across Finance, Consultancy and Sales.Recent career highlights include being part of a team who: have won and retained the largest fully outsourced fleet in the UK, were one of the first to market in delivering a new and fully HMRC compliant funding alternative to company cars, have implemented data driven solutions to significantly increase fleet utilisation measures, and are currently part of the UK’s largest electrification trial.”

Nicole Thompson, Director of Social Innovation & Head of Co-Creation Partnerships, Hitachi Vantara
Nicole has over 15 years of experience in the IT services and technology industry, working for large corporate and start-up businesses, helping both private and public sector clients. Over the past two years, Nicole has been leading the Optimise Prime consortium, driving cross-industry collaboration with leading technology, transport and energy organisations to overcome the challenges faced by commercial businesses and electricity network operators in the electrification of vehicle fleets, while helping the UK plan and prepare for the mass adoption to electric vehicles. In her current role as Hitachi Vantara’s Director of Social Innovation, Nicole is responsible for leading the development of innovation projects and co-creation partnerships which seek to overcome societal challenges and accelerate the development of Smart City ecosystems. Nicole remains actively involved in the start-up community, advising on business development and commercial strategy. She is also a Founder Member of the London Blockchain Foundation.

SPEAKERS:

Tom Christensen, CTO and Customer Advocacy, Northern EMEA, Hitachi Vantara
As a professional with +20 years of experience in the IT industry, Tom uses his skilled experiences and talents to get a solid knowledge of the current business situation. He then prepares a new solution or strategy based on the achieved insight and combines it with a proven technology that has a future trend in the market. Tom thereby supports organisations in achieving their future goals. He brings insight into valuable solutions in the data centre from Big Data Analytic, Applications, Hypervisors, Cloud & Converged platforms including compute, storage and network.

Wael Elrifai, Artificial Intelligence & IOT Author and Speaker; VP of Solution Engineering, Hitachi Vantara
Wael is a thought leader, book author & public speaker in the AI & IOT space in addition to his role as VP of Big Data, IOT & AI at Hitachi Vantara. He has served corporate and government clients in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia across a number of industry verticals and has presented at 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 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Darren Barker, Vice President & General Manager UK & Ireland, Hitachi Vantara
Darren is Vice President and General Manager UK & Ireland at Hitachi Vantara. Darren has a depth of sales experience in leading, managing, developing and driving teams. Throughout his career he has gained wide experience in the IT industry, most recently at Hitachi Vantara, and previously at EMC, Fujitsu, Storagetek and Xerox.

Scott Baker, Senior Director, Data Intelligence, Hitachi Vantara
Scott is, and has been, an active member of the information technology, data analytics, data management, and data protection disciplines for longer than he is willing to admit. In his present role at Hitachi, Scott is the Senior Director of the Emerging Business Portfolio organization leading a team of product marketing specialists focused on Data Intelligence solutions. Scott often jokes that the biggest mistake someone can make with him is to give him a captive audience, a working microphone, a clean whiteboard, and a “time limit”. Scott is a VMware Certified Professional, recognized as a subject matter expert, industry speaker, and author. Scott has been a panelist on topics related to storage, cloud, information governance, data security, infrastructure standardization, and social media topics. His educational background includes an MBA, Masters in Computer Science, and Bachelors in Computer Science.

Bill Schmarzo, CTO, IoT and Analytics, Hitachi Vantara
Bill Schmarzo, author of “Big Data: Understanding How Data Powers Big Business” and “Big Data MBA: Driving Business Strategies with Data Science”, is CTO of IOT and Analytics at Hitachi Vantara. As Hitachi Vantara CTO, Bill guides the technology strategy for IoT and Analytics. With his breadth of experience delivering advanced analytics solutions, Bill brings a balanced approach regarding data and analytic capabilities that drive business and operational outcomes. Bill drives Hitachi Vantara’s “co-creation” efforts with select customers to leverage IoT and analytics to power digital business transformations.