I had an entirely pleasant evening last night at industry association Intellect’s annual dinner, which marked the inauguration of incoming Intellect President, David Callaghan, Senior VP for Oracle’s UK business. I must say, Intellect today is such a different organisation to that of a decade ago in so many ways – and kudos to Director General John Higgins for leading that change. In my opinion, Higgins has brought the association’s agenda back to relevance not just for the ‘usual suspect’ mega-size IT players but more recently, and at an increasing pace, to SMEs too.
In that vein, I was most fortunate to be sitting with the leaders of two relatively unknown small UK software companies that in their own different ways are punching well above their weight. Lisa Hammond is founding CEO of virtualisation optimisation software firm, Centrix Software. I will be writing much more about Centrix quite soon – it really is a great story.
I was also intrigued to learn more after talking to Bernard Edwards, founding chairman of ‘enterprise performance governance’ software firm, Salamander. They’re another ‘Little British Battler’ with extensive success both at home and overseas, including in the Defence sector.
It’s meeting people and companies like these that continues to give me so much confidence in the future of the UK software industry. And there are many others besides.