Safra A. Catz

Chief Executive Officer,
Oracle

Safra A. Catz

Safra A. Catz is chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation and a member of the company's board of directors. She previously served as president of Oracle and has also served as the company's chief financial officer. Catz first served as Oracle's chief financial officer from 2005 to 2008, as executive vice president from 1999 to 2004, and as senior vice president from April to October 1999. She served on the board of directors for HSBC Holdings, one of the world's largest banking and financial services organizations, from 2008 through 2015.

Professor Brian Cox OBE

CERN Physicist and Broadcaster

Professor Brian Cox OBE

Arguably the UK's best known physicist, Professor Brian Cox's books and TV programmes have been read and watched around the world and credited with making science engaging and accessible to millions. With his down-to-earth, likeable enthusiasm, Brian is frequently labelled a 'rock star scientist'. Once the keyboard player for D:Ream, he has come a long way to his position as Professor of Particle Physics at Manchester University and a key part of the ATLAS and the CERN Large Hadron Collider projects.

Brian's blockbuster TV shows include Wonders of the Universe, Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of Life, each looking at the fundamental science behind everything from stars and planets to atoms and microbiology. He has also presented Stargazing, Space Hoppers, The Big Bang and numerous editions of Horizon. His books accompanying the Wonders of... series have become huge bestsellers, as did his co-authored title Why Does E=mc2?

From speaking at TED in the US to World Economic Forums in Davos and China, Brian's presentations engage, inform and entertain featuring awe-inspiring images from the depths of the universe as well as his trademark infectious enthusiasm for his subject. Alongside the story of life, the universe and everything, Brian argues that science can unite the world in an attempt to discover our shared origins. He also explains the work of CERN and their attempts to use cutting-edge technology and engineering to recreate events fractions of a nanosecond after the Big Bang "in the hope of revealing the underlying simplicity of the universe.”

An International Fellow of the Explorers Club Brian was awarded the prestigious Lord Kelvin Award for his work in promoting science to all. When not filming around the world, Brian writes for a range of newspapers and journals and co-hosts Radio 4's Infinite Monkey Cage, the comedy and science programme. He and his friend and co-host Robin Ince examine the big and not-so-big science questions alongside comedians, scientists and celebrities both on air and on tour. Brian also serves as the Royal Society’s Professor for Public Engagement in Science.

Deborah Meaden

Dragons’ Den Investor and
Entrepreneur

Deborah Meaden

Destined to be a successful entrepreneur, Deborah Meaden launched her first business straight out of college, before setting up one of the first ‘Stefanel’ fashion franchises in the UK.With several businesses in the leisure and retail sector under her belt she became Managing Director of Westar Holidays, overseeing its expansion from one to five holiday parks and leading a management buyout. Deborah retained a 23% share of Westar Holidays when it was sold to Phoenix Equity Partners in 2005, before its eventual sale for £83 million in August 2007.

Perhaps best known for her appearances on the BBC2 series ‘Dragons Den’, Deborah joined the panel of investors for series three and has since invested in more than thirty businesses, ranging from market research to online antiques valuations and life saving equipment for hospitals.

Passionate about the environment in which we live, Deborah has judged the Observer Ethical Awards since 2008 and has invested in a number of ‘sustainable’ businesses and also supports a carefully selected group of environmental charities.Deborah is a Fellow of the WWF, the world’s leading environmental organisation and also a Trustee for Tusk Trust, which since its formation in 1990 has raised over £30 million for a wide range of projects across Africa, with The Duke of Cambridge as its Royal Patron. Deborah is an Ambassador for Lend with Care,The Roundhouse, and a Fellow with the RSA.

Deborah has received honorary degrees from the University of Exeter Business School, Staffordshire University and Bath Spa University.

In 2012, Deborah launched Friends of the Earth’s Clean British Energy campaign which calls on the Government to develop clean British power from our wind, sun and water and in the same year, acted as a Sustainability Ambassador for the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.

Deborah acquired Fox Brothers in 2009, a historic textile firm based in the South West which was on the verge of closure and in 2011 ‘The Merchant Fox’ was launched, an on line venture selling an exquisite collection of British-made goods with provenance.

In 2013, Deborah appeared in series 11 of Strictly Come Dancing, the popular BBC One show that pairs celebrities with professional dancers to compete in a ballroom dancing competition.

Richard Noble OBE

Challenger, Entrepreneur, and
Record Breaker

Richard Noble OBE

Against a background of today's low risk culture, Richard Noble specialises in developing high risk ventures. Obviously not all of them can be successful, but the Thrust2 programme which brought the World Land Speed Record back to Britain in 1983 and the Thrust SSC first ever supersonic land speed record programme are the best known.

Richard Noble's other projects include the ARV Super2 light aircraft, the Atlantic Sprinter Blue Riband contender, Programme Funding, an original television funding company, Farnborough Aircraft, the first distributed travel air taxi aircraft and currently the Mach 1.4 Bloodhound SSC project the latest in the long line of Land Speed Record cars now being run through 3600UK schools.

These projects all started very small and being original in concept attract only very limited resource. So they have to obey the rules of small company survival:

• 1. Keep it very simple
• 2. Build a highly-motivated, small team
• 3. Move decisively and quickly
• 4. Make up for the financial deficiencies with a very high level of team motivation and productivity

Working in this high risk environment can never been seen as secure or comfortable, for the financial horizon is often just days away and the company depends on its wits to survive. The upside is that we try to use flat structures wherever possible, delegating both responsibility and authority - which can result in a team which drives the project fast and across a wide front, activities which would be seriously expensive for traditionally micro-managed companies.

As an example The ThrustSSC team found itself head to head with both well funded American and Formula 1 teams. McLaren were building the Maverick supersonic car and had budgetted £25m. The Spirit of America team were reputed to have a $14m budget. The ThrustSSC team carried out the entire programme on a cash spend of £2.85m - 14% of the McLaren budget.

The projects have always tended to be innovative - and that puts them against the odds and against the system which will always favour the conventional. Whilst support in terms of people and resource tends to be forthcoming, the financial support has always been the most difficult to achieve - whether sponsorship or investment - and often because of the financial community's real doubts about the teams ability to achieve. Oddly it does seem that the higher the perceived risk by the financial people, the greater the chance of the team achieving!

As a conference and after-dinner speaker, Richard Noble illustrates the presentations with unique video and explains the huge problems in trying to persuade the old British establishment to consider and implement change and listen to original thinking - but despite the track record the British centralised funding machinery always seems to disappoint. So if the central funding machinery won't deliver then, thanks to the internet, it becomes possible to spread the risk and fund with a distributed funding system - which were key original features of SSC Programme Ltd. and Farnborough-Aircraft.com Ltd.

But above all, these projects are difficult, and giving up is NEVER an option.

Sahar Hashemi OBE

Founder,
Coffee Republic

Sahar Hashemi OBE

Sahar Hashemi founded Coffee Republic, the UK’s first US style coffee bar chain with her brother Bobby and built it into one of the UK’s most recognised high street brands with 110 bars and a turnover of £30m. Giving up professional careers (she as a lawyer in London and Bobby as an investment banker in New York) they staked everything on a dream and made Coffee Republic one of the main players in the coffee revolution that transformed the UK high street.

Sahar left the day-to-day management of Coffee Republic in 2001 and published a bestselling book Anyone Can Do It –Building Coffee Republic from Our Kitchen Table, which has been translated into 6 languages and is 2nd-highest selling book on entrepreneurship after Richard Branson.

In 2005 she founded Skinny Candy, a brand of sugar free sweets, labelled hip by Vogue magazine. Skinny Candy was sold to confectionery conglomerate Glisten PLC in 2007.

Her most recent book, Switched On, published in 2010, focuses on 8 habits that foster a more entrepreneurial mindset for employees. It is based on her experience of the transformation in culture when a small entrepreneurial company becomes big and successful, when the obvious and easy entrepreneurial habits are often forgotten as bureaucracy take over.

In 2011 Sahar was nominated by Director Magazine as one of its Top 10 Original Thinkers, alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Jonathan Ive. The magazine praised her view that entrepreneurially minded talent shouldn’t have to leave large corporations in order to achieve fulfilment. Entrepreneurial behaviour, including ideas like bootstrapping, prototyping and celebrating failure, can help turn stuffy corporations into creative environments. They can also transform automatons into valued, engaged employees.

In 2011 she was invited to join the Entrepreneurs Forum set up by UK Business Secretary Vince Cable to give informal personal advice to the government on enterprise policies.

In June 2012 Sahar was awarded an OBE for services to the UK economy and to charity.

Laura K. Ipsen

General Manager and Senior Vice President,
Oracle Marketing Cloud

Laura K. Ipsen

Laura K. Ipsen is general manager and senior vice president for Oracle Marketing Cloud. She is responsible for leading all customer-facing aspects of Oracle Marketing Cloud, including sales, account management, marketing, and customer support and services.

Prior to her current role, Ipsen was senior vice president of Oracle’s industry solutions group, leading a team of industry and technology experts that built and enabled multipillar solutions across Oracle’s top growth industries. With more than 25 years of experience as a Silicon Valley technology executive, Ipsen has worked intensively with the public and private sectors to drive transformative change with partners and customers and inspire global innovation.

Before joining Oracle, Ipsen served as corporate vice president of Microsoft’s worldwide public sector organization, where she led a team of more than 2,000 sales and marketing professionals serving government, education, and nonprivatized healthcare customers in more than 100 countries. Prior to Microsoft, Ipsen was senior vice president and general manager of connected energy networks at Cisco, where she led the effort to use the network as the platform to transform how the world manages its energy and builds smart-grid solutions for utilities globally. Previously, Ipsen established and managed Cisco’s global policy and government affairs division, leading their public policy agenda and advancing governmental policies around the internet and adoption of broadband access globally.

Ipsen currently serves on the board of Monsanto and is the past chair of the board of the Information Technology Industry Council, based in Washington DC. She has also received numerous awards and recognition for her work in information and communications technology, sustainability, and gender diversity, including the “Women Making History” award from US Senator Barbara Boxer.

Ipsen holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia and studied Arabic at Yarmouk University in Jordan. She is also a Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum, Silicon Valley Chapter.

Matt Bateson

CX Strategy Director,
Oracle

Matt Bateson

As CX Strategy Director at Oracle, Matt’s passion is helping organisations unlock value from CX in order to drive sustainable business growth. His own experiences of leading large service teams provides him with a perspective very much entrenched in the realities of what it takes to run a critical business function. An appreciation of how service leaders must balance the day-to-day challenges with the pressure of delivering against larger, long term business goals, underpins Matt’s ability to help organisations make practical decisions about their existing and future CX requirements.

Melissa Boxer

Vice President, Applications,
Oracle

Brian Curran

Vice President Customer Experience Strategy and Design,
Oracle

Brian Curran

Brian Curran is Vice President of Customer Experience Strategy and Design. Brian wakes up every morning passionate about two things: 1) Designing customer and employee experiences that drive meaningful and emotional connections to a brand and 2) executing those experiences in a collaborative environment that produces measurable financial results. While he loves to talk about this, what he loves even more is to roll up his sleeves and empower others to do it. This is why he travels the globe helping organizations of all shapes and sizes build human-centered design principles into their personal and organizational DNA. He feels fortunate to be able to guide their transformation to become digitally enabled, innovation leaders.

Jacqueline Gummer

Digital Engagement Strategist, EMEA,
Oracle Marketing Cloud

Sylvia Jensen

Senior Director, EMEA Marketing,
Oracle Cloud Marketing

Daryn Mason

Senior Director, Customer Experience, EMEA,
Oracle

Daryn Mason

Daryn Mason is obsessed with Customer Experience and Digital Marketing. His team works with major brands on making their Digital Transformation aspirations a reality. With over 30 years’ experience in IT, he has spent the past 16 years focused on CX and CRM. Daryn moved into the Cloud early and helped introduce Siebel Systems’ first SaaS CRM products in Europe over 12 years ago (before Oracle’s acquisition of Siebel in 2006). He lives near Edinburgh, Scotland and enjoys blogging about CX, Digital Transformation and Digital Marketing. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter @CxDaryn.

Gopesh Raichura

Data Evangelist,
Oracle

Gopesh Raichura

Truly passionate about all things digital, Gopesh Raichura has 14 years applied digital experience working with innovative Ad Networks, ADTECH and MARTECH vendors spanning Data, Analytics, Display, Mobile, Affiliate, Loyalty, eCommerce, and eCRM solutions.

With a comprehensive understanding of the Digital Ecosystem related to Advertising Technology, Big Data and Creative, Gopesh applies a pragmatic approach in helping clients to successfully navigate this space.

Jon Stanesby

Director, Product Strategy A.I. Applications,
Oracle

Jon Stanesby

Jon has spent the last 17 years working in B2C and B2B digital marketing and technology, focussing on strategically leveraging the available technologies to achieve marketing success. He now drives the product strategy for Adaptive Intelligent Applications focused on utilising Machine Learning and Decision Science to manage high noise, high scale and real time decision challenges.

Chloe Young

ABM marketing Manager, EMEA,
Oracle Marketing Cloud

Fred Wilkinson

Chief Executive Officer,
BPI OnDemand

Fred Wilkinson

With over 25 years’ experience in driving business growth through sales, marketing and Customer Service, Fred is an expert in uncovering what strategy works best for you; whatever stage your business is at. Fred co-founded BPI OnDemand in 2006 with the vision of creating a unique zero upfront cost CRM implementation model, a vision that has positioned BPI OnDemand as the leading Cloud implementation partner across the UK.

Michel Tjoeng

Chief Marketing Officer,
Spindrift | DigitasLBi OSG

Michel Tjoeng

Michel is an experienced strategist with a long history of working for some of Europe’s largest retailers such as Tesco, Boots and Ahold. He started his career at various agencies and then moved to Spindrift, a consulting and technology firm focused on marketing and ecommerce, which is part of the global agency DigitasLBi.

Simon Moran

Vice President Cloud Data Security,
Symantec

Simon Moran

Symantec: Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ: SYMC), the world’s leading cyber security company, helps businesses, governments and people secure their most important data wherever it lives. Organizations across the world look to Symantec for strategic, integrated solutions to defend against sophisticated attacks across endpoints, cloud and infrastructure. Likewise, a global community of more than 50 million people and families rely on Symantec’s Norton suite of products for protection at home and across all of their devices. Symantec operates one of the world’s largest civilian cyber intelligence networks, allowing it to see and protect against the most advanced threats

Bio: Simon has over 30 years of software experience working for the largest and most successful software companies in the world. Substantial international business experience working in the United States, Europe, Middle East and Latin America. More than 18 years’ experience in the sales of Enterprise Applications including Security, Customer Experience and Supply Chain software. Over 10 years in Software Development. He has a unique balance of Sales, Management and Technical Skills.
Simon holds a First-Class Honors degree in Computing Science from Staffordshire University in England.

Yvonne Chien

Senior Vice President Customer, Service,
Abcam

Yvonne Chien

Yvonne Chien is Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Abcam – a global life sciences company, headquartered in Cambridge, UK. Abcam provides highly validated antibodies and other binders and assays to the research and clinical communities to help advance the understanding of biology and causes of disease. Their focus on serving life scientists to achieve their mission faster is a key part of becoming quoted as ‘a success story for British biotech’ and the ‘Apple of antibodies’ (The Times, September 2015).

As SVP of Customer Experience, Yvonne has responsibility for Abcam’s global brand and all consumer touchpoints from their industry award-winning website to sales, customer service, scientific support and all offline and online marketing channels. In her two years at Abcam, she launched a re-brand and the roll out of Oracle Eloqua. Her team is in the process of implementing Oracle Sales and Service Cloud as part of a larger Oracle implementation across the company.

Yvonne’s extensive digital marketing and brand experience spans from a long career in media and tech industries. Prior to Abcam, she was Senior Vice President of Marketing at Getty Images, where she instigated their adoption of marketing automation using Oracle Eloqua and during her time in the role, the company achieved many award recognitions at Cannes Lions, the Clio’s and D&AD Awards. Yvonne also previously held marketing positions at pioneering companies including Google, early social network Bebo (acquired by AOL), software company Siebel Systems (later acquired by Oracle) and BrainJuicer (another successful Cambridge, UK start up). She earned her degree in Applied Mathematics at University of California, Berkeley and an MBA at Harvard Business School.

Ann Marie Forsyth

Chief Executive,
CCA

Ann Marie Forsyth

Anne Marie Forsyth is Chief Executive of CCA, the leading independent authority on contact centre strategies and operations. With over 20 years’ experience, CCA work with some of the most reputable brands to help shape and influence the future of customer service. Anne Marie has developed CCA to represent almost 900 member organisations, equating to approximately 50% of the total UK agent population.

CCA membership supports practitioner and strategic influencer alike. At practitioner level the CCA Global Standard© has proved an invaluable tool in the quest for improvement.

At a strategic level, CCA created an industry think-tank in March 2005 to challenge the status quo on how customer contact is managed and delivered. More than 43 leading organisations form CCA Industry Council - the UK’s most senior customer contact leaders tasked to inspire and innovate a change in approach to develop improved customer experience, and ensure the customer is placed at the heart of the organisation.

Anne Marie is a regular speaker on customer experience – both in the UK and internationally. She is committed to improved professionalism, is passionate about customer service, and is convinced of the need for organisations to leverage their potential with customer service, to achieve competitor advantage and service excellence.

Anni Noel-Johnson

Director of Customer Marketing and Analytics,
Farfetch

Anni Noel-Johnson

Anni is Director of Customer Marketing and Analytics at Farfetch which she joined in 2011. Her responsibilities include CRM, Loyalty and Retention, Marketing Data Science and Analytics, Customer Research and Pricing. Prior to joining Farfetch, Anni worked with companies across Europe and Asia as a strategy consultant at Bain & Company out of their London and Hong Kong offices. Anni holds an MA from the University of Edinburgh and an MBA from INSEAD.

Chris Cahill

Agile Delivery Manager,
Hermes

Chris Cahill

Chris Cahill is an Agile Delivery Manager at Hermes UK, the UK's leading consumer delivery specialist handling more than 235 million parcels each year. Hermes provides a range of flexible and affordable delivery options to home, work, safe place or ParcelShop that are convenient for the consumer and fit within their increasingly busy lifestyles.

Chris is responsible for the Digitial Tribe within the IT department at Hermes, which includes large third party packages such as Oracle Service Cloud, as well as myhermes.co.uk, Hermes UK's C2C eCommerce platform.

Peter Rutherford

IT Demand Manager,
Hexagon

Peter Rutherford

Peter received a degree in Production Engineering from Brunel University. He gained experience in Manufacturing, Engineering and Order Management within automotive and industrial equipment companies. For the last 15 years he has been involved in major programs including the introduction of configurators and their subsequent impact on the business.

Jonathan Stuart

Chief Technology Officer,
Paragon

Jonathan Stuart

Jonathan has been involved in commercial roles, covering High Tech, Financial Services and IT for the past 35 years. Currently he is responsible for strategy and deployment of customer-facing and operational technologies, including web-enabled solutions for document management (physical and e-docs), marketing campaign delivery, multichannel communications, international fulfilment services, process automation and ERP/CX systems.

Neil McFarlane

Managing Director,
T H March

Neil McFarlane

Neil McFarlane, an Associate of the Chartered Insurance Institute, is the Managing Director of Chartered Insurance Brokers, T H March, the largest firm of UK brokers specialising in the jewellery trade and its customers and possibly the earliest known pioneer of Jewellers’ Block Insurance.

2017 marks a landmark year for the company that is ‘famous for insuring jewellery’ as it celebrates 130 years in the business having been founded by Thomas H March, the son of a diamond merchant, in 1887.

Neil joined T H March in 1983 and within a few years was promoted to the role of Account Executive covering Wales & South West England.

By 1999 he had been appointed to the main board of directors and within a few years took up the post of Sales and Marketing Director.

Neil is passionate in his belief that T H March must stay ahead of its competition when it comes to Public Relations and Marketing activities. Naturally that includes fully embracing the latest in marketing communications technology; hence T H March’s continuing journey into the world of automated digital communications in the company of Oracle.

Since making the decision to choose Oracle for T H March’s CX platform, Neil has given a number of presentations on his view of how he sees the practical benefits of the technology available, being applied. This really is a journey of discovery as new areas are being discovered and rolled out on a regular basis.

Over the last few years recognition of the T H March brand has continued to increase across the UK and beyond and as a result Neil has found himself in demand on various occasions for mainstream media interviews requiring an ‘industry voice’ (notably with the BBC and Sky News amongst others).

Surely a sign that T H March’s reach is expanding beyond its traditional jewellery trade niche – result!

A happily married family man Neil is interested in sport, music and generally having a good time!

Richard Bassinder

Social Media Manager,
Yorkshire Building Society

Richard Bassinder

Richard is the Social Media Manager for the Yorkshire Building Society Group, managing Social Media channels across six Building Society brands. With over 10 years’ experience in the Financial Services industry as an Innovation & Social Media professional, generating ideas, managing projects and developing pilots & products for large brands he has a wealth of experience in designing and facilitating creative ideas sessions, helping diverse groups solve key business issues from marketing messages to strategic positioning. Richard has also lectured on Social Media at the University of Huddersfield and Nottingham University and has a particular interest in helping businesses understand and maximise the opportunities of using Social Media by driving innovative thinking in this area, looking at the psychology and customer needs that drive success.

Catherine Walker

Group Head of Digital & Marketing Operations,
Vodafone

Catherine Walker

With over 25 years’ experience in technology and services marketing, Catherine leads Vodafone’s digital and marketing operations function worldwide, driving the adoption of digital technologies and best practice, enterprise brand and enhanced marketing capability.

Previously Catherine was responsible for global segment marketing, leading a team working closely with Vodafone’s major markets around the world to build and trial a number of award winning customer propositions, and before that commercial marketing strategy and P&L delivery for Vodafone’s UK public sector business, managing senior Cabinet Office relationships.

With an interest in the future of more a connected society, wider public policy development and corporate responsibility, Catherine is a passionate believer in the value of achieving long term diversity at all levels in industry, for improved competitiveness and healthy economies, and the role of marketing in delivering tangible business and social outcomes.

Prior to joining Vodafone, Catherine was marketing director for Oracle’s communications, media and public sector business, introducing integrated social marketing to programmes executed across the Western Europe region. She joined Oracle from Fujitsu where she established and led an innovative approach to bid marketing, winning a number of major public sector opportunities, and also shaped the development of Fujitsu’s government relations programme, speaking at Party Conferences on the role of technology in connecting communities in addition to managing senior stakeholder engagement.

Catherine is a Fellow of the RSA and contributor to the European advisory board of the IT Services Marketing Association. She also serves on the board of an award winning national technology charity enabling people with disabilities and the elderly to go online and join the connected world.