Professor Simon Gibson CBE (pictured right) co-founded the Alacrity Foundation with Owen Matthews in 2009. Mike Doyle (pictured left) was appointed CEO when the Foundation opened its doors in South Wales in 2011. With the backing of Sir Terry Matthews, OBE and the UK and Welsh Government, Alacrity aims to educate graduates to become a new generation of IT entrepreneurs.
Simon joined the GPO as a telephone technician. He worked with telecommunications companies during the period of deregulation and joined Newbridge Network Corporation at its start-up in 1987. He was VP of marketing and helped build it into a $7.1 billion company. Simon and Michael Doyle founded Ubiquity Software in 1993, which was a leader in the development of the (ubiquitous) Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and achieved one of the biggest VC funding rounds in the history of the software industry in the UK.
Michael Doyle was sponsored through university by GEC Telecommunications, where he wrote software for the Systems X exchange. He worked as a contractor for five years and then co-founded Ubiquity with Gibson.
The Alacrity Foundation is operating in 8 locations around the world. It has been responsible for helping young entrepreneurs launch new ventures based on a demand-driven model. Many graduated companies from Alacrity have successfully scaled up and raised further funding rounds.
They were interviewed by Richard Sharpe for Archives of IT and the full interview should be published in late February.
Gibson and Doyle on Newbridge in a Nutshell
Gibson and Doyle on Alacrity
Gibson and Doyle on South Wales and Ubiquity
