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Latest - Decades: 1970s

Malcolm Penn

Malcolm Penn could have been a rock star but turned out a market researcher, analyst and authority on the electronics industry.

R&B music subsidised his electronic engineering degree sandwich course of four years with Vickers Aircraft in Weybridge and Wisley, where he worked on the VC10 programme, testing one plane almost to destruction, and Venner Electronics in south west London. He spent 14 years with ITT Semiconductors and ITT Europe, where he learned his trade in chip design, product marketing,  manufacturing and as a chip user.

He set up the US market research company Dataquest in Europe, before forming his own market research company, Future Horizons, to explain what the numbers mean. He has trenchant views on Intel and ARM, which are well worth hearing.

Anthony Hodson

Anthony Hodson comes from a distinguished academic and professional background and was one of four sons who all gained Eton Scholarships.  Fascinated by technology, Anthony broke from the main stream of Eton/Oxford to go into the nascent digital computing industry.

He started his 46-year career in IT as a mathematician in the aviation division of Elliott Brothers where he used an early minicomputer, the Elliott 803 and worked in the UK and the USA for the company.

He carried out field research on mainframe-based distributed business systems for the Diebold Research Programme.  He worked for Sperry Gyroscope and was in the thick of ICL as its mainframe business collapsed.  He championed the X.500 Directory standard there and in his own consultancy.

Anthony has supported charitable activities through the Mercers’ Company and Gresham College.

Simon Gibson CBE & Mike Doyle

Professor Simon Gibson CBE co-founded the Alacrity Foundation with Owen Matthews in 2009. Mike Doyle 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.

Professor Peter Dobson OBE

Prof Peter Dobson OBE was born during WWII in Liskeard,  Cornwall and led a “net zero carbon existence” for his first 14 years without mains electricity or water. 

After Grammar school, he chose a GPO (General Post Office, now BT) scholarship to take him to university and worked alongside Tommy Flowers.  His broad career has covered a wide range of disciplines from physics and chemistry to materials science and engineering and bridged industry (Philips) and academia (Imperial College and Oxford).  Peter was responsible for creating and building The Begbroke Science Park for Oxford University.

Peter has successfully spun-off numerous companies. His latest, Oxford NanoSystems was formed in 2012. He is currently on the advisory board of several companies involved in nano-materials, healthcare and energy. He was awarded the OBE in 2013 in recognition of his contributions to science and engineering.

Dr Martin Read CBE

Dr Martin Read CBE is credited with the transformation of Logica, from the archetypal British 20th century software house with a headcount of 3,000 largely centred in the UK, to a 21st century dynamic enterprise with a headcount in excess of 40,000 based in over 40 countries. Martin followed the familiar path from grammar-school boy in Basingstoke to Oxford DPhil in Physics via Cambridge. He then deviated from a classic scientific career path and commenced his employment in shipping container logistics, where he applied his intellect to operations and strategic planning and worked abroad.

After a spell in the marine business of International Paint, his commercial and management skills were honed working for Lord Weinstock at GEC, before he was headhunted to Logica. After 14 years in the software industry, Dr Read again switched track and has been in high demand for a diverse portfolio of chair, non-executive director and senior advisory roles in industry and Government. His advice to the next generation is to begin their careers in well-managed organisations and to gain early experience in sales and working abroad .

Ann Moffatt

Ann Moffatt found “sums” easy as a child at school in post war London and would have gone to Oxbridge had it not been a time when the boys in the family had first call on education.  Nevertheless, by reading every book she could find, she got a job in IT and went on to defy the male stereotype of the industry: combining a friendly manner with incisive expertise that commanded respect at the highest levels.

Ann was Dame Stephanie Shirley’s first lieutenant at Freelance Programmers before being headhunted to Australia, to sort out a mega-project gone wrong.  She is a Fellow of both the Australian Computer Society and the British Computer Society. In 2002, Ann was inducted into the Australian ICT Hall of Fame and in 2011, into the Pearcey Hall of Fame, for lifetime achievement in the ICT industries. The University of Southern Queensland awarded her an Honorary Doctorate, in May 2006 and Microsoft list her as one of 12 Australian Innovators.

Dr Keith Burgess OBE

Dr Keith Burgess OBE was born in Merthyr Tydfil, where education was the way to escape the waiting shovel and the route out of the valleys. 

Arthur Andersen, and their subsequent brands, revolutionised the industry approach to IT-based change and, in 30 years with the consultants Keith developed their approach to “business integration.”  He became responsible for Andersen’s outsourcing and other offerings worldwide and observes that a key to a successful consultancy business is the culture.

He helped to implement public-and private-sector IT systems and has clear views about what drives success and failure.  He is concerned that the UK may not have the IT integration skills it needs for the future. 

A man with white hair wearing a shirt, jacket and tie

Richard Hooper

Richard Hooper studied Russian and German at Oxford and then joined the BBC. His passion for media technology was inspired when, as a Harkness scholar, he spent 21 months in the US looking at innovative educational technology projects.

“I learnt in America,” he says, such wonderful quips as: “Technology is the answer – but…what was the question?  That still resonates firmly today.” He also likes to quote the axiom coined by Marshall McLuhan, one of his heroes: “The medium is the message”.

Richard took on his first senior role in the UK IT industry in 1973 as Director of the National Development Programme in Computer Assisted Learning.

At BT during the early 1980s, he helped pioneer Prestel, the first version of the internet.  He also ran Yellow Pages when it was a FTSE100 company, and oversaw start-ups such as Telecom Gold, the UK’s first public email service.

In 1987, as managing director of Super Channel, the ITV- and BBC-backed pan-European satellite channel, Margaret Thatcher asked him to give the introductory presentation at a Downing St seminar on broadcasting policy.

His wide-ranging career in communications also includes being founding deputy chairman of Ofcom, chairman of the Broadband Stakeholder Group and numerous advisory and consultancy roles. He has just published a book on the art of chairing called Making Meetings Work.