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John Handby

John Handby has directed the IT strategies and operations of IT users in the public and private sector. He has worked in the Royal Mail, National Power and Glaxo SmithKline, among others. He was Chief Executive of CIO Connect, an organisation set up to enable chief information officers to talk about the issues they were facing. He had a formative role in the introduction of clinical systems in the NHS.

Dr Hermann Hauser

Hermann Hauser co-founded Acorn Computers and guided it through its growth and the success of the BBC Micro. He founded the Olivetti Research lab in Cambridge but left in 1988 to found the Active Book company and in 1990 he helped to spin out ARM from Acorn. He continues to look for new ventures and in 1997 co-founded the venture capital IT partnership Amadeus based in Cambridge.

Geoff Henderson

Geoff Henderson was an IBM’er for 27 years, between 1973 and 2000, joining as a systems engineer and retiring as Region Director Finance Sector, EMEA. Before joining IBM Geoff worked for the Steel Company of Wales from 1960 to ’73, where he headed the team that developed the world’s first-real time shop floor reporting system in the steel industry.

Bob Hopgood

Bob Hopgood joined the IT industry out of Cambridge having studied mathematics in 1959 at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. He has worked in software, management and networking until his formal retirement in 2000. This has included work on compiling techniques, computer animation, translator writing systems, computer graphics and the World Wide Web. After retirement he worked for the Word Wide Web Consortium setting up national offices in, among other places, Israel, Morocco and Australia.

Richard Hopkins

Richard Hopkins is a distinguished engineer at IBM and an authority on Hybrid Cloud, AI and Quantum computing. He started as a systems engineer in 1990 based in the north east of England. He has worked for IBM all his working life. He has great admiration for Louis Gerstner who turned around an ailing IBM in the early 1990s.

From his 33 years experience of building complex systems at IBM, Hopkins sees quantum computing far closer than many think and AI still prone to hallucinations and is inaccurate. But both are coming and the key will be not the technologies themselves but their useful adoption.

Frank Jones

Frank Jones during his long career as an executive in IT service companies was known as the outsourcing man. Outsourcing gave financial directors back control: control they had lost to IT managers. But there were drawbacks. He also grew businesses by acquisitions. Frank has experience with the different cultures of UK and continental European companies as well as Asian ones.

John Leighfield CBE

John Leighfield CBE was a pioneering IT user, applying the technology offered by vendors to the benefit of users, particularly in manufacturing. He started in IT with Ford in Dagenham in what would now be called systems analysis. He joined Plessey in 1965 and was on the board of Plessey as the head of IT. John moved to British Leyland in 1972, working in BL Systems, later renamed as ISTEL. It was privatised and John and others succeeded in a management buyout.

Richard Little

Richard Little is a serial angel investor who learned to be an entrepreneur by watching his father and trained for a life in technology by studying languages. Richard built and successfully exited his own business in the 1980’s and 90’s, applying cheaper new technology in financial services. His first big idea failed but the second one worked, and he says that is not a bad formula for building a business.

In the 21st century he has turned his hand to helping others’ companies grow by leveraging investment with his acquired expertise. Richard believes that helping small companies grow is good for the economy and society, as well as being a rewarding occupation. His current portfolio includes Cloud, AI and EdTech.

The stories of the pioneering people behind IT

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