Crimson Innovation Conference

For progressive IT leaders seeking fresh insight and inspirational ideas, this one-day conference will share the latest thinking around top technology trends and their impact on organisations. You will discover how leading brands are using new opportunities to drive innovation and how Microsoft business software is addressing today’s key challenges.

Special Guest: Will Whitehorn, former President, Virgin Galactic

As President of Virgin Galactic, Will Whitehorn was at the hub of one of the most exciting business and technology ventures of the twenty first century - commercial space travel. He took the project from being the nascent dream of Will's boss, Sir Richard Branson, to a project with real spacecraft, test flights and a spaceport.

A Day of Engaging Presentations and Case Studies

Building Trust and Security in the Cloud

As the march continues towards Cloud computing, questions still remain around security and regulatory compliance. We take a look at the big objections to Cloud and how Microsoft’s Office 365 and Dynamics CRM products is face the challenge.

Metro Bank Case Study: Creating FANS not Customers

Metro Bank was founded on a simple precept: to offer the best customer experience, how, when and where the customer wants it. Its motto “no stupid bank rules” and its focus is on bringing back traditional retail banking, supported by flexible technology. Metro Bank is using Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Office 365,Yammer and other cloud technologies to give its people the apps they need to support the personalised interactions that are the hallmark of its business, and be operationally flexible so that they can take a best practice from one location and implement it across all locations.

The Ideal Role for IT

What are CEOs demanding next from IT? Mike Hancox, CEO for Ideal Shopping Direct, shares his views from the perspective of one of the leading multi-channel home shopping retailers, where contribution to top line sales is paramount.

Pragmatic Enterprise Transformation & Governance

“The only constant is change!” has been the battle cry for many years but just being able to deal with change is no longer enough. The new battle cry is... “The only constant is the acceleration of change!”. How an Enterprise affects transformation is becoming a strategic strength or weakness, where massive business opportunities can be gained or problems will result. Kevin Lee will argue that to survive and flourish Enterprises need to take a coherent and holistic view of the whole of the transformation part of their Enterprise, allowing them to pragmatically increase its maturity, and thereby increasing its effectiveness and efficiency.

Successfully Mixing Social Networking with Business

As the socially-savvy generation of employees begin entering the workforce, how can they work in a way that’s as familiar as Facebook or Twitter? We explore the latest innovations from Office 365 and how organisations like Microsoft are beginning to bring a more social element to business productivity.

Finding and Keeping the Best IT Talent

With the ongoing war for IT talent hotting up, we share with you the latest market insight and innovative approaches employers are using to find and keep the best people. Included will be a showcase of Microsoft-based software that enables employers to accelerate the hiring process.

How to Build Innovative Applications Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is much more than a customer relationship management product.Here we’ll show you how different companies are using it to rapidly build custom cloud applications at a much lower cost than previously possible.

Game-Changing Trends in Unified Communication and Collaboration

Moving beyond the traditional voice, video, instant message and presence, we explore how the enterprise is innovating with Microsoft Lync to ramp up greater productivity and collaboration.

The Evolution of Managed Service Provision and Its Role in Innovation
A thought provoking talk about the changing role of service provision, evolving commercial models, how risk has changed and the opportunities opening up to clients.

Brought to You by Leading Technology Innovators

Will Whitehorn
Will steered Virgin Galactic from concept to reality, convincing investors, overseeing technical plans, and moving to a position where daily flights to one hundred miles above the Earth's surface was a genuine possibility. Few can claim to be involved in such a breakthrough project.

Mike Hancox, Ideal Shopping Direct

Ideal Shopping runs two television shopping channels and numerous internet spin-offs, and is owned by Inflexion Private Equity which delisted the company for £78m in 2011. Its craft shopping channel launched in to the US in December 2014.

Mike Hancox, chief executive, joined in 2008 from online retailer Otto, where he was the UK chief executive. He was previously chief executive of Shop Direct and chief operating officer of Littlewoods Shop Direct. His interests include Rugby, Gym and Golf.

Bruce Nicholson, Microsoft
Bruce is a Partner Technology Strategist for Microsoft, focusing on Dynamics CRM Online and therefore leading Microsoft partners and customers to the cloud. Bruce has been with Microsoft for 4 years and in the IT and Microsoft worlds for over 13 years. During this time Bruce has covered a number of diverse roles including Solutions Architect for Microsoft Consulting Services and IT & Operations Director of a Microsoft Partner having stated life as a VB6 developer.

Ramon Tebar, Metrobank
Ramon is a Software Engineer specialised on Microsoft Technologies with experience in large projects for different industrial sectors as developer, consultant and architect. Romaon now specialises in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, where he customises and extends the platform to provide tailored solutions and integrations based on service-oriented architectures and messages queuing. Thanks to his contribution to community events and blogs, technical books, open source projects and forums, he has been awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) on Dynamics CRM since 2012.

Tom Morgan, Modality
Tom Morgan is a Senior Software Developer in the Development Team at Modality with over 12 years’ experience in software development. Tom is also an active member of the UC and Lync community, regularly contributing to the open source community for Microsoft Lync with software, scripts and blogs via his own thoughtstuff.co.uk blog site.

Jim Sutherland
Jim is an independent consultant who has spent his entire career in IT services provision and seen the industry evolve from mainframe bureau services, through facilities management into outsourcing and cloud computing we know today. He has been involved in over 130 major IT transition and transformation projects. Most recently he worked for HP Enterprise Services as an Account Executive and prior to that he was variously Sales Director of Netcall Telecom plc, Head of International Energy & Utilities for Sema Group (now Atos) and Data Centre Manager for Data Sciences UK Ltd (who were acquired by IBM).

Tom Cadman, Crimson
Tom has 25 years’ experience working in a variety of roles, business sectors and technical platforms and solutions in the UK and across Europe. He has worked across a number of different technologies and is consistently ahead of the game in terms of industry developments and how they can be exploited. He now specialises in Microsoft technologies specifically around Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint.

Kevin Lee Smith, Pragmatic EA
Kevin’s professional career spans 35 years at all levels of the Enterprise Transformation stack (from Strategy to Deployment). He is the creator of the Pragmatic Ontology for Enterprise Transformation (POET) and the Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture Framework (PEAF) - now “Part of the Zachman Family” and used all over the world by private industry and governments alike. MBTI and DISC says that he is a result oriented, independent, individualistic visionary. However, he also freely admits that he is an arrogant, inflexible, argumentative, intolerant, impatient, critical and stubborn sceptomist! Kevin is CEO of Pragmatic EA Ltd

Marco Amoedo, Metrobank
Marco is a Technology Strategist and Solution Architect with over 10 years of experience on enterprise software engineering and CRM. Marco has delivered numerous Microsoft Dynamics CRM projects across Financial Services and Commercial organisations. He specialises in bridging the gap between technology and businesses issues to deliver innovative solutions that provide value for the organisation and its stakeholders. He helps companies to define a long term technology strategy that support their business objectives. Marco has been recognised as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional by Microsoft on 5 occasions.