Gavin Beckett – Chief Enterprise Architect at Bristol City Council
Gavin Beckett is the Chief Enterprise Architect at Bristol City Council. He leads a team of Enterprise Architects, working for the Strategic Leadership Team and City Director, supporting their efforts to define and create a council that is capable of responding to the challenging financial circumstances and maintaining the elected Mayor’s ambition to make Bristol “the most welcoming city in the UK”.
He has 16 years’ experience of ICT service and project delivery, strategy and architecture across business, information, applications and technology domains.
Gavin has extensive experience in the adoption and use of Open Source Software, and Open Standards within public sector. He combines principled interest with pragmatic attitude, and recognises both strengths and weaknesses of Open Source Software, and authored the Bristol City Council strategy to pursue “Open Data, Open Standards and where feasible Open Source
Tariq Rashid – IT Reform, Cabinet Office
Tariq Rashid’s Profile Summary
Tariq Rashid was the Lead Architect at the Home Office (Information, Applications, Infrastructure, Open Standards, Open Source), with special responsibility for open source, open standards and information management. He works closely with the Cabinet Office to support wider Government progress in these domains.
He has worked with open source since 1995 in a range of sectors including energy, banking, media and high tech start-ups. His first taste of open source was of FORTRAN compilers and document preparation systems. Since then he has journeyed through open source VPN network stack development, search engines, enterprise support systems, numerical computing and now cloud platforms. He is convinced that open computing is the only way to encourage innovation, enable reuse, drive competition, and empower the customer.
John Powell – Alfresco Founder
John Powell is Founder of Alfresco and has 25 years of enterprise software sales and operations experience.
Prior to Alfresco, John was responsible for running worldwide operations at Business Objects®. During his tenure, Business Objects grew at 50% per annum to $415m and a market capitalization in excess of $6B. Business Objects was subsequently acquired by SAP for $6.8B. Powell founded Business Objects UK in 1991, and built the UK organization and then the global organization into the most successful Business Intelligence player worldwide.
Prior to joining Business Objects, Powell worked in sales management positions at Oracle® and Comshare®. He has a BS First Class from Birmingham University.
Aingaran Pillai – CEO & Founder of Zaizi, previous Tech Lead for APLAWS
Aingaran Pillai is the CEO and founder of Zaizi Ltd (the Open Gov Summit host & sponsor). He has been working with open source within public sector since 2000. He was the technical lead for the APLAWS (Accessible and Personalised Local Authority Website System) National eGov project. London Borough of Camden’s intranet implementation based on APLAWS was nominated by Google for the BCS Information Management Awards 2006 and was short listed.
He actively promoted the use of open source within the public sector at international conferences and has published papers on sustainability of open source technologies within the public sector. He was also sponsored by Department for Communities and Local Government for the Future Leadership Development Programme (2007).