Software Summit cleared for take-off

Registrations are open for the annual Canterbury Software Summit 2014, the largest technology event in the South Island. The conference will be held on Thursday, 2^nd October and features a heavyweight speaker line-up including keynotes from ex-Microsoft DirectX ‘renegade’ Alex St John, Quid co-founder Sean Gourley, and Telogis CTO Ralph Mason.

After outgrowing Addington Raceway with sold out events in 2012 and 2013, the Summit has relocated to the Air Force Museum of New Zealand in Wigram. It has also been extended from a half day to a full day event format. Session topics range from staying innovative and agile through fast growth to parallel processing, user experience design, security, and tackling the IT talent shortage. More than 230 delegates have already registered and the Summit is expected to sell out again this year.

Geoff Brash, Chair of the Canterbury Software Cluster, says: “Our ‘Full Throttle’ theme for the event reflects the momentum in Canterbury’s technology sector. ICT strategies have featured prominently in the election campaigns of all parties, plus the Government has made some big commitments to support Christchurch’s new Innovation Precinct. The precinct will house a new postgraduate computer school, local offices for Callaghan Innovation and NZTE, and anchor tenant Vodafone’s new South Island Headquarters and ‘Xone incubator’. Canterbury is a great place for hi-tech – whether you’re just starting up or already going full throttle. I invite everyone to come along to the 2014 Summit and find out why.”

The 2014 Summit speaker line-up is:

Keynotes

• Alex St John, media platform pioneer, from Microsoft’s DirectX to game publisher WildTangent and social network Hi5.com: "Entrepreneurial engineering”
• Sean Gourley, Oxford Rhodes Scholar, physicist, decathlete, political advisor, and co-founder of San Francisco-based augmented intelligence company Quid (topic TBD)
• Ralph Mason, co-founder and CTO of Telogis: "Can a growing software company stay agile?" 

Speakers

• Nicolás Erdödy and Alex St John, Open Parallel: "Square Kilometre Array – The largest IT project in history"
• Andy Prow, Aura Information Security: "Cyber-Security", myth or reality?"
• Trevor Leybourne, MYOB: “MYOB’s journey from traditional desktop ERP to the cloud”
• Nigel Parker, Microsoft NZ: “Folding the future back”
• Kris Nygren, PwC and former head of Optimal Experience: "The rise of user experience design in NZ"
• Tim Bell, University of Canterbury and Michael Trengrove, Code Club Aotearoa: “New Zealand’s grass roots approach to solving the IT talent shortage”
• Doug Willems, Delta Strike: "Scary and exciting...  Building a technology business from scratch”
• Rob Lindores, Trimble: "Trimble Connected Farm - The next revolution in agriculture"
• Leon Guzenda, Objectivity: "So you have tens of petabytes - now what? How can we make Big Data more accessible to a broader class of users" 

Two Masterclass sessions will also be on offer in a parallel stream:

• Owen Scott & Greg Williamson of Concentrate Ltd: “Axe your advertising”
• Mark Wilson of Planit: "Mobile & app projects: considerations and practices to ensure successful delivery"

The event is on Thursday 2^nd October and opens at 8:30am, with the main conference programme running from 9:15am to 5:30pm, followed by networking from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.