Yesterday saw the Annual ScotSoft Awards dinner held at the Sheraton Hotel in Edinburgh. The event gathers many of the countries' leading ICT companies to discuss the future of IT business in Scotland.
The Afternoon kicked off with the '10 Big Things' global forum - a series of short talks from some of the leading figures in the Industry.
Chaired once again by David Mitchell of Ovum, the focus of the talks mainly centred around how businesses can start to utilise 'the cloud', to provide new and existing services to customers, whilst streamlining processes, improving customer experience and reducing both financial and ecological overheads.
Kelly Dempski, director of research at Accenture Technology Labs, talked of how users expectations and demands have changed, and highlighted a few of the exciting new business models that are starting to emerge on the back of cloud and virtualisation technologies.
Stephen Murdoch, of Dell's Large Enterprise Business Unit, looked at how computing use and user expectations are changing. Talking on the merging of the business and social networks, he presented the notion that businesses need to think carefully about how best to manage these ever-blurring boundaries.
Cisco's Gordon Thomson, talked of the changing face of the wired world. With more and more devices able to communicate with the web, he asked us to look at the many ways we can optimise our businesses to provide superior customer service to an increasingly technology-savvy public.
And finally, Gordon Lovell-Read of CIO Development Ltd looked at the global increase in technology use, spotlighting how a few companies are breaking the recognised mould and innovating new ways of working to keep ahead of the competition. He also took the chance to remind us of our nations' good record of innovation, and issued a strong challenge to all Scottish businesses to firmly stake our place on the new technological map.
The dinner awards ceremony featured the Award for 'Young Software Engineer of the Year', which is given to the most promising project from computer science and software engineering students right across Scotland.
Some of the projects featured included a sailing instruction program, a very interesting and useful visualisation tool for pilots to use in poor visibility, and a system which helps plan placement of medical rescue services on ski resorts.
The overall winner was a young student of Edinburgh University's A.I. department, who worked on a project utilising motion-capture technology to aid in robotic design.
Several other awards were handed out to various luminaries of the scottish ICT industry, including an award for 'Outstanding Business Achievement' to Gerry Docherty.
The evening was rounded off with an enjoyable blether frae wee Mary-doll herself, Elaine C Smith.
Once again, thanks to ScotlandIS and all sponsors for organising and hosting this event - with particular thanks to Polly Purvis and Karen Meechan for their continuing hard work and hospitality. The evening gave everyone involved a few things to take away and chew over, and it will be very interesting to see how Scotlands ICT companies rise to meet these new challenges over the coming year!
