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Charles Southwood, Regional Vice President, Northern Europe and Africa, Denodo Technologies

Describe your career to date

After graduating in Civil Engineering from Imperial College, I spent several years in the engineering industry, gaining chartered status before moving into sales roles; first for engineering software and services and then commercial IT solutions. Over time, I moved into sales leadership, and then into the wider general management and business leadership. Working on the vendor side of solution provision has been very rewarding as it has given me the wonderful opportunity to work with many hundreds of customers of all sizes; from some of the world’s largest enterprises to SMEs, to gain an understanding of their needs and to support them in successful execution of new innovative IT solutions. Most of this experience has been in middleware and specifically data-related technology solutions, building and retaining high-performance teams to support customers. For the last six plus years, as Regional Vice President and more recently General Manager for Denodo, I have had the privilege of leading the company’s business growth over northern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and supporting the rapid adoption of data virtualisation across the region.

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your clients and on the industry as a whole? 

Undoubtedly one of the most profound and frequently mentioned data-related issues is dealing with the vast growth in data volumes. Big data scenarios often encompass IoT data, social media, click-stream information, location information, and many other sources; the volumes are simply exploding. Coupled with this, the data is being created and stored in different formats, accessed using different protocols, and becoming increasingly disparate: spread across on-premises solutions, cloud or multi-cloud, SaaS applications, external sources, and many other locations. Silos of data and applications are sometimes from legacy scenarios, but some also have to remain for regulatory reasons. We are, therefore, often involved in helping with the adoption of data virtualisation to very effectively bridge these challenges.

How are you developing the data literacy of a) your own organisation and b) your clients?

As a leading supplier of data management capability to the industry, our focus on data undoubtedly gives us an unfair advantage when it comes to data literacy and our appetite for a data-driven business. The culture and passion that exists within Denodo, for the most effective and innovative use of data, is seen both in terms of outcomes for customers, as well as the internal use of data to ensure the efficient operation of the Denodo business itself.

How are you preparing your organisation and your clients for AI adoption and change management?

We have moved a long way from the early chatbot implementations on many websites, and more advanced applications are now popping up across all industries. Self-learning artificial intelligence (AI) requires vast amounts of varied data sources to increase the accuracy of AI algorithms and avoid unintended consequences or assumptions from being embedded in the AI models. As we are able to provide connectivity to literally hundreds of data types, we are often placed at the core of these AI architectures. Additionally, because of this position, we can also provide a unified view of all data structures. We have therefore embedded AI in our own solutions to help our customers use these insights for easier data management and more agile services to their business.