Nigel Rochford

CEO
New Verve

Nigel is founder and CEO of New Verve, the only Atlassian channel partner here in Scotland.

With over 15 years of experience in the IT sector across a range of technical and management roles, Nigel decided to grow the business from a 1-man company in 2016. Since then, New Verve has doubled in revenue and size each year, and has become the go-to local company for Atlassian solutions and services.

Outside of the office, Nigel loves spending time with his wife and 3-year old son. When time allows, Nigel loves surfing, wake-boarding, and generally being outside in the great outdoors!

Joachim Fuchs

Pre-Sales Solution Engineer
Atlassian

Joachim Fuchs is an Atlassians Solution Engineer, based in Munich.

Before joining Atlassian Joachim was working for several IT companies in the Software Development Life Cycle & DevOps space as a Presales Consultant , for solutions like test & requirement management, test automation , load and performance testing and agile project management.

Joachim is supporting Atlassians enterprise customers and partners to get the most value out of Atlassian solutions. With a special focus on modern business management and ITSM.

Gary Gray

Senior Systems Engineer
Skyscanner

Gary is a systems engineer at Skyscanner in Edinburgh responsible for various on-premise and cloud based applications used by employees and partners, including Jira and Confluence Data Center running in AWS.

Gary has worked with a variety of systems and applications over the last 20 years the university and private sectors.

Sandra Axelsdottir

Channel Manager
Mindville (formally Riada)

Sandra has extensive experience in the Atlassian Ecosystem. She is the Channel Manager at Riada, where she is equally passionate about supporting partners and their clients in being successful with Insight.

With a couple of Atlassian Jira certifications, Sandra also has experience as a consultant and trainer in the Atlassian Ecosystem.

Martins Vanags

Support Consultant
eazyBI

Martins has worked for eazyBI support for more than three years with additional experience in business analytics.

Martins enjoys working remotely and tends to keep a positive attitude and open mind every day. He likes dogs and long walks in the forest.

Genevieve Blanch

Partner Manager
Refined

Genevieve is the Partner Manager at Refined and has a strong passion for involvement in local communities and clear communication.

When she isn’t working with partners and customers to improve their company communication with Refined apps she can be found running trails, camping in the wilderness or in bars drinking beer with friends.

Kris Siwiec

Technical Lead
New Verve

​As Technical Lead at Scotland’s local Atlassian delivery partner, Kris applies five years of system administration and solution architecture expertise in a wide range of project deployment scenarios, spanning DevOps and ITSM applications at scale.

Stephen Neil

IT Infrastructure Lead
Mary's Meals

Stephen is the IT Infrastructure Lead at Mary’s Meals International. He leads a small team of infrastructure engineers that support staff and volunteers from around the world in their mission to end child hunger. The mission of Mary’s Meals is simple – to provide a daily meal for each child in their place of education – however the work mobilizes hundreds of thousands of people each week in its work and operates in some of the poorest and most rural global communities. Stephen loves the amazing array of infrastructure and operational challenges this presents!

Through the Atlassian Community License Programme and a partnership with New Verve, Mary’s Meals is using Atlassian software to streamline its response to global IT support issues and to manage the delivery of project work with third party suppliers.

Roman Jouravlev

ITIL Portfolio Development Manager
AXELOS

Roman Jouravlev an ITIL 4 lead architect responsible for ITIL continual development. After working for more than 15 years in ITSM, mostly in Russia, as a trainer, consultant, quality manager and – many years ago – service desk manager, he joined AXELOS in 2016 as an ITSM Portfolio Development Manager.

Before ITIL 4, Roman has authored and translated several books and many articles on IT management.

Dr. Alastair Rennie

CTO
Metix Medical

Through a career straddling the public, private and third sectors in diverse industries, I have over twenty five years of senior leadership and governance experience in delivering challenging service transformation and change projects. I focus on business outcomes, using risk management and governance frameworks to deliver the change required. With a sound technical background, I have many years’ experience managing multi-disciplinary teams and adopting up to date service and delivery methods.

Recently, while working as Director of IT with a financial services company, I remediated and then successfully implemented a large banking development project to very tight timescales. This was a significant success for both the company and the client, with a project team of over 70 at its peak. Integration with IT operations was achieved to deliver a supportable and manageable service. In parallel, I managed the remediation and upgrade of the application stack and hosting infrastructure along with the operational service and security processes. Through this, I delivered ISO 27001 accreditation for the company.

Prior to that and while working as CTO with a large public sector company, I transformed the IT operations teams to deliver significant service improvements while in parallel assessing application stack risk, creating an application strategy and development roadmap. Business cases for both the application and infrastructure transformations were prepared and agreed and the transformation programmes initiated. With an operations team of around 200, significant service enhancement and team performance improvement were achieved, resulting in substantially increased application availability and stability. I reviewed the security landscape, including security operations, tools and critical incident response to prepare for and gain both ISO 27001 and Public Secure Network accreditation.

In recent years, as Head of Managed Services, I successfully established, grew and managed a business unit within a large multi-national software company, delivering application and infrastructure managed services to the public sector. Over 3 years, I created an income stream of more than £5m from the delivery of new and expanded services. I provided consultancy services to public sector organisations as part of my role in delivering managed services. This focussed on creating IT transformation strategies, including the adoption of cloud services, modernisation of application and infrastructure estates and review of operational services and target operating models.

With a large public sector organisation, as Head of Information Services, I was responsible for supporting transformation of the organisation as well delivering transformation of the IT services. This included introducing operational excellence into service delivery, re-building the entire application suite, creating a sustainable disaster recovery and business continuity service and delivering year-on-year performance improvements in service and customer satisfaction.

Claire Agutter

Director
ITSM Zone

Claire Agutter is a service management trainer, consultant and author.

She is director at ITSM Zone, providing accredited eLearning in ITIL, DevOps, BRM and more, and also at Scopism, publisher of the SIAM Foundation and Professional BoKs.

In 2017 and 2018 she was recognised as an HDI Top 25 Thought Leader and was part of the team that won itSMF UK’s thought leadership award. Claire is the host of the popular ITSM Crowd hangouts, and Chief Architect for VeriSM.

Lorraine Brown

Service Delivery Manager
Orange Bus (part of Capita Consulting)

With over twenty-five years’ experience delivering in IT Customer and Service Support, Lorraine brings a unique blend of enthusiasm, energy, and drive to every task undertaken.

She strives to take a creative approach to driving change, leadership, continual service improvement, customer and service support, and steering this towards organizational development, and transformation.

She has achieved industry recognized successes, and gained a reputation as being passionate about the IT service support sector.

Jonathan Boyd

Senior Solutions Consultant
Prophecy International

Having worked within the IT industry for 20 years plus, much of this as a senior consultant covering ITSM practices and complex software solutions, Jonathan has a unique mix of IT and business understanding. Working across the UK, Europe and Central America, Jonathan has built up an impressive level of expertise, delivering successful transformation programs across multiple sectors including, Retail & Commerce, Local Government, Legal & FinTech.

Experiencing first-hand, the business and IT gap becoming ever greater from years of traditional ITSM approaches, Jon is leading a Paradigm Shift in thinking for CIOs and IT Teams across the markets and is not afraid to ‘rock’ the apple cart in doing so.

“IT can no longer hide behind best practices, we must step back into ‘the business’ and focus on improving quality and creating new digital capabilities to provide a competitive advantage that can be measured at the organisational level”. Which is the focus of the DCMM book written and co-authored by Jonathan in 2018.

Jonathan, a Senior Solutions Consultant with Prophecy International, holds a number of industry qualifications as well being the EMEA ambassador for the BRM institute, certified as a BRMP and CBRM trainer, IT Quality Expert, authorised trainer in IT quality Index and DCMM certified instructor.

Jonathan strives to advance the IT industry through new approaches that will challenge the very idea of what IT, within the enterprise is. His knowledge, integrity and the high standards to which he consistently strives to achieve both in his business and personal life, instils the utmost confidence in all who he works with.

Juan Vazquez

Channel Specialist
Atlassian

Juan Vazquez joined Atlassian in January 2016 as a Channel Specialist, supporting Solution Partners in EMEA. He currently manages over 60 partners across Nordics, Baltics, Benelux and the UK.

Juan has been working in the software sector for over 10 years now. He is passionate about technology and is keen on helping companies improve their team’s productivity through the power of software.