As Symantec’s Senior Vice President for EMEA, Matt Ellard is responsible for driving Symantec sales, operations and business development across the region. He brings to Symantec more than 13 years’ experience in the IT industry.

Mr Ellard joined Symantec in March 2003, through the acquisition of VERITAS. Since then, he has held a number of sales and sales leadership positions, including director of the UK telecommunications practice, senior director of Symantec’s UK&I public sector business and he has also led Symantec’s UK enterprise business. Most recently, Mr Ellard was the Regional Vice President of Northern Europe, giving him extensive experience of the company’s products and sales operations and a deep understanding of the challenges that Symantec’s customers face.

Before joining Symantec, Mr Ellard held a number of sales positions for large technology enterprises including Sun Microsystems. His experience in the IT industry began in 1998 when he joined Computacenter, making the step change from financial services where he worked for JPMorgan Chase.

Rob Hornby is an AlixPartners Managing Director who combines experience in start-up, consulting, and FTSE 100 organisations. He held Chief Information Officer, Application Development and Maintenance Director, and Programme Director positions at Old Mutual (Skandia) and Sky Television. Mr Hornby is highly experienced in delivering information technology (IT) transformation through restructuring, outsourcing, and replatforming to facilitate new business strategies and achieve major cost reduction. He has also led the provision of strategic business intelligence solutions. Mr Hornby joined AlixPartners in 2011.

He has a Master of Philosophy and a Bachelor of Science (first class) from Aston Business School. He is also a Chartered Engineer and a Chartered Information Technology Professional. He served on several regulated boards as an Executive Director at Old Mutual and was a UK Financial Services Authority approved person. He is frequently invited to speak at professional conferences.

Andreas Rueter is an AlixPartners Managing Director in the Information Management Services unit. He has more than 20 years of experience from consulting engagements as well as from his time as an entrepreneur and investor. His engagement work involves managing complex and critical IT topics in corporations, such as; carve-outs, mergers, reorganization of IT departments, IT transformation, IT governance, outsourcing, cost optimization, and efficiency improvements. In addition to client-related work, Andreas also gained extensive experience as a supervisory board member, advisor, and investor by helping build and supervise IT, Internet, and high-tech companies and manage their growth and reorganization.

Prior to joining AlixPartners, Andreas was an investor and partner at venture capital firm Grazia Equity. Prior to that, he was a Partner at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he led the European IT Practice and was a member of the European Board.  Andreas started his professional career as a mechanical engineer in South Africa, followed by a four-year tenure with Accenture.

Andreas has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Technical University Munich. He co-authored the book IT Governance in der Praxis (Second Edition) and is the author of various publications dealing with the founding of new IT companies.

BT Technology, Service & Operations (BT TSO) is responsible for the innovation, design, test, build and running of BT’s global networks and systems. It also looks after delivery of the technical aspects of the company’s managed service contracts.

Mr Selley was a BT-sponsored student at university and on graduation in 1986 joined BT Labs at Adastral Park, Suffolk. He has held varied positions across the company including, most recently, CEO BT Innovate & Design. In that role he led the technical teams working on all of the company’s major programmes. Successes included, doubling the speed of BT’s fibre broadband products, delivering the technology behind more that 4.5m WiFi hotspots delivering the technology behind the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Before BT Innovate and Design, Mr Selley was President of BT Global Services Portfolio & Service Design. 

Mr Selley spent time in India as Managing Director, BT Global Platforms – where he established the company’s first global development. He has also held positions of CIO BT Wholesale and Director CRM for BT Retail. He has a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronic Engineering and a Master’s in International Business Management.

Paul Taylor is the FT's New York-based Business Technology and Telecoms Editor. He is responsible for The Connected Business section of the FT and a regular writer for both the newspaper and FT.com. He also writes a ‘How To’ column on technology for SMB’s.

In his 35 years at the FT, Paul has been local government correspondent, assistant news editor, Americas page editor, New York correspondent, foreign news editor, SE Asia business correspondent and management writer. He was the FT’s UK-based IT correspondent for most of the 1990s and launched the FT's Personal Technology column in 2002.

Paul left the FT briefly in 2000 to help found a web-based technology analysis start-up and moved back to New York, where he is based now. He has long had a passion for technology and computing and readily admits to being a gadget and gizmo freak and “a bit of a geek”.

Born in Liverpool in 1953, Paul graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and has a postgraduate diploma in journalism from Cardiff University.