Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top United Kingdom based VP’ operating in the Cloud Computing space. If you think a VP’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Sahil Rekhi
Vice President Global Strategic Partnerships of RingCentral
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About RingCentral: RingCentral, a global distributor of cloud-unified communications and collaboration solutions, offers its users with technology services.
Alexandra Gee
VP Marketing & Communications of WANdisco
Alex worked as a broadcast journalist for over ten years at CNN International, ITV News, Channel 4 News and Al Arabiya. She was part of the team which set up Al Jazeera English in Doha and went on to manage the channel’s coverage in Central and South Asia. After leaving journalism Alex advised a number of foreign governments and ultra high net worth individuals on reputation and crisis management and went on to work with entrepreneurs and fast growth businesses on profile raising, branding and marketing.
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About WANdisco: WANdisco, the world leader in Active Data Replication™, enables the replication of continuously changing data to different environments.
Meg Blight
VP Global Scouting (Consumer customer experience and propositions) of BT Global Services
Meg is a global scout in BT’s External Innovation team whose role is to identify and introduce companies with innovative technologies, propositions and business models to BT Consumer – the largest Broadband and Phone provider in the UK. Prior to scouting, Meg spent more than 10 years in the UK telco sector working in product, commercial and strategic roles at BT and other major providers. She has managed product lines with annual revenues over $3bn per annum in more than 9m households in the UK. Meg has an honours degree from Cambridge in Experimental Psychology and Physics.
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About BT Global Services: BT Global Services plc is a division of United Kingdom telecommunications operator BT Group.
Thibaut Rouffineau
VP Marketing of Canonical
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About Canonical: Canonical is a computer software company that markets commercial support and related services for Ubuntu and related projects.
Matthew Locsin
Vice President of Publicis Sapient
Matt Locsin is a Vice President at Publicis Sapient, where he leads the firm’s practice for innovation and drives Digital business transformation. He works with leaders and their teams to conceive, develop, and launch ‘what’s next’ and helps organisations to build their innovation competencies.
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About Publicis Sapient: Publicis Sapient is a digital transformation platform.
Neerav Shah
VP EMEA of commercetools
Neerav Shah has more than 20 years’ experience in complex, high-value enterprise sales across a range of technologies, including next-generation commerce solutions, big data, data and application integration, api management, social media and online community management platforms, mobile and fixed line device management systems, and network and systems management solutions. He has proven experience helping companies quickly scale in EMEA by building and growing high-performing sales and channel teams which surpass expectations and achieve above industry customer retention rates. Currently Mr Shah is the Vice President of EMEA for commercetools, the global leader in next-generation commerce software. Prior to commercetools, Mr. Shah was the Vice President of EMEA for SnapLogic, the leader in data, application, API integration and iPaaS. Previously, Mr Shah held sales management and consulting positions at Lithium Technologies, Alcatel-Lucent Motive, KPMG, and IBM Tivoli Systems. Mr. Shah has an extensive network of telecoms, financial services, retail, utilities, hi-tech and media contacts across Europe, Middle East, Africa and the United States. Mr. Shah holds a BSc in Computer Science from City University London.
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About commercetools: commercetools is an enterprise commerce company providing modern cloud-native API-lead offerings.
Clive Thomas
Senior VP of Global Sales of Autogrid
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About Autogrid: AutoGrid Systems organizes energy data and employs big data analytics to generate real-time predictions that create actionable data.
Mark Farnell
VP Revenue Operations of NewVoiceMedia
Mark heads Marketing Operations at NewVoiceMedia, is a Marketo Certified Expert & Marketo Champion. Focussed on AI, predictive lead scoring, Revenue Cycle Analytics, and process improvement.
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About NewVoiceMedia: NewVoiceMedia provides cloud technology that helps businesses sell more, serve better, and grow faster.
Paul Turner
VP Benelux and Nordics of NewVoiceMedia
Paul is responsible for global operations (network operations, professional services and client support). Prior to NewVoiceMedia, he held leadership positions in software and telecommunications businesses world-wide and has a strong track record of growing global businesses. He has a passion for customer service and an inspirational approach to leadership.
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About NewVoiceMedia: NewVoiceMedia provides cloud technology that helps businesses sell more, serve better, and grow faster.
Steve Miller-Jones
Vice President of Strategy, Industry & Partners of Limelight Networks
As Vice President of Product Strategy at Limelight Networks, Steve focuses on driving the long term product roadmap for the company with a focus on delivering the highest quality online experiences. This includes live and on-demand online video streaming, edge services, downloadable software and updates, online video games, as well as web application acceleration, cloud storage and security services. Steve has extensive experience designing and delivering solutions to help companies manage and optimize their online presence. His expertise ranges from defining, planning, implementing and managing complex streaming, content distribution and workflow solutions across Broadcast, Media & Entertainment and Enterprise verticals. Prior to joining Limelight in 2010 he served as Chief Operating Officer for Global MIX and SetTopSolutions before that. Steve holds an MBA from Henley Management College and resides in Brighton, England.
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About Limelight Networks: Limelight Networks provides content delivery network services to deliver digital content over the internet.
Justin Barrett
Vice President EMEA of Brightcove
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About Brightcove, Brightcove: Brightcove is video that means business, helping customers experience the incredible potential of video.
Hugh Williams
VP Professional Services of OpenLink Software
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About OpenLink Software: Provides a modern platform for exploiting power of AI, Semantic Web, Cognitive Data Virtualization, and Multi-Model Data Management
Avik Sengupta
VP Engineering of Julia Computing
Avik Sengupta is the VP of engineering at Julia Computing.
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About Julia Computing: Julia is an open source, modern, easy, and high performance programming language.
Dennis Parker
SVP, Customer Success of K2
Dennis is the SVP, Customer Success and early employee of SourceCode Technology Holdings, Inc. — the developer of K2. He assumed his current position in 2003, when the company was created in South Africa. Since inception he has been involved in customer facing roles in sales, support and service delivery.
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About K2: K2 is a low-code digital process automation in the cloud.
Simon Croome
Founder & VP of Engineering of Ondat
Simon Croome is the Founder & VP Engineering at StorageOS.
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About Ondat: Ondat supports your freedom with industry-leading levels of data performance, resilience, security, and scale.
Debbie Ashton
Founder; SVP, Strategic Customer Experience of FinancialForce
With more than 16 years of experience in enterprise software development, customer experience management and product management, Debbie leads product strategy, R&D, and customer advocacy as the Vice President of Product at FinancialForce.com. Under Debbie’s leadership, the company’s Accounting and PSA products have been honored with accolades such as British Accountancy Awards’ Software of the Year and 2012 CRM WatchList’s Broad Brush Winner while customer satisfaction reliably exceeds industry average. Debbie and Jeremy Roche, while at CODA Group, realized a market gap in cloud applications for financial management and collaborated in the founding of FinancialForce.com with the backing of UNIT4. Prior to creating FinancialForce.com, Debbie served as the Head of Product Management for CODA Group and held senior research & development and product management responsibilities for CODA. Earlier in her career, Debbie held positions in client management, consultancy and presales for Science Systems and was part of the team who acquired CODA in the year 2000. Following the acquisition of CODA, Debbie led the team that designed and delivered CODA’s award-winning financial applications and was a core member of the team that conceived CODA’s SaaS accounting concept. Debbie began her career in microbiology and has a degree in Applied Biology from Sheffield Hallam University. Outside of work, Debbie is a proud mother of two boys and enjoys spending time with family and participating in triathlons.
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About FinancialForce: FinancialForce develops cloud back-office applications for salesforce CRM.
Hugh McEvoy
Senior Vice President Product of Sefaira
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About Sefaira: Sefaira is a provider of software for high-performance building design.
Justin Kearney
Vice President of Human Resources of Logicalis
Justin Kearney joined Logicalis Group in August 2013 as Vice President of Human Resources with responsibility for providing people management leadership within Logicalis Group. Prior to this, Justin was the HR Director for the Corporate function leaders at Invensys, the engineering and technology business. He has also held international HR business partner roles within the aviation and financial service industries with General Electric, and in retail, with Sainsburys in the UK. Justin has an honours degree in Psychology and a Masters degree in Leisure Management, as well as being a Member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management.
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About Logicalis: Logicalis is a platform that provides IT solutions and managed services.
Joanne Nelson
Vice President of International Marketing of Logicalis
Joanne Nelson was appointed to Vice President of Marketing in August 2004, to head up the UK marketing department, and in addition, take responsibility for the corporate marketing function of the Logicalis Group. In January 2008, she became VP International Marketing with responsibility for corporate strategy, branding and analyst relations across the organisation. Joanne brings over fifteen years of ICT marketing experience to her role having previously worked at Ericsson Enterprise, and then its spinoff, Damovo, where she was VP Marketing & Communications, across the Group. She had sole responsibility for re-branding the multi-million dollar global Communications Provider (then ranked 36th top global brand, Interbrand, Citigroup, August 2001) and managing the global corporate marketing function across 20 markets worldwide. Joanne has first-hand international experience, having studied at the Institut Universitaire de Technologie (IUT), Nice, Côte d’Azur, France, and at Haarlem Business School, in The Netherlands, and worked in Antibes, South of France.
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About Logicalis: Logicalis is a platform that provides IT solutions and managed services.
John Shearing
EVP, Group Solutions and Security of Interoute Communications
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About Interoute Communications: Interoute is an international telecommunications service provider and the owner operator of Europe’s largest cloud services platform
Aled Sage
VP Engineering of Cloudsoft Corporation
Aled brings 17 years of experience developing distributed applications, mostly in the enterprise sector. Particular areas of interest include devops, automation, cloud, concurrency and distributed systems. Prior to joining Cloudsoft, Aled was Chief Architect at Enigmatec Corporation. He holds a PhD (Computer Science) from the University of St Andrews.
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About Cloudsoft Corporation, FinOps Foundation: Cloudsoft is a software company providing multi-cloud application management with open-source tools.
Dan Panesar
VP EMEA of Certes Networks
Dan has a real passion and love for sales and this is reflected by more than 12 very successful years in leading-edge technology sales. He started out in various new business sales roles before progressing into leadership with innovative cyber security start-up Sipera Systems. Sipera Systems was the first worldwide market leader in solutions for the rapid, simple and secure adoption of Unified Communications (UC). Many FTSE 100 organisations with thousands of users around the globe deployed Sipera to secure VoIP, IP video, collaboration, messaging and dozens of other high-performance applications. Backed by a number of high-profile VCs including partners Sequoia Capital, Dan recruited and led the EMEA high touch sales team, where he was responsible for driving direct customer engagement and all aspects of the sales strategy. Sipera Systems achieved huge success and in late 2011 was wholly acquired by Avaya Inc., one of the largest Unified Communications and Contact Center software vendors in the world, for a reported 11X multiple. At Avaya, Dan continued to lead the new Real Time Application and Identity Access Management security division for EMEA. Over the next 4 years Dan and his team delivered significant and consistent YoY double-digit revenue growth. After leaving Avaya at the end of 2015, Dan has been advising and working with a number of UK-based cyber security start-ups through the Cylon – Cyber London accelerator programme.
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About Certes Networks: Certes Networks, Inc. provides security solutions for high performance networks for government agencies and federal organizations.
