Closing the productivity gap : Are intelligent applications the solution?

A pioneer of today’s Internet in the seventies (at MIT) Roger Camrass has been helping organisations across the Globe harness the power of new technologies and methods for over five decades.

As a thought leader, business executive and part time academic, Roger has introduced a succession of innovations including digital networking in the seventies, outsourcing and call centres in the eighties, business reengineering and third generation mobile networks in the nineties, e-commerce in 2000 and more recently cloud and 5G.

Charles Lamanna is the corporate vice president of Business Applications & Platforms (BAP) at Microsoft. He leads the product development and engineering teams responsible for creating business applications and low-code platforms that empower everyone to achieve more. This spans products and services across Dynamics 365, the Power Platform, Viva Sales, and Nuance Enterprise. These products include low-code/no-code tools, robotic process automation, virtual agents, customer experience platform, customer service, finance, and supply chain applications.  

Under his leadership, Power Apps has become the market leader in low-code/no-code tools and the Dynamics 365 service has moved to Azure, becoming one of the largest public cloud hosted SaaS (software as a service) products in the world. 

Previously, Lamanna led the engineering teams that created Azure Resource Manager, Azure Autoscale, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Activity Logs, and several other management related capabilities. Prior to that, Lamanna founded MetricsHub, one of the first offerings for public cloud cost management and service health monitoring. MetricsHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2013.

Lamanna graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Notre Dame.

Asheesh Malhotra is Partner in the Technology Consulting practice. He leads Technology Transformation across sectors for UKI. He is responsible for CIO Advisory, Programme Management, Microsoft, ServiceNow and Digital Engineering & Cloud portfolios in UKI.

Asheesh Malhotra is a business leader with 25 years of experience. He has experience across UK, US, Middle East and Asia Pacific. Proficient in Digital Transformation, particularly in the areas of digital business model, customer experience and digital enablement. He has led multiple Digital Transformation engagements across Financial Services, Retail, Auto, Telecom and Pharma sectors involving strategy and enablement. He is seasoned in ‘Design Thinking’ methodology and uses it to unlock business benefits for clients in their Digital Transformation journeys. He has consulted leading global companies (including FTSE 1000) in multiple sectors including Financial Services, CPG, Utilities and Drug Discovery. Asheesh has successfully launched consulting practices including Digital / IT Transformation, Cost & Productivity Optimisation and Business Process Improvement in EMEA and APAC region.

He is Global Economic Fellow for 2010 year, Dishaa Alumni (member of UK India Emerging Leaders Network) and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Above all, Asheesh shows real passion for his work and can enthuse people to achieve exceptional levels of performance and commitment.