Rave Technologies’ Annual Conference, SPEC 2014, reaches a New High This Year

London, November 10, 2014: Rave Technologies – A Northgate Group Company- organised its annual conference this month in London, UK. The theme of the conference was ‘Disruptive Technology Trends in STM Publishing’.

The event was attended by 25+ delegates from companies like Wiley, Macmillan Science and Education, SAGE Publications, Copyright Licensing Agency, AIP Publishing, BPP Learning Media, Cambridge University Press, eLife Sciences Publications Ltd, Emerald Group Publishing, IOP Publishing Ltd, Pharmaceutical Press – Royal Pharmaceutical Society. The Institute of Engineering and Technology, Royal Society of Chemistry, American Chemical Society, De Gruyter and DeltaThink.

Event Highlights:

The event started with the keynote session – Disruptions: Myth or Reality by David Smith, Head of Solutions at The Institution of Engineering and Technology – setting the tone for the conference. He defined “Disruption” having two dimensions, Market and Technology. He gave various real-life examples like Seagate Disk Drive and Apple smartphone disrupted the market dynamics.

The keynote session was followed by an interesting case study, Dealing with Disruptions at Wiley by Freddie Quek, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Wiley. He presented real life examples of how disruptions are managed at Wiley and offered some interesting tips to handle disruption, like break some rules and replace with them some new rules. He spoke about importance of networked leadership and being adaptive to counter disruption.

In the third presentation, Andrew Burbidge, IT Development Manager at The Institution of Engineering and Technology, discussed a case study, My Offshore Development partnership with Rave, on handling disruptive technology challenges, by selecting right technology partner. He discussed critical success factors of this engagement like process synchronisation and using distributed Agile model.

There was a panel discussion, moderated by David Smith which discussed topics like the importance of research data, whether Open Access is really disruptive and touched upon various other challenges in the STM Publishing. The panel members were Freddie Quek, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Wiley, Jim King, Director of Software Engineering at American Chemical Society, and Christian Kohl, Director Information and Publishing Technology at De Gruyter.

Christian Kohl, Director Information and Publishing Technology at De Gruyter, started of the presentation, Start Small with Big Data, describing present information explosion, highlighting the characteristics of Big Data like huge volume, velocity at which it is increasing, variety and complexity. Additionally, he explained how we have moved from the structured data and RDBMS to almost 80% unstructured data. He gave an insightful example about how Big Data was utilised to give an analytical insight into customer behaviour.

In the last presentation, RSC’s Journey to Innovation, David Leeming, Strategic Innovation Group Solutions Manager at Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) took us through RSC’s Journey to Innovation. David Said,

“The objective of Innovation program was to develop a range of innovative tools, products and services available to the user on single integrated account. This allows the user entry into a global collaboration platform which enables him to learn, share, network and collaborate within the community. It has several interesting features like microblogging and tips”.

David also explained the innovation process and how it was implemented in a set of programs with the technology partner.

About Rave Technologies – A Northgate Group Company

Rave Technologies – A Northgate Public Services Company, is a software services company that works with small and medium sized organisations, predominantly in the Publishing and Technology space.

Based in Mumbai, Rave Technologies’ end to end product/application engineering services help address challenges in the product or application development life cycle. These services include Requirement Analysis, Software Architecture, Design, Development, Testing and Maintenance with specialised services in Cloud/SaaS Migration, Usability Engineering, System Architecture and Design, and Independent Testing solutions.

We have a strong presence across the globe thanks to our parent companies – NEC & NPS. NEC is a multinational provider of information technology (IT) services and products, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan with a turnover of GBP 18 billion in 2017 whereas Northgate Public Services (NPS) is a market leader in software solutions and IT services to local government, public safety and health sectors in Europe, Canada, Australia and India.

Overall, the event was a good mix of interesting presentation, discussion and networking opportunity for the industry experts.