The 3rd Annual STM and General Publishing Conference gets Bigger and Better this Year!

London, September 29, 2015: Rave Technologies – A Northgate Public Services Company, organised its 3rd annual STM and General Publishing conference on 29th September 2015 in London, UK. The event was attended by 47 delegates from over 36 publishing companies across UK, other European countries and the US.

The attending companies were Wiley, SAGE Publications,The British Institute of Radiology, Oxford University Press, LibLynx LLC, Taylor and Francis, Copyright Licensing Agency, AIP Publishing, IOP Publishing Ltd, Pharmaceutical Press, The Institute of Engineering and Technology, American Chemical Society, De Gruyter, Bloomsbury Plc, Henley Business School, The Collinson Group, Springer Science+Business Media, CABI, Brill, MarkLogic, BMJ, OECD, Alexander Street Press, The Physiological Society, International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), Frontiers, Wichtig International Limited, 67 Bricks, Redlink, Inc., Tutton Russell Consulting, and many more…

Event Highlights:

The event started with the keynote session, ‘Parallel Worlds! Trends for the Future Coming to a Universe Near You!’ by David Smith, Head of Solutions at The Institution of Engineering and Technology. He set the tone of the conference by describing the Database of Intentions and it’s interesting possibilities.

The keynote session was followed by an interesting presentation, ‘Bloomsbury: Challenges in growing a digital business’ by David Duncan, Group Head of Technology at Bloomsbury. He talked about challenges in growing a digital business which were focused on how CCIP Capability Assessment can be leveraged to plan the strategy to counter these challenges. In the third presentation, Christian Kohl, Director Information and Publishing Technology at De Gruyter shared his experience about ‘How small publishers should leverage innovation’ and shared an expected Return on Investment plan on IT cost.

There was a panel discussion, moderated by Lisa Dittmar, Head of Project Office at Bloomsbury, where interesting views were expressed by our esteemed panelists about ‘Customer Engagement and Discovery in the Publishing world’. The panel members were Stewart Marshal, Global Director of Enterprise Architecture at CABI, Martha Sedgwick, Executive Director Product Management at SAGE, David Leeming, Publishing Consultant at 67 Bricks, Jim King, Director Software Engineering at American Chemical Society and David Smith.

After lunch, Martha Sedgwick spoke about ‘SAGE, A Case Study in Innovation: The Executioner’s Tale’. She took us through the insightful journey of SAGE with extremely interesting takeaways.

After Martha’s session, Freddie Quek, Research Associate at Henley Business School and Group Head of Software at The Collinson Group presented a thought-provoking session about ‘Dealing in Disruptions in STM’. He spoke about business, digital, and technology disruptions facing the publishing world. He offered his experienced advice to cope up with these disruptions. He encouraged the publishing community to join hands and counter these disruptions together.

The last session at the conference was a panel discussion moderated by Deepika Bajaj, VP, Publisher Relations at Redlink, Inc. The panel discussion included 6 panelists, Christian Kohl, Ove Kahler, Director Product Management and Global Distribution at Brill, Stephen Cornelius, Product Owner at Springer Science+Business Media, Jeremy Macdonald, Director of Technology at Pharmaceutical Press, Louise Russell, Director at Tuton Russell Consulting. The panelists were discussing whether publishing companies are software businesses as their dependency on IT is increasing day by day.

Overall, it was a very engaging conference with good mix of interesting presentations, discussions and networking opportunity for the publishing professionals. For more information on the event, please visit our event microsite: rave-tech.com/stm-and-general-publishing-conference/

About Rave Technologies – A Northgate Public Services Company

Rave Technologies (Rave) – 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.