Ed Randall

What this looks like in practice: Seven years at Rackspace as account CTO for their biggest customers. Focused on technology strategy, architecture, security, and helping them not waste money. The key was building trust with senior stakeholders by being able to explain technical complexity in a way that made sense to both engineers and business people. I'm doing similar work now at SoftServe, just at a broader scale.

Examples: At Neo4j, I redesigned the cloud marketplace architecture to follow industry best practices whilst improving security, which led to better customer adoption. At Rackspace, the challenge was always balancing technical quality with commercial reality for customer projects. At JP Morgan, it was about understanding the needs of a regulated financial institution and translating that into practical technology decisions. Different contexts, same underlying skill.

Where I've done this: At JP Morgan, I helped create a product management function for database capabilities, establishing processes and getting engineering teams to work together better on mission-critical financial systems. At Neo4j, I owned the technical product strategy for self-managed offerings across AWS, Azure, and GCP marketplaces. One's about building the function, the other's about running it. I've done both.

The approach: There's enough AI hype out there already. I'm more interested in helping organisations integrate AI in ways that are practical, secure, and actually deliver value. Same goes for platform modernisation: it's about balancing innovation with operational reality and security requirements. Twenty-five years in technology means I've seen enough trends to know which ones have substance and which ones are just noise. Cloud transformation, containerisation, modern data platforms, infrastructure automation. I've worked across all of it.

In practice: Managed a team of 14 design engineers at Visa Europe whilst also being the Linux infrastructure specialist. At Rackspace, I coordinated specialist resources across solution design and migration work for enterprise clients. At JP Morgan, I worked with engineering teams and the infrastructure platforms group to keep everyone aligned. The common thread is establishing processes that actually help rather than hinder, and getting people from different backgrounds to collaborate properly.

Why this matters: I've published over 34 articles on Kubernetes, AWS, databases, networking, and DevOps. At BAE Systems, I wrote and delivered a Linux training programme that people actually found useful. Being able to explain technical complexity to different audiences (engineers, business stakeholders, whoever) has been critical in advisory roles. You can't advise effectively if you can't communicate clearly.