Charles Southwood, regional vice president, Northern Europe and MEA, Denodo

What has been your path to power?

After graduating in Civil Engineering from Imperial College, I spent several years in the industry with major construction company Taylor Woodrow working on-site and in the design office. This included a unique opportunity to spend several months in the Amazon jungle designing and building bridges to connect remote villages that would otherwise be cut off during the rainy season - both an unusual and very rewarding experience for someone in their mid-20s!

Upon returning to the UK, I moved into the design office, designing dams and oil rigs which included the use of CAD/CAM systems and computer modelling. This was my transition into IT - an opportunity presented itself to move to a sales role in a software and services company that provided both engineering and applications development solutions. Although I still had my links to engineering, the faster growth was in applications development, which inevitably led to my focus on this area. This in turn led to other sales positions and into sales management and then wider business leadership.

Over the last 25 years, I have therefore had the pleasure of working in a number of software houses, driving the sales and marketing operations where the predominant focus has been on innovative solutions, often disruptive in their nature. For the last five-plus years as regional vice president of Denodo Technologies, I’ve had the privilege of leading the company’s business growth across northern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, supporting the growth of data virtualisation adoption across the region.