Outstanding Leader of the Year Award

Outstanding Leader of the Year

The winner of our Outstanding Leader of the Year award will be someone who has demonstrated exceptional guidance, direction, integrity, decision-making, or inspirational leadership throughout their work in the cloud space.

2023 Shortlists

UK shortlist

Ali King
Senior Data Engineer at Inspera

Amanda Sleight
Commercial Director, UK at AWS

Anna Brailsford
CEO of Code First Girls

Babita Kumar
Digital Innovation & SAFe Transformation at Roche Diagnostics Europe

Carolyn Brown
Chief Information Officer at British Medical Association

Charlene Hunter MBE
CEO & Founder of Coding Black Females

David Okeyode
EMEA CTO Azure Cloud at Palo Alto Networks

Elaine Forth
CEO of Hyphen8

Gatonga Theuri
Senior Program Manager at Diageo

Jonas Templestein
Co-founder and CTO at Monzo Bank

Lianne Potter
Head of SecOps at ASDA

Mark Young
Programme Director at Channel 4

Nadine Thomson
Chief Technology Officer, Media (GroupM)

Pooja Bagga
Technology Director/ Divisional CIO at Royal Mail

Sarah Rench
Director of Data, AI and Industry Solutions, Global Data & AI Centre Excellence at Avanade

Tanya Powell
Co-CTO at Coding Black Females

North America shortlist

Ursula Burns
Senior advisor, Teneo

Laura Ipsen
President & CEO at Ellucian

Elizabeth Tobey
Head of Marketing Digital Solutions at NICE’s Digital Solutions Group

Derrick Reyes
CEO & Co-Founder at Queerly Health

Kathryn Finney
Author and Managing General Partner at Genius Guild

Aly Murray
Founder and Executive Director at UPchieve

Mitra Best
Partner and Technology Impact Leader at PwC

DACH shortlist

Angela Maragkopoulou
Chief Operating Officer at DWS Group

Felicitas Birkner
Head of Business & Head of Fujitsu Academy Expertise at Fujitsu

Kave Bulambo
Founder – Head of Talent at TalentDiverse EU

Georgie Smallwood
Chief Product Officer at TIER Mobility

Irina Schellenberg
Senior Associate Global SAP Alliance at PwC Deutschland

Sabine Bendiek
Chief People and Operating Officer, Member of the Executive Board at SAP

Global shortlist

Shortlist for our Global event will be released on Monday 22nd May, 2023.

Criteria

Our judges will be looking for nominees in the cloud industry who exemplify the traits of a great leader, no matter what their role.

Successful nominations should:

Identify a CEO, CIO, CTO, Director, Manager, or anyone else in a leadership role
Describe the nominee's courage, vision, compassion, innovativeness, or outstanding engagement and how they embody their values in their day-to-day role
Demonstrate their impact—this could be business growth, implementing innovative practices, or empowering others
Reference anything else that demonstrates how the nominee leads by example and acts as an advocate for others and their organization

Nominations can be submitted as a 100+ word statement (400 words max) OR a three minute (maximum) video highlighting how the nominee has hit all or some of the elements outlined in the category criteria. Try and include as much tangible evidence as possible—please note that the video should explain why the nominee should win the award, and not exceed the length mentioned above. The video can be shot on a phone, laptop or PC camera, corporate adverts that do not address the category criteria will not be accepted.

Previous Winner

Victoria Critchley

Chief Executive Officer, Bam Boom Cloud

Victoria and her team completed a management buyout of Bam Boom Cloud in February 2021, whilst making sure she helped support the organization’s young workforce who were spread across the globe, placing an emphasis on a culture that values empathy, trust, clarity and kindness in order to allow people to be their authentic selves at work.