Richard Bennett

Head of Industry Solutions and Strategy, VMware

Richard is a senior technology executive with over 20 years’ experience in EMEA and US leadership, managing teams in Customer Success Consulting, Advisory & Professional Services and System Engineering, for global vendors and integrators. Based in the UK, he has managed complex customer-facing teams globally for organisations including VMware, as Avaya’s EMEA CTO, Lehman Brothers, Cisco & Horizon. He has a proven background leading customer-facing teams who are focused upon technology, products and innovation strategies. In addition to a wide array of advisory engagements, he has extensive experience in developing customers’ digital roadmaps and product strategy (both on-premise or in multi-cloud) for; Communications, Applications, Customer Experience and Telecoms. As well as international industry keynotes, he regularly helps businesses build teams which execute programmes around “business technology” and innovation in order to broaden the capability and commercial competency of systems integrators and vendors Richard concurrently delivers several non-executive roles for innovation start-ups the world over, advising on business strategy, technology imperatives and is a Fellow of the Customer Experience Foundation.