ASE Speaker

Stewart Watson has a consulting and entrepreneurial role in IBM and works in an Emerging Business Opportunities (EBO) organisation that focuses on Virtualisation, Grid and Open Source. This organisation is specifically designed to identify, create and incubate new business opportunities for IBM’s Global Technology Services (GTS) business.

Stewart is particularly focussed on developing Open Source service opportunities. He has a worldwide responsibility and is part of a broader cross-business team that is working to help position IBM optimally in the Open Source space, to ensure that IBM is actively growing, adapting and extending its offerings in this field. He currently leads the design of some of the service offerings and solutions, and is particularly interested in the links between Open Source, Open Innovation & Open Source Value Enablement.

In previous roles in IBM, he worked very closely with IBM Research and some Venture Capital Companies to identify and implement innovation opportunities for IBM’s clients in the Industrial Sector. Prior to that he has been responsible for the conceptualisation, design and build of a business automation solution for their Strategic Outsourcing business, an activity for which IBM has awarded him an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award.

Preceding his career in IT, he has been a researcher in the field of Human Sciences. He holds, amongst others, a D.Phil. in Ancient Near Eastern Studies (Egyptology) where a large part of his focus was to help transform Egyptology into what today could probably be called eGyptology, being the digital transformation of a field of study that previously has been predominantly paper-based. This work soon opened doors for him in the IT industry – which led to a personal career change in 1995 to IT.