60 days until Britain leaves the EU and 50 days until Advanced World 2019
With major milestones facing the UK over the coming weeks, it’s critical that businesses take time out to consider their plans for the future – whatever it may look like. It’s timely then that Advanced World, now in its fifth year, is just a few weeks away – 50 days to be precise, and only 10 days before the final date of us leaving the EU. And who better to help us navigate the journey than Carolyn Fairbairn, who we’re delighted to announce as the keynote speaker on the day. The CBI Director General is certainly best placed to be guiding us through the political, economic and technological factors that are impacting businesses today, and sharing her views on how leaders can reshape their organisations in such turbulent and uncertain times.
Advanced World has become our largest annual gathering of the Advanced customer and partner community. This year’s event – more than ever – has been designed to provide a sounding board and opportunity for business leaders, professionals and partners to exploit some thinking space and make sense of all this change in an environment where they can also get up-to-speed with our latest product and solution developments whilst receiving advice from a vast array of market experts.
Carolyn’s keynote lends itself to the themes for this year event, which are ‘Rethink, recharge and reshape’. The event will look to bridge the challenges between business uncertainty and technology innovation, and with unprecedented access to key Advanced staff and partners, as well as the time and space away from the office to breathe, visitors will have a unique opportunity to see how to reshape their organisation for success, now, and in the future.
And it’s against a worrying backdrop for businesses. Since the EU referendum, business investment has remained sluggish - only two percent higher than at the time of the Brexit vote, and 0.2 percent lower than a year ago - as leaders hit the pause button on any kind of commitment. This is an alarmingly low figure - especially when you consider that prior to the referendum, the Bank of England expected business investment to have grown more than 13 percent over the two-year period from 2016i .
In contrast, the pace of change across the technology world is relentless - from artificial intelligence and machine learning to the third platform, the digital journey continues to accelerate rapidly. There have been countless examples of disruptive start-ups jumping on board the digital revolution and gaining significant success. Yet at the same time, there are equally many companies failing to transform and embrace technology to deliver agility and business intelligence.
So for businesses looking to gain insight into where their focus should be in order to recharge their organisation now, and to embrace the innovations that will reshape the way they work, Advanced World will help you to navigate the key trends.
For us, we’re excited to be introducing a number of new Cloud-based products as we continue to focus our product platform with native Cloud solutions, demonstrating forward strides in how we’re continually innovating to meet the modern and evolving needs of our customers. We will also preview some of the new developments and services coming to market in 2019.
Held at the ICC in Birmingham on Monday 18 March, the one-day event will mark the 10 day countdown to the Britain officially leaving the EU, and will unite guests from across the country with one common goal – to rethink, recharge and reshape their organisation during a time of political uncertainty and rapid technological growth. So please delay no further and sign up to attend - for more information or to register, please visit our dedicated event website.
Gordon Wilson, Chief Executive Officer, Advanced
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i https://www.ft.com/content/cf51e840-7147-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9