Meet Mark Hudson - Solver & SCN Member

[Former Member]

Have you ever wondered what it takes to solve an InnoCentive/SAP Challenge? What kind of a person would take on such a Challenge that requires creativity and the ability to innovate?

Mark Hudson from Antivia, an SAP Community Network (SCN) member, is one of those Solvers. Learn more about him here:

Mark Hudson from the U.K who recently won the SAP Polestar Innovation Challenge

"I'm the co-founder and Vice President of Product Management at Antivia. After graduating from Leeds Metropolitan University (far too many years ago!) with a BSc (Hons) in Computing and being fascinated  by databases during that time (blimey - I must have been really boring!), I found the application of business intelligence and data warehousing came relatively naturally and inevitably found myself falling quickly into a career focused on business intelligence.

I was lucky enough to start my career right at the beginning of the BI explosion when there were a plethora of BI vendors to choose from. Vendors which are now unfortunately only fondly remembered by employees and ex-customers such as Holistic Systems and Crystal Decisions. My firm favourite has always been BusinessObjects and I have had the enviable opportunity during my career of having worked as a customer, a business partner and an employee of theirs.

My true passion has always been developing software, from very early days of developing basic games on my Commodore 64 to writing my own compiler at university. However, my problem was that I was always a better software designer than developer, hence my career in Product Management rather than Product Development.

In 1999 I realised two of my life goals, firstly to start my own business, secondly to design, develop and sell my own software. Blue Edge Software's vision was to democratise the delivery of business intelligence information to all areas of an organisation. We grew the business to 15 employees, 15 blue chip customers with annual revenues in excess of $1m and in 2002 we were acquired by BusinessObjects.

Today at Antivia, I still get a huge kick out of designing software with my amazing team, solving real problems faced by organisations deploying business intelligence throughout their organisation. The InnoCentive Challenge that we won gave us yet another opportunity to show how we can solve these problems and has been a great platform for Antivia to showcase our innovative solutions for SAP BusinessObjects customers.

You can find me on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markhudsonantivia"

Mark kindly wrote the above profile upon request by SAP/InnoCentive and gave me the permission to share it in this blog; you can also find it on InnoCentive's web site.

CONGRATULATIONS, Mark!

More information...

• § ...on the other Polestar Challenge winners and their solutions Explorer(Polestar) Contest Winners Announced
• § ...at the SAP Innovation and Technology Pavilion.