On the occasion of ICT Spring Europe 2014, one of the most influential conferences on the European agenda taking place, on 3rd & 4th July, at the New Conference Center of Luxembourg-Kirchberg, more than 1,200 professionals attended the Networking Cocktail and 500 of them took part in the European ICT Awards Dinner, on the first evening of the convention. The winners of the European ICT Awards were announced during the Dinner. These awards aim at rewarding the best practices in the ICT field. 3 awards were attributed by the jury: European CIO of the Year (Taavi Kotka), European ICT innovation of the Year (Telerik), and European startup of the Year (eProseed).

Taavi Kotka, European CIO of the Year

Taavi Kotka (35), currently the Estonian Government CIO, has a strong background working in private sector. He started his career as a programmer, rapidly rising to be a Managing Director of the most successful software development company in the region, Nortal. He is an angel investor or founder of many innovative startup companies like zeroturnaround.com, Fits.me, plumbr.eu etc.

He holds a master’s degree in e-Governance Technologies and Services. He was the president of the Estonian Association of Information Technology and Telecommunications (ITL) and he was elected as an Entrepreneur of the year in 2011.

10 million e-residents

Estonia is a country of 1.3 million people in Northern Europe, which has grown over the last 15 years to become one of the most highly developed information societies in the world. Using ICT, Estonia wants to implement e-residency, to get at least 10 million people around the world and to become a country without borders. The goal of Estonia is to guarantee the preservation of the Estonian nation, language and culture through the ages.
The Estonian authorities have decided to adopt a no-legacy policy. This is primarily accomplished by forcing public sector institutions to rewrite their solutions at least every 13 years. At first, this may seem like an enormous investment expense, but the examples prove that constant renewal keeps investments and maintenance costs low. The annual ICT budget of Finland is approximately 2 billion €, for Singapore 1 billion €, for the United Kingdom 20 billion €, and for Estonia 50 million €.

The other important trend is related to the events in Crimea. Considering the presence of an aggressive neighbour, Estonians are working on a concept that would allow them to persist as a state even if the country’s physical territory is occupied. As Estonia already has e-elections, an e-parliament, an e-government, location-independent justice and taxation systems, etc., it is no longer an impossible dream to detach the state from the physical territory.

Telerik, European ICT innovation of the Year

Telerik has developed the industry’s first truly adaptive development platform, supporting any approach (web, hybrid and native), any OS, any device and any technology.

A complete set of powerful cloud services is fully integrated with the entire Telerik Platform suite to optimize design, delivery, management and real-time analysis of apps across all screens with a single, unified platform. Moreover, with Telerik Platform, developers can use their existing skills to create apps for any platform: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows, and BlackBerry OSs.

Inspired by customers and developers

Telerik is known for its community of more than 1.2 million developers. People at Telerik closely listen to their customers when creating products and adding features. For example, the latest release of Sitefinity CMS is fully inspired by customers’ and partners’ requests. Also Telerik Platform enables developers to choose programming languages, environments, devices, OSs, etc. Telerik uses a plethora of tools to gather feedback: different internal portals, customer Feedback Portals, forums, ticketing support and feedback system.

Telerik recognizes that developers are not just at the forefront of delivering great value for their customers, but are a critical element of the engine that drives the world forward.

In 2013, Telerik turned the old mobile app development paradigm on its ear. While most developer tools and platform vendors take a prescriptive approach, forcing developers to choose between native, hybrid or web, Telerik shifted development to focus on what an app needs to do, based on app requirements, not vendor bias.

As a result, Telerik developed the industry’s first truly adaptive development platform. It enables developers to create beautiful experiences optimized for every app and screen. With the Telerik Platform, developers can focus on what an application should do first and then choose the approach that best balances cost, development time, reach and access to device capabilities.

eProseed, European startup of the Year

Headquartered in Luxembourg, eProseed was incorporated in 2009 by Geoffroy de Lamalle with one key objective: find opportunities to leverage the latest technologies to hedge against financial crisis.

eProseed’s core software "Financial Supervision & Insight Platform" (FSIP) was conceived in 2010. This solution is now fully operational, delivering unprecedented modernization of financial supervision activities. eProseed hired its first employee in November 2010 and currently employs 59 highly-skilled collaborators. The company operates out of 6 branches: Belgium, Netherlands, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates., Lebanon, and United States.

FSIP delivers a revolutionary approach to financial supervision: it enables financial supervisors to collect deep and detailed structured and unstructured financial transaction data, process them through systematic controls using automation, monitor financial regulatory layer-cake using full blown Business Intelligence, thus spending quality time on doing ad-hoc analysis where human value or knowledge is a must while the system does all repetitive and complex data processing automatically.

eProseed’s FSIP addresses a niche market, that of financial regulatory software, where billions are at stake. Financial compliance is not a "good-to-have" option anymore: it is mandatory. This mandate provides a strong market driver for eProseed’s FSIP. In June 2014, eProseed generated a 4.7 M€ revenue on Q1/Q2-FY14, and targets closing FY14 with 11 M€ revenue. Margins have been quite steady and all profits were entirely re-invested to R&D and company growth. As a result eProseed is self-funded without a single Euro of debt.