Vivit Announces the 2013 EMEA/APJ Award Winners

The Vivit Board of Directors presented the EMEA/APJ Leader of the Year Award to Mostafa Moussavi, Champion of Year Award to René De Vleeschauwer, and Speaker of the Year Award to Mark Laird.  The EMEA/APJ Awards are presented each year and winners are chosen from a select group of talented volunteers who are member-nominated because they have demonstrated excellence and outstanding service to the Vivit Community. 

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Vivit awards presentation.  Tammy Young, Local User and Special Interest Group Chair, Vivit Board of Directors, said, "The three distinguished award recipients have demonstrated outstanding service to the Vivit and HP Software in the EMEA communities where they serve. Nominated by fellow Vivit members, the winners are highly-respected and bring a diverse set of skills to our industry. It’s an honor to celebrate their contributions to Vivit and its members.”

Mostafa Moussavi, 2013 EMEA Leader of the Year, is being recognized for his passionate support of user group and member meetings. He believes that because of VIVIT, end users are able to influence the development and improvement of the HP Software tools, serving both HP and the end user. Moussavi’s insights about Vivit members having different needs because of their diverse roles in IT, and how they deploy HP Software, led him to introduce parallel technical sessions at meetings throughout Sweden. He is a speaker at Vivit meetings and shares his experience with other members.

Mostafa has 24 years of experience in IT. He is a technical test specialist with nine years of experience with performance testing, performance test methodology and test automation. He has worked mainly with HP Software test tools as Quality Center, LoadRunner and QTP/UFT. He currently works as a Test Automation Specialist at SEB in Stockholm. He is also a teacher in "QTP & Running Automated Tests in QC,” and is responsible for SEB’s Test Automation Community.

René De Vleeschauwer, 2013 EMEA Champion of the Year, serves the HP Software community as a Chapter Leader in Belgium and has a special interest in the Testing, Quality, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Special Interest Group (SIG). 

René has worked in IT for more than 30 years, starting with IBM mainframes. He is now the founder and CEO of IKAN, a Belgian-based software vendor that is an HP Software Enterprise Management Alliances Program (EMAP) Partner. As a niche player in the ALM space, De Vleeschauwer helped IKAN to develop strategic relationships with industry leaders like HP, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and others. His key focus is to position the IKAN product set, IKAN ALM for lifecycle, build and deploy, and MetaSuite for test data management, which are complementary solutions to the HP ALM offerings.

Mark Laird, 2013 EMEA Speaker of the Year, is co-leader for the Business Service Management (BSM) SIG, as well as a presenter who represents Vivit within the wider HP community at conferences and webinars.  He has presented as part of the BSM SIG, helped with Vivit APJ (Asian Pacific and Japan) webinars, spoken at roundtable events and elevated Vivit’s presence at the HP UK Software Universe.  

Mark has been in the IT industry for over 25 years, and has been promoting, using and deploying HP Software for the past 10 years. He currently works as Group Technical Architect for Steria and now has responsibility for continuing to develop the HP, Cisco and VMware partnerships within Steria.  Steria, as both an HP Partner and Customer, has a unique insight into the use of HP Software in the real world and as such, Mark is also a member of HP’s Customer Advisory Board for Business Service Management, providing feedback and insight into customer requirements for future versions of the suite.