Ellexus Founder, Dr. Rosemary Francis, delivered keynote promoting Women Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Dr Rosemary Francis, founder of growing software company Ellexus based at St John’s Innovation Centre, the regional Centre of excellence supporting high growth businesses, was selected to deliver the keynote at an event promoting women entrepreneurship and innovation in Zagreb, Croatia on Thursday 18 June.
The roundtable was organised by the British Embassy Zagreb in partnership with the Croatian Chamber of Commerce, British Business Centre Croatia and Development Agency Zagreb with the aim to inspire more women to follow in the footsteps of international role models. This is especially important right now, according to the British Embassy, as Croatia is in its sixth year of recession and many young women are unemployed.
Rosemary comments: “It was an excellent opportunity to speak at an internationally recognised event alongside British and Croatian women with careers spanning the globe. I spoke about the journey of Ellexus and the collaboration and support I've received from universities across Europe as well as from commercial organisations and government schemes.
Central to that support has been the facilities, training and community offered by St John's Innovation Centre, and I wish to thank them for nominating me for this speaking role.”
David Gill, Managing Director at St John’s Innovation Centre, says: “I am delighted to see Ellexus continue to grow into a successful business with a customer portfolio comprising multinational companies. We have always supported our ambitious tenants here at SJIC to reach out to a global market.
When we were approached to nominate a female keynote speaker we could not think of a better person than Rosemary who started as a very small business in St John’s Innovation Centre and is now a success story with an established business and multinational clients.”
The event focussed on methods to inspire more women into business where Rosemary discussed her own personal journey, including the coaching she has been involved in at the Judge Business School in the area of women in business.
Rosemary adds: “It was an opportunity to celebrate some of the many advantages women-run businesses have in terms of improving long-term employment and growing stable economies.”
Rosemary was amongst other successful female entrepreneurs who presented inspirational stories to a wide group of women from all walks of life, including business people, government officials, academics and media professionals. Among other subjects they also spoke on the role of universities and science in bringing innovative ideas to market.
Over the last five years Rosemary has led Ellexus to become an established provider of software to the chip design and bioinformatics sectors. Engineers and IT departments across the world use the company’s inaugural product Breeze, a system debugger that gathers information about a company’s IT infrastructure in order to highlight configuration problems. Customers include the world’s largest semiconductor IP supplier ARM Holdings, Cancer Research and Mentor Graphics.
Ellexus has recently been awarded a significant contract to develop the technology used in Breeze to create a new product, Mistral, which will solve the ‘noisy neighbour problem’ – the problem created when there is too much activity in a storage cluster, which can bring a whole system down and halt development work for some time. By improving the performance and reliability of high performance computing clusters, Mistral will save users millions of pounds each year in lost engineering time and wasted resources.
About St John’s Innovation Centre
St John’s Innovation Centre was founded in 1987 by St John's College, Cambridge, the first pioneering business incubator of its kind in Europe. The Centre now provides almost 5,000m2 of managed workspace and flexible leases, currently occupied by around 87 companies, and is also the base for around 350 virtual tenants most of whom are also startups.
It aims to provide a dynamic and supportive environment to accelerate the growth of early stage knowledge-based companies with flexible accommodation, strategic business advice, training and introductions. It is located at the heart of the Greater Cambridge technology cluster, in which it plays a pivotal role, and is a Business & Innovation Centre (BIC) accredited by the European Business Network.
About Ellexus
Ellexus Ltd is a Cambridge-based software development company. It specialises in tracing Linux application dependencies and profiling file IO so that engineers can deploy and tune complex software pipelines easily.
Ellexus’s inaugural product Breeze, which takes a number of forms, deploys unique technology to trace programs as they run in order to monitor file dependencies and environment settings. Breeze offers a unique visibility into the inner workings of complex scripted flows such as those used in semiconductor design or complex software builds.
IT managers and engineers use Breeze to look inside their scripted flows to solve issues such as installation problems, or problems in scripted flows caused by differences between machines or user settings. By making it easy to extract detailed information about the way programs are called and which files they access, Breeze helps IT managers, tool vendors and tool users to communicate and solve problems more quickly. www.ellexus.com