Biography

Kate is a multi-award-winning technology entrepreneur, owner-manager of Memset, and a nationally renowned expert-advocate of green ICT and cloud computing. She was recently tanked #20 in Computer Weekly's UKtech50 - the list of the 50 most influential people in British ICT.

A self-taught coder from the age of 9, Kate has always had a deep interest in technology and business. She completed her MSc in Biomedical Science at Southampton in 1999 and started her career as an e-commerce developer. In 2002, disenchanted with an employee's life, she founded Memset Ltd. with her brother Nick who was initially part-time. She started the company above their mum's garage in Guildford with £3000, which went towards a laptop and some Google advertising. Nick joined Memset full-time in 2005.

Since inception Memset has been a leader in the field of virtualisation and openly shares their experiences and methodologies. Memset was Britain's first Carbon Neutral ISP and has been voted the UK's Best Web Host for 6 years running by users in the PC Pro service and reliability awards. They have also won several other business and environmental awards including the ISPA Best Managed Service 2011 award and the BCS UK IT Best Small IT Supplier 2011 award.

Kate is passionate about green IT personally, as well as through Memset. She chairs Intellect UK's Climate Change group, as well as sitting on their main board, providing important linkage between activity and governance. Kate also sits on the ministerial Green Economy Council, championing the role of UK technology the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Kate is also the external communications officer of BCS's influential Data Centre Specialist Group. Last year she co-led and co-authored the technical architecture strand of phase two of the Cabinet Office's G-Cloud and App Store project and Memset has recently been invited to be part of the G-Cloud IaaS/PaaS foundation delivery partner activities. Kate takes an active interest in local and national business affairs is frequently quoted in the technical press on the topics of green ICT and cloud computing as well as writing on those topics via her blog.

In late 2009 Kate started a collaborative PhD with Surrey University's computing department. She is mining power and load data from Memset's public cloud and developing a number of power consumption models incorporating both the data centre and network. Her aspiration is to address the question; "Will Moore's law defeat Jevon's paradox when applied to the total power consumed by ICT services?".

As well as her interests in ICT and environmental issues, Kate keenly follows a number of scientific fields, enjoys SCUBA diving, skiing, sailing and motorcycling. Kate was also the first woman to tandem-jump Everest in October 2008, raising money for getting girls into IT.

Publications

• Kate Craig-Wood, Paul Krause and Nick Craig-Wood (2010) Analysis of CPU & disk I/O utilisation in a real-world deployment of 950 virtual machines. In Proceedings of 1st International Conference on Cloud Computing and Virtualization (CCV 2010), Global Science and Technology Forum, 2010
• Kate Craig-Wood, Paul Krause and Aaron D. Mason (2010) Green ICT: Oxymoron, or call to innovation? In Proceedings of the Annual International Conference on Green Information Technology (Green IT 2010), Global Science and Technology Forum, 2010