John Hawkins, Chairman

John had a background with Philips Electronics where he became the youngest Senior Director at the age of 30. With over 20 years at Philips, his main achievement was the successful launch of the DVD. As Chief Executive of Graseby Plc, he successfully turned the company around and sold it to Smith Industries in 1996. In 1997 he joined Anite Plc as CEO and in 7 years grew the market capitalisation from £20m to £800m and, during his tenure, turned the Group from a £50m loss to a £28m profit.

John holds a number of chair positions in various private and public companies. He is the Chairman of Salamander Ltd and Genus Plc, a Non-executive Director of Psion Plc, an investing CEO of Atex and is one of the founding investors in ANV.

Bernard Edwards, Chief Executive

Bernard is responsible for driving forward Salamander's agenda for innovation and market development, and, since its formation in 1996, the company has achieved consistent growth of 30-40%. The blend of strong consulting skills coupled with world-class technology has proved to be a very successful and highly competitive proposition for the company.

Prior to co-founding Salamander and MooD International in the 90's, Bernard was Director of Marketing & Financial Services at N&P, where he was part of a successful turnaround. Before that he was Director of Marketing & Product Programmes at Unisys. He started his career with the National Health Service where, following training in behavioural psychology and group dynamics, he was responsible for clinical practice and in lecturing on human behaviour and motivation.

As a management consultant, Bernard has undertaken transformation work in the financial services, information technology, manufacturing and government sectors. He has a first class honours degree in Computing and Management Sciences from Manchester University , where he won the Computing Prize for each of his 3 years.

David Ward, Chief Financial Officer

Since qualifying in private practice, David has worked across a range of industrial sectors in entrepreneurial private, public and venture capital backed enterprises. His most recent role was as Finance Director of Spearhead Exhibitions Group. A keen cook, David's interests also include the hunting down of old and unusual wines to taste and share.

Dick Whittington, Chief Technology Officer

Dick is Director for the Defence & Intelligence sector and co-founded MooD International and Salamander in the mid 1990s. Prior to working with Salamander, Dick lectured on computing at the University of York . During his time there he managed a successful research team addressing innovative project support environments, publishing a number of research papers and books, including Database Systems Engineering (Oxford University Press, 1987), which became a standard undergraduate text within many universities. With more than twenty years of development and consulting experience in industry, defence and the wider public sector, Dick's focus combines a keen involvement in method and tool development with programme delivery across a range of corporate clients. Dick has a Doctorate and a BSc Honours degree in Computer Science from the University of York.

Simon Smith, Solutions Director

Simon Smith joined Salamander in January 1998. He was previously a lecturer in software engineering at the University of Durham, UK, where he managed research and development in corporate knowledge and evolutionary software architectures, funded equally by government science councils and industrial partners such as BT, BAe and ICI .  Prior to joining the faculty at Durham , he developed and applied methods of working in requirements engineering and formal logics at the University of York in conjunction with Logica.

Simon holds an MA in English literature from the University of Glasgow , and masters and doctorate degrees in computer science from the University of York.

Laurence Beardmore, Practice Director

Laurence is Director of the Defence & Intelligence Practice. He joined Salamander in 2005 from GD UK Ltd, where he was the Director of Integration Programmes and leader of Corporate Strategy. Having amassed some 20 years of experience in the defence sector Laurence has specialized in driving change, performance enhancements and growth in small, medium and large enterprises. Laurence's management experience spans a range of disciplines including Programme Management, Business Development, Strategy and Consulting. He qualified for his MBA in 2004.

Robin Tullett, Practice Director

Robin is Director of Commercial and Government Practices. He joined Salamander in early 2005 from HP, where he was the Director of Consulting for the UK business. Having spent most of his career within large IT services firms including IBM & HP, Robin has acquired significant management expertise in a wide range of business strategies including a strong focus on technology-enabled change. As a consultant, he has 15 years' experience in business change and systems integration, IT operations, IT governance and project and process management.