With fundamental shifts currently impacting the marketplace, many Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are reviewing their position in the market and the optimum strategies for future development. On March 26 in London they will get a unique opportunity to glimpse the future, hear some outstanding presenters and discuss new ideas on markets and the dramatic changes affecting their industry. IT Europa's seventh European ISV Convention is a pan-European event that brings together the leading independent software vendors with leading hardware and software platform providers, service providers, systems integrators and solution providers.

Among the confirmed speakers is Lauri Saft, Director of the IBM Watson Ecosystem program. In her current role she is responsible for developing a network of partnerships consisting of entrepreneurs & established companies who will build their applications on a foundation of cognitive computing. These companies will take advantage of the natural language processing and deep QA capabilities of Watson in order to serve their customers in new ways.

Rob Craft, Senior Director of Enterprise Cloud, Microsoft will talk about what business customers ask for from the cloud.  “It's a simple thing, really. They want everything! How can we change expectations with business customers to match and exceed what they get today from a device?”

The Gartner keynote at the event is on how Big Data, mobile, business intelligence and hybrid cloud platforms introduce different buyers and cause a shift in customer buying behaviour. This is impacting all ISVs and channels; so Gartner's Mark Paine is looking at ways for ISVs to succeed in selling to these 'new' customers.

The aim of the event is to develop business partnerships and capitalise on the evolution of the IT industry within an increasingly applications and solutions-driven world. HP, IBM, Interoute, Microsoft and Oracle are supporting the European ISV Convention as platinum sponsors. Other sponsors include Arrow ECS, AVG, Avnet, Ingram Micro, ISVWorld, Jaspersoft, SafeNet, SoftServe and SunGard. The agenda is reaching its final stages, and the latest can be viewed at: http://isvconvention.com/agenda.html

The European ISV Convention 2014 will take place at the Lancaster London Hotel, on 26 March 2014. ISVs wishing to attend the convention and vendors or service providers interested in sponsorship opportunities can find further information at: www.isvconvention.com. Following the convention the winners of the European IT & Software Excellence Awards 2014 will be announced at the European IT & Software Excellence Awards Dinner. Full details of the awards can be found atwww.iteawards.com