The Tech’o’Space Podcast Ep 70 - 40 Years of Driving Tech, Cloud & Salesforce Transformation Forward
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Who is Richard Clark and what is his background in the IT industry?
Hello, this is your host, Takhil Navdhori, and welcome to the brand new episode of the Techospace Podcast series. In this podcast episode, I'm super thrilled and honored to welcome one of the most eminent and prominent industry leaders of the IT industry and also the Salesforce world. And he's none other than Mr. Richard Clark, who is based out of Bexhill, the United Kingdom. And also he is the VP of EMEA Alliances and Success for a reputed company. elements.cloud and along with that he's the co-organizer of the London and Sussex uh Salesforce community groups and also a volunteer and the founder for Beer Force UK that we are going to talk as we go ahead in this podcast session. So uh Richard, it gives me a super pleasure and honor to welcome you to this uh podcast initiative of mine.
So Richard, how are you doing and how are things in you know in Bexel at the moment in UK? Uh so as to ask.
Hi Kiel, thank you for having me as a guest today. Appreciate it. Uh hello to all your audience. I see you've done a huge number of these sessions already. So it's definitely uh pleased to be selected. Yeah, uh bit rainy uh down here in Bexhill, but we're used to it. Uh we have a saying down here in where I live in East Sussex, uh as Pettical is Eastbourne, Bexhill for the Incontinent. So there's not many people at work in my area. It's very much a uh an older generation's area. Yeah we are. Um but yeah, very good, thank you.
How did Richard’s career evolve from the 1980s home‑computing era to becoming a Salesforce consultant?
Yeah, very good.
That that's a beautiful insight about the city, you know, from a trivia point of view. So yeah, uh so uh Richard, so at the stroke of this R, let's uh, you know, head up with our podcast session. All right. So Richard, can you give me a complete timeline of yours in the IT industry?
Wow. I mean, uh, how do you summarise forty years in a few seconds? Uh interrupt me at any point. So, like a lot of people back in the eighties, I started as a teenager working teaching myself IT, uh, learning basic on a home computer during the revolution uh home computing revolution. So that was buying magazines and books, typing stuff out, working out that the stuff didn't work and learning how to debug. uh all for yourself and that my interest built into learning at uh school level university computer science uh and really just sort of getting in in the early days of the IBM PC uh was still new believe it or not uh at that time and then I went through a journey um with software house uh value added reseller doing sort of product uh growing that joining the consulting boom in the 90s uh contractor consulting boom
uh, which was hugely exciting working on so many different platforms, so many e commerce systems, uh, a a real bubble uh that never really burst, in my opinion. Um, and those days you had to learn a new technology. Every project seemed to be a different language, small talk or Java or Visual Basic or Oracle PL SQL. There just seemed to be something different every single time. But I eventually uh joined the Southwest system, uh, some uh fellow uh colleagues from that company, I was at Smart for 21. Uh started a new consulting company. Um, but they actually wanted to be the next Salesforce. And um that got us into using Salesforce as a mechanism to learn more about it, and it just grew from there. Um, they become uh one of the top platinum partners in the UK, one of the top boutique companies, Brightgen.
And I really had a career from then either at other system integrators. um other uh and customers as well doing projects myself uh and did a lot of Salesforce implementations over that time. Um more recently I've been uh working in the ISV space. So first solving problems in test automation, uh, because I recognize from my consulting gigs that actually people were not testing enough in the Salesforce world. It's very different to the core uh tech industry.
What magazines and early tech experiences shaped Richard’s passion for IT?
And then elements because people were not documenting or fixing the technical debt or the architecture uh entropy, if you like, the technical entropy of the solutions I'm building. Uh and you have to pay that debt.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Richard Clark and what is his background in the IT industry?
0:05–1:23
2
How did Richard’s career evolve from the 1980s home‑computing era to becoming a Salesforce consultant?
1:23–3:43
3
What magazines and early tech experiences shaped Richard’s passion for IT?
3:43–5:11
4
What does Richard’s role as VP of EMEA Alliances & Success at elements.cloud involve?
5:11–8:48
5
What are the biggest challenges Richard faced delivering digital transformation for SIs, ISVs and end‑customers?
8:48–13:30
6
How does Richard view the importance of Salesforce in the UK market and across different sectors?
13:30–18:40
7
What is the story behind the Beerforce UK initiative and its purpose?
18:40–26:20
8
What fun rapid‑fire questions reveal Richard’s personal favorites and hobbies?
26:20–50:11