Proudly Sponsoring the 2018 Women In IT Excellence Awards

sorangutan

New Relic was a proud sponsor of the 2018 Women In IT Excellence Awards presented by the United Kingdom’s Computing magazine. The event, now in its second year, took place in Finsbury Square, London, on November 27.

This year’s event included awards in nearly 20 categories, including:

IT Leader of the Year
Innovator of the Year
Hero of the Year
Role-model of the Year
Entrepreneur of the Year
Woman of the Year
Digital Leader of the Year
Outstanding Transformation
Security Leader of the Year
Rising Star Award
Diversity Employer of the Year
Diversity Project of the Year
Outstanding Returner Award
Transformation Leader
Graduate of the Year
Software Engineer
Team Leader

You can see the winners here, along with more photos from the event.

The evening was a gathering of aspirational and inspirational women across a wide variety of industries and career levels. And by including awards in categories such as Outstanding Returner Award and Graduate of the Year, the event recognized the important contributions made by women returning to work—while also encouraging rising stars to continue to develop promising careers in the technology industry.

Support from New Relic

I was honored to represent New Relic at this year’s event, in my role as the company’s diversity and inclusion officer here in London. Mark Fieldhouse, New Relic’s Vice President, Northern Europe, joined me at the event, along with a number of female technology leaders—representing many of our customers and partners, as well as New Relic’s own London office.

The New Relic Team (Samantha Brown, Jennifer Godwin, Rebecca Grant, Mark Fieldhouse, Tom Chmielewski, Nilofar Sarwar) and customers and partners from Amazon Web Services, ECS, and HSBC).

The New Relic team was honored and excited to sponsor this important event. We embrace and support the Women in IT Excellence Awards’ stated goal to “shine a spotlight where it’s most needed in tech: on the mould-breaking, ceiling-smashing female talent rising up the ranks and shaking up the industry.”

At New Relic, of course, we are passionate about creating and supporting an inclusive and diverse work environment. If we do not accept our responsibility to take a broad perspective and to serve a diverse community, then we would be doing our customers—and ourselves—a huge disservice.

New Relic also understands the important roles that diversity and inclusion play in building high-performing teams. People from diverse backgrounds bring a spectrum of opinions, values, and experiences to the table—all of which encourage healthy discussion and debate. This environment helps our team members to get out of their comfort zones and to escape the limitations of a status quo mindset—believing that “this is how we’ve always done things” isn’t an acceptable approach.

“Events like the Women in IT Excellence Awards are important to women and underrepresented groups in the technology industry,” noted New Relic Chief People Officer Kristy Friedrichs in an interview with Computing magazine. Such events, she added, are a way of “reversing those subtle signals that they’re getting that they don’t belong, to say, ‘No, you do belong, and we’re celebrating it.’”