Dr. Andy Harter

Dr Andy Harter is responsible for VNC software which allows remote control of one computer screen from another. The technology is worth over a billion dollars, is on more different kinds of computer than any other application and is an official part of the internet.

He is CEO of RealVNC, a company he founded 12 years ago partly with crowdfunding, before it was called that. It is the fastest growing software company in Cambridge according to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50, and earlier this year received its third Queen’s Award for Enterprise in three years.

VNC continues to enable innovation, most recently in the automotive and semiconductor domains. The company was recently awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s MacRobert Award, the most prestigious award for engineering innovation in the UK.

Before that, Andy was director of research and engineering at the influential AT&T Cambridge Laboratory and responsible for several disruptive technologies. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge where he is a Fellow of the Computer Laboratory and St Edmund’s College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and received the Academy’s Silver Medal for outstanding contributions to innovation with commercial impact.

He was almost an organ scholar at Cambridge choosing instead to read maths and has been to some far flung parts of the world in a light aircraft.

He is married to Lily, who co-founded RealVNC, and as well as growing the company they have also found time to have two energetic boys now aged 7 and 2 who are already engineers.