Novia Works LtdSimon Hudson is an entrepreneur and health sector specialist. He formed Cloud2 in 2008 following a rich career in the international medical device industry and the IT industry. Simon’s background encompasses quality assurance, medical device development, international training, business intelligence and international marketing and health related information and technology.
Simon’s career has spanned both the UK and the international health industry, with roles that have included quality system auditing, medical device development, international training (advanced wound management) and international marketing. In 2000 he co-founded a software-based Clinical Outcomes measurement start-up in the US. Upon joining ioko in 2004 he created the Carelink division and, as General Manager, drove it to become a multi-million pound business in its own right.
In 2008, Simon founded Cloud2 in response to a need for a new way of delivering successful projects based on Microsoft SharePoint. This created the first commercial ‘Intranet in a Box’ solution and kickstarted a new industry. He exited that business in 2019, which has continued to grow as a leading provider of Power BI and analytics solutions.
In 2016, he co-founded Kinata Ltd. to enable effective Advice and Guidance in the NHS and is currently guiding the business beyond its NHS roots to address needs in Her Majesty’s Prisons and in Australasia.
In 2021, Simon founded Novia Works Ltd.
In 2021 he was invited to become Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Hull.
In 2022 he was recognised as a Microsoft MVP.
In 2025 he founded Sustainable Ferriby CIC, a community energy not-for-profit to develop energy generation, energy & carbon reduction, and broader sustainability & NetZero projects in the West Hull villages.
Simon has had articles and editorials published in a variety of technology, knowledge management, clinical benchmarking and health journals, including being a regular contributor to PC Pro, as well as a presenter at conferences. He publishes a blog on areas of interest at noviaworks.co.uk. He is a co-facilitator of the M365 North User Group. He is a lead author and facilitator on the Maturity Model for Microsoft 365. He is the author of two patents relating to medical devices. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Physical Science and a PGCE in Physics and Chemistry from the University of Hull.
Simon is passionate about rather too many things, including science, music (he plays guitar and octave mandola), skiing, classic cars, narrowboats, the health sector, sustainability, information technology and, by no means least, his family.
Hello, I’m Simon and I have a problem. 10 years ago I fell in with a bad crowd and started doing SharePoint. I thought I was in control. Just a little session here and there; a quick hit of site creation or an hour or so wrapped around list and library configuration. It was just […]
This blog thinks about some pros and cons of deploying a collaboration solution to Office 365 compared with an internal VM farm. It starts with a view of what the collaboration technologies from Microsoft are.
Adopting SharePoint There are a number of important activities to consider in order to drive success of the SharePoint implementation. These include seeking appropriate user input in the early stages, continuing to obtain user feedback for an extended period of time after deployment and being seen to act upon feedback, setting out a policy and […]
Implementing SharePoint In many regards SharePoint is remarkably straightforward and flexible for developing solutions with; very many applications can be developed by simply selecting appropriate features such as lists and libraries, configuring them using metadata and views and aggregating these within a variety of functional sites within a portal. All this can be done by […]
What is SharePoint SharePoint is a Microsoft platform technology, running on servers or in the cloud, which allows a large range of business solutions to be rapidly built, deployed and managed for any size of organisation. It includes a large number of capabilities as standard focused on, in our view, 5 core business activities: Content […]
Folders are terrible as a means of organising content. It’s a deeply broken approach and carrying it over to SharePoint is a deeply bad idea. Here are 15 reasons why and a couple of counter arguments for balance.
I’ve been thinking about intranets and user adoption. And not for the first time. We absolutely love Cloudbase, our intranet even though it is one to two generations behind Hadron 8020, the Enterprise Intranet we sell. We know that our clients love their Hadrons, but still we see poor end user survey results sometimes. I […]
Reading the Friday morning blog of the rather excellent Ed Reid this morning on how many small improvements can make a big difference I was struck that it resonated with part of my talk at the NHS event Cloud2 hosted in Manchester the day before. As with Ed’s comments, I referenced the Olympic 1% improvements […]
Dilbert never fails to illuminate a few areas of business wisdom, by contrasting it with arrant business stupidity. So, Dilbert on Intranets: Some interesting behaviours and themes to ponder: If your intranet doesn’t work it must be the fault of either the technology or your users… Maybe what was implemented, for what purpose, with what […]
In Cloud2 we spend a lot of time thinking about SharePoint use, intranets, user adoption and the challenges of matching what people want, with what they think they want and what other people (usually managers, communications and IT folk) say they should want. We also try to match this to what we see being successful. […]
As a company, we have just moved completely to the Office365 suite, mostly driven by a desire to improve our email (though it was pretty good before) and also from a desire to start using Lync (even though we are big users of Skype already) for our internal communications because of the way it looks […]
These prophetic words come from Blondie’s 1978 Parallel Lines album (one of the all-time great albums by the way – if you haven’t got it then shame on you). In fact the preceding lines are just as prescient: “Picture this, my telephone number One and one is what I’m telling you Get a pocket computer […]
Novia Works Ltd 