Investment Pays With Record Year for Blue Chip

Oct. 15, 2012 - PRLog -- IT specialist, Blue Chip, has announced another record year with a headline turnover of £19 million at its year end 2011/2012.  This has included considerable investment in its Head Quarters, Cloud services, Customer Service Programme, staff numbers and interactive web site, all of which have contributed to higher customer retention and gain for overall growth.

Richard Cook, managing director at Blue Chip, said: “This year we have invested in the region of half a million pounds to ensure a continuation of the growth and expansion we have experienced in recent years.  This expenditure has underpinned the relaunch of our HQ encompassing our own data centre for Cloud based IT, plus a new state-of-the-art training centre in addition to our newly launched facility in Southampton.  It has also seen our head count increase by 24 people, in order to support new customer wins.”

Cook adds: “Differentiation is a key focus of our growth strategy.  In this climate, it is not enough just to offer first class IT products and services.  By listening in detail to customers, we have developed a number of customer-centric initiatives of importance to them.”  

These initiatives include areas where they receive greater value – saving money whilst benefitting from higher customer service levels and is the focus for the Service Provider of the Year Award, for which Blue Chip has been shortlisted in this year’s prestigious Computer Reseller News (CRN) Awards - the IT industry’s top accolades for the IT channel companies.

Cloud Services have played a large role in this as Cook explains:   “We have made a significant investment in our Cloud offerings, taking leased space in the C4L Bournemouth Data Centre and building out an extensive compute platform to enable us to deliver Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Online Backup to our customers as the first of many services that we will offer into the future.

“Blue Chip’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform offers customers a robust solution at a fraction of the cost of traditional infrastructure alongside the savings made through not locating hardware on-premise. Our IaaS platform provides an enterprise class platform for all customers big and small and leveraging our 20 years experience in building Microsoft networks, we can then design and build out a fully customisable customer environment quickly, effectively and economically. “
   
SecureVault, Blue Chip’s online backup solution secures data in encrypted storage across two locations - Blue Chip’s Bournemouth data centre and at its Poole Headquarters - providing a modern, enterprise class disk based backup to replace customers’ legacy tape backup solutions, which can often be one of the largest elements of a companies IT support costs. This simple ‘pay as you go’ service is scalable, as and when a business grows.

Another prime example of Blue Chip’s initiatives is extension of full 24/7 Technical Support, as standard, for all support contract customers, regardless of their size.  In an industry leading move, Blue Chip removed the extra costs traditionally associated with around-the-clock monitoring and support, bringing enterprise level IT to small medium sized businesses.

Meanwhile, the launch of the Customer Service Programme and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to ensure Service Excellence throughout the entire business has played a role in retention and new business wins, with customers seeking demonstrations of customer service excellence and satisfaction.  

Cook concludes: “This has been a significant year for Blue Chip, with fundamental changes throughout our business which set us apart from the competition and provides us with an even stronger foundation for future growth.”

http://www.bluechip.uk.com