TechWeekEurope Announces Finalists of New Tech Success Awards

Nov. 27, 2012 - PRLog -- The Tech Success awards are designed to celebrate the achievements of IT managers and CIOs in end-user companies. The final winners will be announced on 6 December.

“The arrival of cloud and mobile technologies is ushering in a new era, where IT departments can become more responsive to user needs,” said TechWeekEurope Editor Peter Judge. “We are recognising this with a set of awards that recognise the way organisations are capitalising on this change.

In its first year,  the Tech Success Awards attracted a strong field of more than 80 entrants, and the panel of editors had a tough time debating the merits of all those sent in. Already, TechWeekEurope is starting to prepare for next year’s awards, hoping to generate even more interest. “Successful tech projects rarely get the visibility and recognition they deserve,” said Charles Ward, chief  operating officer at Intellect, TechWeekEurope’s partner in the scheme.  “These awards highlight excellence in deployment as evidenced by the impact on the performance of the business.  It’s a refreshing perspective because success is all about outcomes.”

The shortlist was decided by a panel of judges including TechWeekEurope Editor Peter Judge, Ian Osborne, Intellect UK; Clive Longbottom, QuoCirca; Liam Newcombe, Romonet; and Mark Taylor, Sirius IT.

Green Project of the Year
●     Veolia Water - which saved a million litres of water a day using a monitoring system from i2O Water, which remotely diagnoses leaks and problems

●     Cadoxton Primary School - which installed a solar-powered ICT suite using low-energy terminals, working with Solar Ready

●     Memset - a hosting company which worked with Surrey University to reduce energy consumption from 28W per virtual machine, to 4.7W

Cloud Project of the Year
●     Orbian – a supply chain finance company who moved to a virtual data centre from Adapt

●     Doner - eCRM firm who moved to a private cloud with and saved 60 percent on hosting bills using Pulsant

●     O2 – the mobile phone giant got users onto new contracts quicker using CloudSense

Mobile Project of the Year
●     Surrey County Council - BlackBerry phones and tablets let the council’s youth services work quickly with confidential data

●     Laing O’Rourke – a construction firm which uses mobile devices to make sure its staff can all get home every day

●     Stockport Homes – a social housing provider which automates customer visits using Android tablet

Public Sector Project of the Year
●     Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust (CHUFT) – whose health team uses QlikView apps to monitor patient care and reduce mortality

●     Harrow Council – whose parking services work faster using online forms from FirmStep

●     NHS Institute – whose central health innovation body uses the open source Alfresco content management system to make its documents more accessible

Most Innovative Project of the Year
●     Farrell Heyworth – this estate agent uses social media and analysis to find out what customers really want

●     Jaguar Land Rover – uses virtual high-performance computing clusters help the manufacturer go quickly from “virtual cars” to real machines

●     YouGov – this polling and market research firm moved its data centre from Berlin to the UK by virtualising it first

In the first year of the Tech Success awards, there were two categories where we felt we didn’t have enough entries to justify giving a prize.

“Big Data, it seems is not yet established enough, or else Big Data users are still keeping their best results secret,” said Judge. “Meanwhile Open Source is very well-established, and we were aware of many great projects in the UK – but we didn’t get enough applications in by our deadline for this prize.”

Open Source and Big Data entries were redistributed to other relevant categories, and TechWeekEurope has already started to encourage more entries from these and other categories for next year’s awards.

TechWeekEurope will finally announce the winners of the Tech Success awards in a webcast on 6 December at 11.30 GMT. Please join us, either through our Live Events channel (http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/webcasts) or through the link below: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/6925/61415

Notes to editors:

TechWeekEurope UK (www.techweekeurope.co.uk), is an online publication providing authoritative guidance on the impact that technology will have on the future of business. Its tagline is ‘enhancing business with technology’. The site provides insight on topics including mobility, security, cloud computing and sustainable IT to a rapidly growing audience that increasingly sees the issues as business-critical.

Also established in mainland Europe and the US, TechWeekEurope UK provides a one-stop shop for advertisers and sponsors looking for innovative pan-European opportunities. TechWeekEurope UK is published by NetMediaEurope, which operates in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

About NetMediaEurope

NetMediaEurope (www.netmediaeurope.com) publishes websites aimed towards IT Experts in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. It was founded in July 2007 as a result of a management buy-out by senior VNU managers.

With 30 sites across Europe, NetMediaEurope is the leading European B2B sales house to target the IT professional audience and market segment. It has 15 million monthly unique readers and 5000 stories per month across Europe. The portfolio includes brands such as TechWeekEurope, ChannelBiz, Gizmodo, Silicon and ITespresso in different territories.