By David Terrar, EuroCloud UK
POST-EVENT UPDATE (12 July 2013):
At the awards ceremony, Richard Sykes explained the judges thinking and announced the awards, but wanted to point out the strength in depth and range of companies that had been shortlisted. There were some very different styles and types of solutions competing in each category, and that highlights the quality and diversity of cloud offerings on the market here in the UK and Globally.
Richard explained that the judges wanted to give XTM Cloud a special award as their solution didn’t really fit well in any of the categories, but tackled a very important issue for the whole sector – translation of software solutions to local language – in a very elegant and comprehensive fashion.
The winners were:
Best Start-Up: Present.me
Best Business Impact: Anomolay42 for Guidepost Solutions
Best Case Study, Commercial Sector: Daisy Group for Manchester Airport
Best Case Study, Public Sector: Accellion for London Borough of Camden
Best Cloud Offering: OneLogin
… Our congratulations to all of the winners!
Original Post and Category Nominees (12 July 2013):
Later today the annual EuroCloud UK awards will be showcasing the cream of cloud apps and services. The awards event is sponsored by IBM and hosted by well-known accounting firm Baker Tilly at their offices in the city. The awards are being judged by independent panel – Dr Richard Sykes (Chair, Cloud industry Forum), Max Cooter (Editor, CloudPro) and David Blacher (Head of Media & Technology Practice, Baker Tilly). Here are the shortlisted candidates for each of the 5 categories, plus a Special Award that the judges added.
Best Start-Up:
AdvancedChange with their cloud based HR and performance management software Actus. It’s designed to increase employee performance, engagement, and so improve the organisations profitability as well as compliance. They have name customers like Siemens and have grown to 2000 users in 6 months.
SaaSID with their Cloud Application Manager. They provide a browser-based single sign-on (SSO) solution designed to provide full visibility and management of web applications that is equivalent to existing on-premise application control, but from any device. They’re addressing the vital BYOD problem, gaining traction and IDC says their solution is “smart”.
Present.me describe themselves as YouTube meets Slideshare. They make it easy for an individual or a company to create and share a video presentation on line. The spoken word combined with visuals – a simple but very powerful concept. They started in May 2012 but already have over 30,000 subscribers.
Best Business Impact:
D2C with WordFrame providing the ICAEW Community. Started as a pilot back in 2007, this was part of a shift in business model to move from traditional print publishing with advertising to on line community content and sponsorship. As of today 79,613 of the 138,000 members are participating in what is a strategic move for the Institute.
Anomolay42 for Guidepost Solutions. Guidepost provide confidential investigations, litigation support and forensic accounting and financial investigations. They use Anomaly42’s rapid data discovery engine has enabled us to connect previously hard to find data and has transformed the speed and efficiency in which they undertake investigations and monitoring work.
WebExpenses using Skype, Trello, Google Docs and, of course, webexpenses. In 2007 WebExpenses decided to use only cloud based tools to run the business.
Best Case Study, Commercial Sector:
Workbooks for Taopix. Taopix are a software development company providing a photo book and photo gift software platform to digital printers and photo finishing companies. Workbooks gives them a single, unified cloud based CRM and business solution that the entire Taopix team can access at any time, anywhere in the world.
NaviSite for ASOS. NaviSite provide enterprise-class infrastucture and platform as a service. ASOS is a global on line fashion destination. They needed a flexible, scalable development and testing environment. With Navisite they can create new tes/dev environments in a day instead of 2 weeks, and have moved 2 key production systems on to NaviCloud.
Daisy Group for Manchester Airport. Dais Group provide unified communications. When Manchester Airport hosted their web services in house, they struggled with peaks in traffic caused by things like adverse weather conditions. Daisy’s managed hosting solution gives them the flexibility and elasticity to handle millions of website hits and improve customer service.
The Judges Special Award:
XTM Cloud is a multi-tenant SaaS solution to help linguists translate more efficiently, improve translation quality and consistency, and reduce delivery times. For project managers it helps them manage and allocate translation resources, control and monitor the progress of projects and estimate costs. Customers range from 3DI to Philip Morris International to Zynga.
Best Case Study, Public Sector:
Accellion for London Borough of Camden. Accellion provide secure mobile file sharing. LBoC were implementing a BYOD policy and needed to provide anytime anywhere access to Sharepoint and File Shares. Accellion has given all employees secure mobile access to confidential documents and revolutionized the way the Council works internally and with their partners.
Firehost for Cancer Research UK. The charity used Firehost’s secure cloud hosting services to support the demands of a donation system for a live Global telethon. They load tested up to 300 transactions per second, and during the campaign processes 38,000 transactions, raising over £7,000,000.
Exponential-e for Viridian. Exponential-e uses its own network to deliver business critical services including cloud, voice services and connectivity. Viridian is a housing association supporting 30,000 residents who wanted to move to a cloud based IT model. Exponential-e gave them a more flexible, agile and efficient environment as well as shifting expenditure to pay as you go.
Best Cloud Offering:
Abiquo provides a software based, hypervisor agnostic, Cloud Management Platform that works across private, hosted and public IT infrastructure. With Abiquo organizations can discover and optimize existing infrastructure, choose the right platform for every workload, whilst managing access, usage, security and costs.
OneLogin provide a comprehensive cloud identity platform for managing user identities, both in the cloud and behind the firewall. Onelogin provides pre-integration with over 3,000 cloud apps, 5 leading strong-‐authentication vendors, Active Directory, LDAP, Google Apps, Workday and more. It has a clean simple UI, one click access to the Cloud, an iPad app and Cloud search.
Xero is a UK and global on line accounting solution connecting small and micro businesses to their advisers and other services. Xero was the first provider to incorporate bank feeds and has pioneered the development of smart-phone applications. Their UK customer base is currently 22,000 but they plan to grow it to 100,000 within 3 years.
We wish everyone the best of luck and we’ll report the winners later.
Disclosure: I’m an unpaid director of EuroCloud UK, and my company has been shortlisted for the best business impact award.
Founder & CXO