I recently attended the IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference (BPLC), where our sales director, Gareth Pritchard, and I received on behalf of Centiq the fantastic honour of a Beacon Award 2012.

IBM devotes a big part of the BPLC programme to recognize and reward innovation and development by its thousands of worldwide partners.  Only 27 gain the coveted Beacon Award.  To our delight, Centiq received one of them: the Outstanding Optimised Workload Solutions category.

Opinions vary about whether new staff recruitment is on the rise, but the latest statistics on UK IT employment really struck a chord with me following our intake of six new starters on our graduate training programme in August last year.  According to e-Skills UK, the IT sector skills council, the proportion of the UK IT workforce below 30 has dropped from 33% in 2001 to just 19% in 2010.  To me, this seems like such a wasted opportunity for IT companies to benefit from the qualities that newly qualified recruits can bring to the workplace.  For us, it has been noticeable that our graduates have such ambition, drive and determination to give to the sales operation specifically and the wider business generally.

The new graduates have helped energise our existing activities and brought some fresh ideas to areas such as sales prospecting, making the investment doubly worthwhile.

Centiq’s enterprise consultancy and system support services transform the performance and economics of organisations’ technology infrastructures and related business systems. The company consolidates, virtualises and optimises computing environments, delivering smarter IT, business analytics, cloud deployments and helpdesk capabilities at reduced cost. Headquartered in Nottingham, the company has a 12-year track record of success with blue chip and mid-range customers in the technology, retail and wholesale, manufacturing, business services, local and central government, finance and healthcare sectors. We spoke to Glyn Heath, Managing Director, to find out more about the IT services industry....

Continuing the theme of value-for-money and pricing , I thought I’d take a step back and establish some basic truths that can easily get sidelined or ignored.

Many moons ago when I was involved in software development I was introduced to an assertion that I’ve not managed to disprove in the intervening years which is: “fast, cheap, good – pick any two”.

OK, so we’re not talking about life threatening human obesity, but we are continuing to accept a ballooning storage ‘waistline’ and financial wastefullness on a very large scale.  Which is even more suprising in the midst of a recession (yes I know Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, said the recession in the US had come to an end back in September but that could be the topic for a whole separate blog!).