UK IT Industry Awards: Get your entries in by 5 August

Due to an overwhelming response, the closing date for entries to the BCS/Computing UK IT Industry Awards 2011 has been extended. The deadline for entries is now 5pm on Friday 5th August.

One of the main aims of the awards is to showcase the success of companies that have made an outstanding contribution to the UK IT sector over the previous 12 months, and this was certainly the case with Grid-Tools, which won the 2010 IT Achievement of the Year prize.

Grid-Tools specialises in creating and provisioning data for test and development environments, and won the award in recognition of its innovative niche software solutions.

Grid-Tools’ products help companies secure test and development data across multiple projects and test environments, by creating smaller, more targeted versions of a company’s original sprawling database. By doing this, a business can use its data more effectively, but without having to worry about the usual disadvantages that managing large amounts of data brings.

“Our software will maintain all the referential integrity of the original live environments, but with less data to worry about storing,” says Jessica Jones, head of marketing for the company.

“The company’s data will be secure and you don’t have to worry about compliance - it is for all these reasons that we won.”

Grid-Tools was pretty confident of success after it found out it had been shortlisted for UK IT Achievement of the Year.

“We felt we deserved the award,” says Jones. “The functionality of the product is very powerful, and the judges obviously recognised this. The type of data you can create from the software is really useful for a business

“The software makes the data richer, and you can apply data trending and version control. You can ensure that you get really good testing. It’s truly innovative,” she adds.

However, the company did not want to get its hopes up too high, knowing that the competition would be strong.

“We had full confidence in our entry but thought that maybe we would end up in second place,” recalls Jones.

“We are a small company. There are only about 30 of us, and at such a huge event we were just unsure about what the outcome would be.”

So how did the Grid-Tools team feel when it was revealed that they had actually won the award?

“We were absolutely thrilled. We are a small British company based just outside Oxford, and the award really means a lot to us,” says Jones.

The impact of winning the award has also extended far beyond the excitement of the night. Jones says that it has helped Grid-Tools establish itself in the market.

“Winning UK IT Achievement of the Year has had an incredible impact for our marketing team. They have done a lot of PR around it,” says Jones. “We have gained a lot of recognition by being able to say we are award-winning. It makes a small company look far more legitimate,” she adds.

“The UK IT Industry Awards is also a great chance to see who else is out there, which companies are being innovative, and what interesting products they are releasing. We will certainly look to apply again this year, although probably in a different category, and we’ll see what happens.”

If you want your team to get the recognition it deserves, start working on your entry for this year’s competition now. The deadline for entries is 5pm on Friday 5 August. The winners will be announced at a lavish prize-giving ceremony, to be held at the Battersea Park Arena in London on Thursday 10 November 2011.

For a full run-down of this year’s categories, with details on how to enter, simply go to www.ukitindustryawards.co.uk.