UK IT Industry Awards 2011: And the winners are...

The awards were presented by comedian, actor and television presenter Alexander Armstrong at a glittering ceremony in London

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The awards were presented by comedian, actor and television presenter Alexander Armstrong at a glittering ceremony in London, in front of an audience of more than 1,000 technology professionals from across the UK.

Outstanding contribution to UK IT: Mike Lynch

Mike Lynch is recognised for establishing a number of technology companies, including Autonomy, the UK's largest software company by market capitalisation and a member of the FTSE 100. The company was recently acquired by HP in the largest ever European software transaction.

Mike studied Information Sciences at Cambridge University, where he received a Ph.D. and held a research fellowship in adaptive pattern recognition. He is a technology entrepreneur and a pioneer of the Meaning Based Computing movement. He has been awarded an OBE for services to enterprise.

He has held a number of advisory and board roles in the venture capital industry and is currently a non-executive director of the BBC and the British Library. He has won numerous awards including being named the Confederation of British Industry's Entrepreneur of the Year, the European Business Leaders Awards' Innovator of the Year for pioneering new approaches to search and information processing technology, and Management Today's Entrepreneur of the Year 2009. Mike has also won an IEE Award for Outstanding Achievement.

He is also a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Lady Margaret Beaufort Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, and the author of a number of academic papers on the subject of pattern recognition and signal processing.

PROJECT EXCELLENCE AWARDS

Business Project of the Year

Winner: Jaguar Land Rover

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) designs, engineers and manufactures luxury cars and 4x4s in the UK that sell in 177 countries. The complexity, timescale and cost associated with automotive engineering and safety testing demand an advanced IT environment. JLR has deployed a state-of-the-art IT environment consisting of scalable compute clusters, engineering workstations all built from commodity technologies. This underpins JLR's move to "virtual car" product development, reducing the time to market, engineering costs and environmental impact of the product lifecycle.

Medallists: Dell/Team Lotus; JP Morgan Chase

Jaguar Land Rover's Andy Searle receives the Business Project of the Year award

Small Business Project of the Year

Winner: LondonWaste

LondonWaste operates the LondonWaste EcoPark, a busy recycling and waste management facility in North London. Handling hundreds of vehicles a day, it has undertaken a project that integrates some of the most modern technology into one of the oldest industries in the country.

Medallists: Business Stream; Royal Bank of Scotland

Public Sector Project of the Year

Winner: University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust

The Department of Health (DoH) and National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) mandated that a venous thromboembolism (VTE) risk assessment be conducted for a minimum of 90 per cent of adult patients admitted to hospital. University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire invented the e-solution for VTE risk assessment, replacing traditional paper forms. The innovation, forming part of the Trust's existing Clinical Results Report System, led to impressive improvements in VTE risk assessments, increased patient safety and an improved hospitals' admission process.

Medallists: Eastbourne Borough Council; University College London Hospitals

Community Project of the Year

Winner: South West Grid for Learning Trust (SWGfL)

360 degree safe is a user-friendly online tool that allows schools to review their e-safety provision, identify strengths and weaknesses and develop an improvement action plan. It can be used free of charge by any school and provides a unique database of current and relevant data on the state of e-safety in schools. The tool is provided by SWGfL, a not-for-profit, charitable trust company, funded by 15 local authorities.

Medallists: Community Gateway Association; WORLDwrite

Environmental Project of the Year

Winner: Network Rail

Network Rail's On Train Metering project is a cross-industry initiative, delivered by a collaborative team to develop a solution in a compressed timeframe, on budget, to maximise the benefits for the industry as a whole. It means that the operator is billed for its use of EC4T (electric current for traction) based on metered consumption data instead of modelled consumption rates. By creating a delivery-orientated cross-company initiative - rather than the more long-term boards and discussion groups - and recognising the true worth of data collection early in the process, this innovative project will support green initiatives as well as reduce costs.

Medallists: Enworks; Zoological Society of London & Bat Conservation Trust

Network Rail's Lawrie Read and team pose with their award

ORGANISATIONAL EXCELLENCE AWARDS

Large IT Department of the Year

Winner: Allianz Insurance

Allianz UK recognised that there were traditional barriers to innovation and set up the structures to overcome these. It provided guidelines to staff on what innovation means and how it can be achieved, and provides regular and clear communication to employees. It also offers management support at all levels to enable organisational excellence.

Medallists: Home Group; HM Revenue & Customs

UK IT Industry Awards 2011: And the winners are...

The awards were presented by comedian, actor and television presenter Alexander Armstrong at a glittering ceremony in London

IT Department of the Year

Winner: Royal Shakespeare Company

The Royal Shakespeare Company is world renowned for producing Shakespeare’s work, and also ambitious new work. It is an ensemble company, meaning staff and associates have a part to play in the risk taking and pushing of creative boundaries that characterise its work. IT does not spring to mind in this context, but in fact it now underpins and informs all that the company does.

Medallists: The Benenden Healthcare Society; McDonald’s

The RSC's Chris O'Brien receives the IT Department of the Year award

IT Supplier of the Year

Winner: Northgate Managed Services

Northgate Managed Services is a cloud, infrastructure and ICT managed services provider, with more than 2,000 customers across the UK. The company has grown its customer base by deploying IT services and solutions to reduce costs and improve efficiencies and service levels, delivering value for money. Northgate is committed to investing in its employees and the local communities they work in, which is helping to build a sustainable and growing business.

Medallists: FDM Group; SAS

Small IT Supplier of the Year

Winner: Memset

Memset is an IT hosting company based in Guildford, Surrey. It provides managed hosting and cloud computing infrastructure-as-a-service solutions for businesses. Its services range from individual virtual machines to enterprise-class dedicated server clusters with multi-site fail-over, all without term contracts or up-front costs. Customers range from small startups to large corporates spread across all industry sectors. Its services are popular with IT companies providing web-based software-as-a-service.

Medallists: Company85; Metronet (UK)

IT Employer of the Year

Winner: MSM Software

MSM has high client satisfaction rates and enjoys long-lasting client relationships thanks to its innovative approaches to quality, shared risk/reward client payment terms, intellectual property rights and guaranteed delivery dates. This, combined with its commitment to staff development, training and excellent benefits, leads to high levels of staff satisfaction and retention.

Medallists: Accenture; UKFast

IT Project Team of the Year

Winner: HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC)

HMRC touches every individual, family and business in the UK. Last year it collected more than £468bn and paid out £40bn in benefits and credits. Supporting this is one of the UK’s most complex and extensive IT operations, managed by Information Management Services (IMS), who are responsible for managing the suppliers and infrastructure. IMS plays a pivotal role as any disruption to IT operations could significantly impact the UK economy.

Medallists: Box UK; Capital One

TECHNOLOGY EXCELLENCE AWARDS

Security Innovation of the Year

Winner: Egress Software Technologies

Egress Software Technologies, an innovator in collaborative security, provides on-demand email and file transfer services to give organisations and individuals the ability to share information securely. Using patented real-time access control, an extensive range of products deliver desktop and gateway encryption using a combination of public and private cloud infrastructure. Used by businesses, healthcare companies and governments, Egress solutions offer integrated and easy to use software designed to streamline user workflow and manage the protection of data.

Medallists: Cryptocard; Trusteer

Business IT Innovation of the Year

Winner: MarkLogic

MarkLogic is changing the way organisations make business use of unstructured or “big” data. More than 250 customers in industries including financial services, healthcare, government, and media are generating revenue and growth using big data analytics enabled by MarkLogic products, services, and partners. MarkLogic Server is a database for unstructured information that helps organisations build applications that leverage unstructured information.

Medallists: Varonis; WANdisco

Mobile IT Innovation of the Year

Winner: Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)

RBS has created a mobile app, which is also available to NatWest customers. According to RBS’s head of technology solutions, George Kelsey, the RBS app lets customers transfer funds between accounts, check balances and recent transactions on mini-statements.

Medallists: Absolute Software; MobileIron; TotalMobile

UK IT Industry Awards 2011: And the winners are...

The awards were presented by comedian, actor and television presenter Alexander Armstrong at a glittering ceremony in London

Infrastructure Innovation of the Year

Winner: Alquist Consulting

Celsius from Alquist Consulting is a high-definition energy monitoring technology for the datacentre that uses fibre-optic cable as a high-resolution temperature sensor. Datacentres are using Celsius to reduce their annual energy consumption by about 25 per cent.

Medallists: Veeam Software; Virtual Instruments

Andrew Jones from Alquist is presented with the Infrastructure Innovation award

UK Innovation and Entrepreneurship Award

Winner: Shutl

Shutl is a new, UK-based delivery service that enables retailers to offer two delivery propositions to their customers: immediate delivery within as little as 90 minutes or delivery within a one-hour window of the customer’s choosing. Shutl makes this possible by operating a platform that aggregates capacity within the same-day courier market and exposes this capacity to retailers via a web service.

Medallists: Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation; Functional Technologies

INDIVIDUAL EXCELLENCE AWARDS

CIO of the Year

Winner: Rob Fraser, IT director, Sainsbury’s

Rob Fraser became the IT director at Sainsbury’s in August 2009. His remit was to transform the internal IT capability following an unsuccessful outsourced operating model. Since then, Rob has transformed the IT division that is now achieving the highest levels of operational service, efficiency savings and delivering a significant capital programme of IT-led business change.

Medallists: Phil Pavitt, CIO and director general for change, HM Revenue & Customs; Keith Woolley, director of technology services, Home Group

Rob Fraser of Sainsbury's is named CIO of the Year

Young IT Professional of the Year

Winner: Nicola Cooper, senior consultant, IBM

Nicola has been engaged as a senior business consultant across a variety of sectors, and has managed global, multi-vendor design, build and testing teams in her six years with IBM. Most recently, she was the test consultant for the largest implementation in the history of Shell’s Downstream-One Aviation Programme, managing nine test phases for 29 IT systems concurrently.

Medallists: Andy Birds, service design & transition manager, The Co-operative Banking Group; Vidhyalakshmi Karthikeyan, graduate researcher, BT

IT Manager of the Year

Winner: Steve Collins, Investigation and Threat Management, National Grid

Steve is a senior information security professional at National Grid. Over the past year he has worked on creating and recruiting a new team focusing on investigation and threat management. He has set vision and direction for the team and deployed immediate tactical initiatives and strategic recommendations designed to create a world-class function within National Grid and immediately solve threat exposures.

Medallists: Paul Webster, IT manager, Lloyds Banking Group; Dave Westwood, IS strategy consultant, National Grid

Systems Professional of the Year

Winner: David Newman, channel platform manager, Best Buy Europe/The Carphone Warehouse

David has more than 14 years of IT solutions/project management, systems development, business and change analysis experience. He has an extensive skill set in operational IT, software development, infrastructure rollout, change and process management based projects, especially those that involve new technology, software introduction or re-engineering.

Medallist: Peter Bellinger, IT architect, IBM UK

Service & Support Professional of the Year

Winner: Sheila Hardwicke, head of Service Centre, Network Rail

Sheila is a highly motivating operational manager with more than 18 years’ experience managing service recovery and improvement programmes across the UK and Europe. Driven by results and able to achieve significant service improvements, team re-motivation and cost reduction, Sheila has experience in both internal support functions and as a commercial service provider. Her approach to people management is fair and straight-forward, enabling her to bring enthusiastic teams with her when delivering the service recovery for which she is now recognised.

Medallists: Chris Holmes, IT infrastructure change and deployment manager, McDonald’s; Michelle Major-Goldsmith, head of service management training, Sysop

Business Analyst of the Year

Winner: Andrew J Perkins, senior business analyst, Post Office

Andrew delivered a IT programme of “transaction re-engineering” across 12,500 branches. He led the requirements and design definition of a replacement flow by using innovative methods of requirements elicitation using social media, resulting in a £5.7m benefit, removing 670,000 counter hours and allowing the delivery of enhanced training and a corresponding increase in customer and user satisfaction.

Medallists: Julian Dyer, business analyst, National Grid; Paul Mercer, senior business design analyst, Barclaycard

Special Commendation: Dr Yang Li, principal scientist, BT