Interview: Axiologik, UK IT Industry Awards winner
'We're intentionally a bit different'
The UK IT Industry Awards are the largest and most well-known event in the technology industry calendar. Owned and operated by Computing and BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, the awards enjoy an unmatched level of professionalism and industry knowledge.
This year's winners were announced at a live awards ceremony on Wednesday 12th November in London, where Axiologik took home the Services Company of the Year (<100 Employees) Award.
We talked to Ben Davison, founder, CEO and CIO at Axiologik, to learn more about how this award will help his organisation and his priorities for the next 12 months.
Why are events such as the UK IT Industry Awards important to the industry?
They matter because they give a platform to showcase and highlight the amazing work being done by smaller, typically more nimble organisations. They help to stimulate innovation by raising the profile of these organisations and giving them the external validation often needed to start conversations in places they typically wouldn't be invited.
They're also important as a celebration – for the people within our teams for work they've done, but also to celebrate how the state of the art is evolving in the wider industry. Showcasing what others are doing provides us all with the opportunity to learn and improve and something to aspire to.
How did you feel when you heard that your entry had won?
Slightly shell-shocked. We didn't expect to win against such great competition and it took a few seconds for it to settle in. It still seems a bit surreal now.
What do you think made your entry stand out?
The programmes we work on often have a significant impact on society and we're often asked to both shape the direction and lead the delivery. For an organisation of our size, this means we're punching significantly above our weight - we're not just taking orders, we're directly influencing and delivering population-scale digital change. We believe it's the impact we make, whilst still being a young and growing organisation, that made our entry stand out.
What does the win mean for your team, and your organisation? How will it help you?
For our people, the work we do is often hard and unforgiving - this is an important award for them as it shows the commitment they demonstrate every day is having a real impact. For our organisation, it definitely raises our profile significantly and acts an important proof point for the work we do.
We're intentionally a bit different to many other consultancies and we often end up competing with much larger, more established businesses with prestigious brands. The customers we work with know that we're different and love the work we do for them. However, for newer prospects, size and scale often provide an illusion of safety - this award provides independent validation that there are alternatives out there, that bigger doesn't always mean better.
What does the future hold for your organisation - what are the priorities for the next 12 months?
In the next 12 months, we expect to continue our growth journey - we've built strong sales and pipeline momentum and we hope this will continue to accelerate. Whilst our core business is leading digital transformations, we're seeing a dramatic rise in demand for our strategic consulting offerings around cyber resilience, AI readiness and helping organisations achieve fast product flow. We expect these to become increasingly important over the next 12 months and we're investing significantly in these capabilities.
Lastly, clients have always valued our deep technical capabilities but we've not actively offered them as a distinct service offering. We're now offering heavy-duty software, infrastructure and security engineering leadership as services in their own right and we expect this to become a really important part of our business within the next 12 months.