Video QA: BlakYaks, UK IT Industry Awards winner 2025

'Customers just focus on how they want to compose their environments, not writing the code that does it - that's what the accelerator does for them’

We talk to BlakYaks CEO Dirk Anderson and CTO Stuart Anderson about the innovation that propelled them to victory at the UK IT Industry Awards 2025.

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 BlakYaks won the prestigious prize for Cloud Technology of the Year.

We talked to CEO Dirk Anderson and CTO Stuart Anderson to find out more about the company's tech, challenges and achievements over the past year.

Tom Allen: Dirk, Stuart, thanks so much for joining me and congratulations on your win at the UK IT Industry Awards 2025. You both work for BlakYaks. The company's expanded very, very quickly since your launch in 2021. What do you think is the secret behind your success?

Dirk Anderson: We started with a bit of a head start. So prior to getting BlakYaks launched, Stuart and I had been working across Microsoft Azure domain for a whole number of years, and before that running consultancy businesses. But when BlakYaks launched, we were very, very focused on and intentional about growing in the right way; so using very deep expertise around one specific domain area, which for us was Microsoft Azure Cloud Native technologies: specialising in a very defined set of technologies, always looking to automate, do everything with code, build to quality in a way that enterprise companies would expect; and secure by design, straight out the gate.

We knew that we could deliver real strategic value and change for customers, providing that we were very disciplined about sticking to our core; and off the back of that we've been able to build a set of solutions and a portfolio of customers very steadily, but in a sustainable way.

You've won the award for Best Cloud Technology and that was for your Azure Accelerator Packs. What was the impetus for the launch of that product?

Stuart Anderson: They were built for selfish reasons, initially. So they were built as internal accelerators, because we've found that when we're building solutions for customers, even when they were really custom designs, we're building or delivering broadly the same thing, 80 or 90% the same, each time.

That's a huge waste of time, to take a blank sheet of paper and create it all again from scratch if you know there's that amount of commonality at the end.

So yeah, we built them internally, accelerated our own delivery for customers by using them internally, and then it was just a natural step to say, ‘We should offer them directly to the customers, rather than just using them as an internal accelerator,’ and they've kind of all been built that same way.

How are your Accelerator Packs different from the Microsoft version?

Stuart: Ours were designed to be user friendly to begin with; there’s a big emphasis on simplicity. So they're all configured with human-readable templates and manifests, and we hide away a lot of the infrastructure-as-code complexity on the customer’s behalf, so they really just focus on how they want to compose their environments, not writing the code that does it, that's what the accelerator does for them.

The customers receive really detailed design documentation which is customised to them at the end of any engagement, and we put in a team to do it for them, so we put in a really expert team of engineers to deploy the Accelerator Packs, and at the end of it they will get full ownership of all the resources.

Some of the accelerator packs you'll see out there, like Microsoft's, reach out to remote repositories to pull code down, and that's a big no-no for some of our customers. So, the customer has 100% ownership of everything at the end of the day and then we can transition them through to owning it, or we can fully support them and manage the environment on their behalf, and anything in between.

What is next for Accelerator Packs. What's the next innovation or expansion?

Stuart: We always build with repeatability in mind, so anything we do for a customer - even if it's something brand new - we try and build it in this repeatable, modular way. And then when we find there's more than one customer doing it, we immediately start to think, ‘That might be the next Accelerator Pack.’

We have a few things incubating. We're looking at things like Azure Virtual Desktop and DataBricks, and the more we see customers asking for them, the more we're thinking, ‘OK, we'll formalise that into an Accelerator Pack.’

So yeah, some stuff incubating and I think we'll have at least a couple released in 2026.

And finally, how did you feel when you heard your name read out as the winner at the UK IT industry Awards a few weeks ago?

Dirk: I was personally blown away. We went there with zero expectation to win, we felt that we'd already won by simply being included in the shortlist. So, we'd written it off as an option to win, and when our name was announced, we were ecstatic. I think you could see it on the table, it was totally unexpected.

To be recognised by industry peers in that way, we felt very honoured by it and couldn't be more pleased. Brilliant.

This article is sponsored by BlakYaks.