future story uk technology
TRANSCRIPT
FUTURE STORY UK TEchnOlOgY
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AcknowledgementsWritten and produced by Lucy Parker, Blaise Projects Research by Intellect UK Design by Bell
Special thanks toAll the individuals and organisations featured in this publication
For PDFs and accompanying videos please go to www.uktechnology.info
CONTENTS
06 Introduction08 A history of ideas which shape the future
10 A nation of smart consumers 11 O2 – smart services on the move16 Pace – changing the way we watch TV
20 A hub for European and world markets 21 Nokia in the UK – a global technology hub24 Logica – technology solutions designed to deliver global strategies28 BT – building a network for the 21st century32 Epitiro – starting small, going global34 Inventive responses to the world’s climate change challenge
36 Enabling business to compete 37 Rising to the demands of the global financial markets: FFastFill40 Bringing the world into the classroom: RM44 A matter of life and death in the health services: Savant48 The fusion of technical and artistic skills takes centre stage
in the creative industries: Pinewood Studios
54 Strong clusters, high level skills 55 The Cambridge cluster – a historic university town
pushing the boundaries of the future56 Autonomy – leading the way in meaning-based computing60 TTP – turning cutting-edge ideas into commercial reality64 The South West cluster – putting silicon expertise on the map66 XMOS – hi-tech manufacturing at the heart of Europe’s silicon valley
70 World-class universities, cutting-edge research 71 Poweroasis – inventing new technologies for a low-carbon economy74 The digital design studio – art school creativity leading the way
in technical innovation76 The University of Southampton – paving the way to a smarter web
80 Building blocks for the future 81 Technology Strategy Board – a catalyst for innovation in the UK84 UK Trade & Investment – putting UK technology on the map86 Future Story UK technology
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References:1. e-skills UK, http://www.e-skills.com/
2. UKTI Inward Investment Report 2006/7
3. Gartner, 2010
4. Ofcom
5. ONS
6. Digital Britain Report, 2009. DCMS
7. European Competitive Telecommunications
Association www.ectaportal.com
8. Ofcom
9. Ofcom
10. Ofcom
11. Gartner, 2009
12. ONS: UK BERD 2007 Release – Jan 2009
13. Gartner, 2009
14. Gartner, 2010
15. Gartner, 2010
16. Gartner, 2010
17. The British Educational Suppliers Association,
BESA
18. BESA
19. Gartner 2010
20. DCMS 2010
21. PWC, Global Entertainment and Media
Outlook 2009 – 13 June 2009
22. BBC
23. www.mcvuk.com
24. NESTA
25. DEVELOP 100, 2010
26. Cambridge Cluster Report, 2007
27. Cambridge Cluster Report, 2007
28. Cambridge Cluster Report, 2007
29. www.topuniversities.com
30. http://www.innovationuk.org
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FUTURE STORY UK TECHNOLOGY
The digital revolution is changing the world in the 21st century, transforming how we live and work, how companies operate and the markets they trade in. Right across the country and in every sector of the industry, the UK has inventive high-tech businesses which are at the forefront of that revolution.
International investment has flowed in from multinational firms; almost all the world’s leading software and services businesses have operations in the UK. Global telecoms companies are attracted by the open regulatory system and the readiness of the UK’s sophisticated consumers to adopt digital technologies – and the potential that offers to develop products and services which roll-out in international markets.
Home-grown companies, like Autonomy in software and Vodafone in mobile, have taken their place as global players in the FTSE100 – while long-established brands, such as BT and Logica, have rapidly expanded their global footprint. And the rapid rise of specialist firms serving global markets testify to the energy in the sector: Pace becoming No. 1 in the set top box pay TV market worldwide, Greenstone in low carbon accounting or Kuju in computer gaming.
In all industries today competitiveness is dependent on innovation – and in innovation technology is often the vital component. So from FFastFill growing up in the heart of London’s financial centre to RM dedicated to supporting learning in the classroom, the technology sector in the UK is enabling other industries to thrive. The breadth and vibrancy of the UK’s creative industries are recognised around the world – and in the digital age, artistic creativity and technical creativity are becoming increasingly intertwined.
Strong clusters of leading-edge companies are spread across the country, focused on different areas of expertise from silicon designers in the South West to informatics in Scotland. The powerful mix of research, finance and business concentrated in these locations acts as a magnet for talent and a seed-bed for entrepreneurialism.
Underpinning the UK’s ability to deliver innovation is the high calibre research base in the universities – including Southampton University leading the way in Web Science. The worlds of academia and business are getting closer together. Global investors are backing the high-tech start-ups which spin out of academic centres of excellence. And new collaborations and networks are being established to generate commercial value from ground-breaking research.
So everywhere you look today, you begin to see the future story of technology in the UK.
The IT and Telecoms workforce in the UK is 1.52 million people – 860,000 in the IT and telecoms industry directly, and 663,000 as IT professionals in other industries1
From global players to small start-ups, the UK has 100,000 specialist software businesses2
The UK is home to more than 40% of the EU’s independent electronic design community by turnover and by number of design houses3
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Charles Babbage began on his life’s work: inventing methods for mechanical computation to remove human error from calculations. Inspired by the punched cards used by the Jacquard loom used in the textile industry, his design of an ‘Analytical Machine’ was based on cards to control sequential operations.
Ada Lovelace – a talented mathematician and daughter of the poet, Lord Byron, wrote a programme to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers for Babbage’s machine – becoming the first ever computer programmer.
Creating new technologies and putting them to work for industry and consumers has a long history in the UK. The Industrial Revolution changed the world: radically altering the ways of working, growing new businesses, trading in global markets, offering consumers a previously unimaginable array of opportunities – and UK innovation was the catalyst to that.
The creative spark that led to the invention of the steam engine, the light bulb, the phone and many other transformational technologies, fused with a culture of entrepreneurialism to create the basis of whole new industries. In the 20th century, the tradition continued with the invention of the television, the first flight, and the arrival of the internet, all pioneered by UK scientists and engineers. Each was ground-breaking in its time, each paved the way to future innovations, and all contributed to the Digital Revolution which is shaping the 21st century.
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A HiSTORY OF idEAS wHiCH SHApE THE FUTURE – FROm BABBAGE TO BERNERS-LEE
Alan Turing, working at Bletchley Park, broke the German navy’s Enigma code which helped the Allies to win World War II – and provided a formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation that proved to be a major step towards modern computing. Ten years later he designed the Turing Test, still used today to explore questions of artificial intelligence.
James Clerk Maxwell set out his ‘Dynamic Theory of the Electro-Magnetic Field’ at the Royal Society. Demonstrating that electric and magnetic fields travel through space in waves, at the constant speed of light, he pointed the way to applications of electromagnetic radiation for modern technologies, including radio, radar, microwaves, thermal imaging and satellite communications.
John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television images at Selfridges department store in London. It began with only 30 lines of resolution, improving by 1936 to 240 lines for BBC broadcasts. In the ‘30s, he went on demonstrate colour TV and in the ‘40s proposed a 1,000-line system – which would have been equivalent to today’s HDTV.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the worldwide web – and made it freely available to the world. He saw the opportunity to link hypertext with Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas to create an information system
everyone could use. Working at CERN, he designed and built the first web browser. The first website went up online in 1991 – initiating the phenomenon which has changed how we live and work in the 21st century.
Alexander Graham Bell patented his invention of the telephone – and three days later succeeded in getting it to work. It was just one of the 18 patents granted to him over his lifetime and 12 more shared with collaborators, including the photophone, phonograph, hydroairplanes and selenium cells. The first transatlantic phone call took place in 1927.
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A NATIoN oF SMART CoNSUMERSThe UK is one of Europe’s largest market for consumer electronics – with consumers spending more than £10 billion a year on digital devices such as smart phones, MP3 players, cameras, HD-ready flat panel TVs and games consoles.
And the voracious appetite of the UK consumer for new technologies creates a market which encourages innovation in content, services and applications.
O2 – SmART SERviCES ON THE mOvEMobile technology has seen spectacular growth since its birth in
the mid ‘80s and now the mobile internet is creating a new wave
of innovation. O2 – part of the Telefonica Group and one of the UK’s
leading mobile operators – is seizing the opportunity to offer more
services and richer content to eager consumers.
Since 2006, the UK has had more phones than people – just one indicator of how the UK has typically been at the forefront of the trends driving the sector. ‘Because the UK population are early adopters of digital technology we can trial ideas in this market that can be applied in other markets,’ says Dr. Mike Short, Vice President of Research and Development at Telefonica O2 Europe. ‘And the pace of take-up is extraordinary. In 1999, 1 billion texts were sent by all UK consumers, by 2009 that had grown to 98 billion. That’s a huge growth curve. And all over the world the transition from fixed line to mobile, and from wired to wireless services continues to be a megatrend.’
In the competitive UK market place, o2 operates alongside a number of other global players, including Vodafone, 3UK, and everything everywhere – the new company created from the merger of orange and T-Mobile. Mike – a long-time champion of innovation including mobile data, cross-network texting and international roaming – has been part of the industry
since the beginning and is as enthusiastic and optimistic about its prospects today as he was at the outset, ‘The UK mobile market has been innovative since the early days. From 1986-91, we were the second largest mobile market in the world – and that arose from a competitive environment that goes back to the start. The UK is
The average age of our 13,000 UK employees is only 32. We always need fresh ideas and new approaches, and we need a new mix of skills for the future.
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Because the UK population are early adopters of digital technology we can trial ideas in this market that can be applied in other markets.
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a great place to do business because we’re an open trading nation with an open regulatory system: open to allow independent service provision, along with competition at the network and at internet levels’.
We all know how the mobile phone has become an indispensable item in so many people’s daily lives. We have grown accustomed to it not only for voice telephony, but for messaging. We use it as an address book and a camera. We turn to it for entertainment, music and games.
‘Just in the last year or so, data traffic has overtaken voice traffic’, continues Mike. ‘And now data’s rapidly on the increase with new areas such as mobile email, social media, internet access and mobile video.’ He sees enormous potential for new applications in sectors which have not traditionally been associated with mobile in the past, everything from financial services to transport to healthcare to smart energy management, ‘We launched o2 Money just last year, in partnership with the Royal Bank of Scotland; it’s based on a pre-pay mechanism for debit cards and has quickly become one of the fastest selling debit cards in the UK’. o2 has also established a partnership with Tesco, the leading supermarket, to support Tesco Mobile solutions for customers.
For the last three years o2 has run a loyalty scheme linked to the famous o2 Arena in Greenwich – the biggest entertainment venue in the world – where o2 customers can make priority advanced bookings. And they expect to see growing use of location based services over the next few years. Already, for example, school students are beginning to use their mobiles for their studies, with photos on geography field trips – and o2 anticipates growing use of smart phone technology as an educational tool.
‘The average age of our 13,000 UK employees is only 32. We always need fresh ideas and new approaches, and we need a new mix of skills for the future’, reflects Mike. ‘Certainly, we’ll need digital ICT skills, based on computing and the internet, to keep pace with new generations of technology as they come along. But we also need to mix ICT and sector skills for key markets such as healthcare, online learning, and financial services. We will need the right skills and the right partners in every sector we serve and the capability to integrate and link sectors together.’
So the pace of innovation continues and o2 is rolling-out technologies which will help their customers access new and different services wherever they are, whatever they are doing.
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An area which commands Mike’s attention is how to keep improving the user-friendliness of mobile data devices to minimise complexity. o2 was the first operator to introduce the RIM Blackberry into Europe and Mike also sees the Apple iPhone as a big step forward, ‘We were really pleased to be chosen by Apple to be their lead partner in the UK – which came about largely because of our historic experience with smart phones – and to date we’ve sold more Apple iPhones than anyone else outside the US’.
‘Telefonica wanted to expand their footprint in Europe beyond their home territory of Spain and investments in Latin America. o2 in Western Europe was attractive because of the innovation and data story which came with this acquisition. This is a period of rapid change and the business is investing not just in fixed and mobile networks, but increasingly we’re investing in solutions’, says Mike.
In all the 25 countries where Telefonica has a presence, the regulatory regimes influence investment priorities. They consider regulatory uncertainty as a potential barrier to growth, and these days that’s not just in telecommunications directly but in the sectors which seek to offer services through mobile technology, such as healthcare, financial services and energy.
Unsurprisingly, o2’s supply chain is more global than even a few years ago. The world’s top equipment manufacturers are customers of o2, including Apple, Dell, Ericsson, HP, LG, Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Samsung and Sony. Huawei, the Chinese communications manufacturer has become a supplier – and the Telefonica Group is now a major investor in China.
Mike expects the telecommunications market to grow over the next five years, maybe not in all areas but certainly in mobile and broadband. Competition remains fierce between mobile networks but customers don’t buy on price and speed alone: network coverage, reliability, effective billing systems, customer service and better data are just some of the other factors that customers consider – along with the increasing array of new content being made accessible on mobile. So satisfying the expectations of sophisticated consumers is what drives the industry.
And with convergence coming through, Mike points to the relevance of the UK’s strong creative industries, ‘From publishing to broadcasting to advertising, the creative industries here are a real asset in the digital economy. If you put all that together with advances in technology, it’s enabling new business models and new solutions to emerge’.
At a recent conference he suggested that by 2035 there may not be any pure fixed line phone companies left. Not all industry observers would agree him – and there may have been an element of tongue-in-cheek in his provocative remark. Yet it is clear that a new era of mobile technology is just beginning and, as Mike says, ‘This is a sunrise, not a sunset, industry’.
From publishing to broadcasting to advertising, the creative industries here are a real asset in the digital economy.
By 2011 more calls will be made on mobile phones than on fixed lines in the UK4
e-commerce in the UK has grown x10 from £19 billion in 2002 to £223 billion today5 – by 2012, £1 in every £5 of all new commerce in the UK will be spent online6
The UK has the highest number of verified Wi-Fi hotspots in Europe – and ranks 3rd globally after the US and China7
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pACE – CHANGiNG THE wAY wE wATCH TvA local success story in Yorkshire and a global technology leader,
in just three years Pace has moved from No. 8 to No. 1 in their
industry – becoming the largest supplier of set-top boxes to Pay TV
operators worldwide.
Based in Saltaire in West Yorkshire, Pace develops set-top boxes for more than 120 leading Pay TV players around the world, ‘We’re dealing with the biggest change to TV since it was invented,’ says Neil Gaydon, Pace’s Chief Executive. ‘We’re making it possible to watch what you want, when you want it.’
‘Pay TV has changed the way we watch TV, going from 4 terrestrial channels to 70 channels of analogue, to 1,000 channels of digital – then the move to high definition, with 3D coming next,’ he explains. ‘Now we’re starting to see what the integration of broadband can do to offer even richer services. It’s a really incredible change.’
A pivotal move in setting Pace on the way to becoming something bigger than a local technology company was their early investment in digital technology’, continues Neil. ‘Pace was the first company in the world to deliver broadcast quality content to a digital set-top box for satellite; the first to do the same for cable; then the same for terrestrial. That really set the tone for how the company would grow.’
Pace’s ambition is to be at the heart of convergence. They were first to market with High Definition; their boxes can run 3D – and now they’re looking ahead to the ‘whole home’. They are first to market – ahead of majors such as Motorola and Cisco – with whole home solutions into the North American market which allow you to watch nine channels
Our goal is to ‘own the home’ – we want to be well-known in the industry as a leader in enabling the converged home.
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simultaneously throughout the home, with the ability to move that content around. They’ll be adding features which enable people to upload home movies or photos, or download content onto their iPhone.
Yet it’s not been an easy road all along. When Neil Gaydon became Chief Executive in 2006 the company was shipping 2 million boxes and had revenues of £175 million a year, but was losing £15 million. Today they are shipping 20 million boxes around the world and have revenues of £1.1 billion, with profits of £75 million.
The turning point came when Philips decided to sell its set-top box business in 2007: it was fifth in the world in size but losing money. Pace didn’t have the funds to buy it. However, as a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange, it was able to mount a £68 million rights issue to finance a reverse take-over of the much bigger business. The deal was transformational, and alongside the company’s organic growth, doubled the size of the business and put Pace in a different league competitively.
‘We now produce a set-top box every 2 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week’, says Neil. ‘We’ve grown our Indian team to 350 people. We’ve got 300 people in France, 200 in America and almost 500 in the UK. You can walk into a Pace site anywhere around the globe and it feels like Pace.’ Neil believes that it is this sense of a cohesive strategy, structure and culture globally which gives them competitive edge and the ability to innovate.
They produce over 160 bespoke products for Pay TV operators, bringing together design,
We now produce a set-top box every 2 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
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software and hardware through what Neil calls ‘small-large company mapping’. They have a world-class engineering team in Yorkshire but also create complete engineering and commercial teams in a number of locations around the world to ensure they can deliver a small company’s speed of innovation. Meanwhile, procurement is centralised to leverage scale and the strategic direction emanates from the UK HQ.
Half of the company’s revenues are generated in the Americas, North and South, where they have built a range of products for the cable industry. In those markets, Motorola is a major competitor and in 2008 Pace moved to buy Motorola’s set-top box business although eventually Motorola decided to hang on to it. Yet in Neil’s view, the attempt signalled to the market Pace’s determination to be a serious contender in the industry, ‘We’ve shown that we can compete on a world stage’, he says.
But there are challenges associated with the rapid growth of the past few years. ‘Whereas we were the little guys aiming at the big guys, now the big guys are targeting us. our focus means we’ve been innovating ahead of them, so we have to continue to do that’, reflects Neil.
‘our goal is to “own the home”,’ says Neil. ‘We have the right technologies, we have the right partners and we’re working with great customers. We want to be well-known in the industry as a leader in enabling the converged home.’
‘To me, this is one of the most exciting industries to be in. It works on a global level; many of our engineers visit all parts of the world, they meet interesting people, they see operators in other markets. You help create products that are changing the way we all consume entertainment. And for people who love a fast-moving market and exciting technology that’s constantly evolving, it’s a great place to be.’
Pace was the first company in the world to deliver broadcast quality content to a digital set-top box for satellite; the first to do the same for cable; then the same for terrestrial.
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9 out of 10 UK households have access to digital TV8
23% of households – more than 5 million people – use online catch-up services, such as BBC iPlayer – to watch TV programmes9
27% of UK households use a digital TV recorder to watch programmes at a time that suits them10
Sky’s Premier League match between Arsenal and Manchester United on 31st January 2010 was the world’s first live 3D football match broadcast to a public audience
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A HUB FoR EURoPEAN AND WoRLD MARKETSAlmost all the major global technology businesses have operations in the UK – many using it as a springboard for the wider European marketplace. Inward investment levels are high, with companies attracted by the long-standing open regulatory environment which has enabled lively competition and bred a culture of innovation. And UK-based companies, large and small, are facing-outwards to establish new customer relationships and industry partnerships to succeed in today’s global economy.
Larger than their major competitors combined, Nokia has established market leadership globally, supplying around 500 million mobile phones a year – 1.2 million a day. Mark Selby, who has global responsibility for Industry Collaborations, explains why the UK is one of Nokia’s global technology hubs. ‘Nokia has invested heavily in the UK partly because the open regulatory environment truly fosters innovation. It’s very open, very transparent. There’s not just a single operator driving the mobile market in the UK, and that drives competition and has resulted in an extraordinary range of new services.’
‘That’s perfect for Nokia because we pride ourselves on simple innovation and we’ve been able to work in partnerships with a range of different operators to introduce and test services in a way that can prove to be more difficult elsewhere’, continues Mark. ‘We’ve had innovations triggered in the UK that have been transported to other parts of the world – and that’s why, for us, the UK is important not just as a market we’re servicing, but as a major research centre and a manufacturing centre as well. The UK is one of our global technology hubs.’
Marks identifies another key driver to Nokia’s activities in the UK as the high quality research base in universities, ‘When Nokia first came to the UK, digital mobile telephony was in its infancy and we worked with leading research institutions to develop the technologies – Cambridge University in particular – and we’re now working with them on nanotechnology. It’s extraordinary how many parts of the world I visit that refer to research being undertaken in the UK – and we’re very conscious of that.’ Nokia has established relationships as well with oxford and many of the London colleges; sometimes funding unique research, sometimes collaborating with other organisations to explore new technologies which are going to be applied across the industry.
‘There are other characteristics of operating here that people are less aware of’, he continues, ‘design is a core skill set in the UK which is why a lot of product
Nokia has invested heavily in the UK partly because the open regulatory environment truly fosters innovation.
NOKiA iN THE UK – A GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY HUB
Nokia is one of the global telecommunications giants investing in the
UK because the combination of the regulatory environment and the
strong research base drives innovation which can be applied in markets
around the world.
design happens in this market and is then transported around the world. And what’s important for us is that the research and developer communities are focused on global opportunities, rather than limiting themselves purely to the UK market.’
one of the important technologies pioneered by Nokia is photography on mobiles. When they first introduced cameras on their mobiles it was seen as strange, but all devices now provide high-definition cameras for both capture and viewing high-definition footage. And a lot of that research has been undertaken in the UK. Nokia now also offers a Comes With Music service that enables their users to have immediate access to 8.5 million music tracks for free – and that too has been developed and managed in the UK.
Mark anticipates that the expanded use of mobile is about to take-off in a number of different sectors. Intelligent transport is a frontier area and, in Mark’s view, the innovations implemented by Transport for London stand out as world-class. Near Field Communications is another exciting area to emerge: responding to the challenge of ageing populations and
the cost of care through health services for mobile workers and the capability for consumers to be able to monitor their own health for conditions such as diabetes. Mobile financial transactions, already available in developing markets, will shortly be showing up in the UK too. ‘We get excellent feedback here. British consumers are very vocal about their feelings. When we launch a service – thanks to social networking – we’re able to determine very quickly whether people like it or hate it; what they want to see improved. In some other countries, it’s very difficult to get at that.’
‘The way Nokia works is that we have different activities headquartered in different geographies around the world. And what determines what we do where is the skill sets that are available for a particular aspect of our operations. In our view, the skills sets are excellent in the UK; we’re confident we can reach people who can contribute to Nokia’s success.’ The business has about 3,000 people in the UK, covering pure research, manufacturing, global logistics and sales activities, as well as the operation which specifically looks after the UK as a market.
We’re looking at extraordinary processing power in the hand of a user – and the beauty of that technology now is that it enables a dialogue.
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Mark sees the relevance of the skill base as stretching beyond the core technology disciplines, ‘one of the most interesting aspects of the UK IT sector is that rather than a pure focus on technology, it’s actively exploring the application of technology as it relates to other sectors. The creative economy in the UK is recognised absolutely as a global leader, for instance. It enables us to see how the creative
industries are adopting technology and mobile – and we want to be close to that and working with them’.
Yet as a global organisation, no hub operates in isolation. It’s vital to Nokia that its research initiatives are also delivered with partners around the world. For example, the business invests heavily in the Chinese market too, where it has approximately 40% market share.
‘The way the Chinese technology community is developing is very vibrant which is why our teams in the UK work very closely with colleagues in China,’ explains Mark. And the Nokia Siemens Network partners have a technology team building networks, undertaking research and providing support to customers globally from the UK.
Looking into the future, Mark says, ‘The take up of mobile devices will carry on and people will continue to want replacement models. But even more interesting is the way people are looking for additional functionality – which creates totally new ecosystems that provide opportunities not just for Nokia but for the companies we work with.
‘Telecommunications, particularly mobile, has gone through a marvellous journey since it began and today we’re looking at extraordinary processing power in the hand of a user. The beauty of that technology now is that it enables not just a one-way communication but a two-way conversation; a dialogue. That’s the next step – and when you see that you have to say the potential is even greater than we’ve realised to date.’
The UK is ranked as the top internet gateway in the world – with the highest international bandwidth and 36% of inter-regional traffic11
Around 23% of R&D funding in the UK comes from abroad12
All the world’s major consumer electronics companies have operations in the UK13
The creative economy in the UK is recognised absolutely as a global leader – and we want to be close to that and working with them.
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LOGiCA – TECHNOLOGY SOLUTiONS dESiGNEd TO dELivER GLOBAL STRATEGiESHeadquartered in the UK, Logica’s client base has expanded rapidly
across Europe to serve the demands of a global marketplace.
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In the past 13 years, Logica has grown from 4,500 to 39,000 employees. Now operating across 36 countries it’s become the largest UK-based business and technology services company, providing business consulting, systems integration and outsourcing for around 10,000 clients around the world. Many of Europe’s largest businesses and public sector organisations rely on them to deliver the technology solutions which underpin their operations: 6 of the Top 10 listed European telecoms operators, 5 of the Top 10 listed European utilities; and 3 of the Top 10 global listed oil and gas companies among them.
‘our market strategy is very clear’, says Andrew de Cleyn, Managing Director of outsourcing. ‘We seek to work with large European multinational organisations, in both the private and public sector, who require a service around the globe. Michelin is a good example of a client of ours in that mould: a European based company with a global presence. And it’s that which requires us to have a global footprint.’
Andrew puts Logica’s rapid expansion across Europe down to their determination to get close to their clients’ business priorities and deliver a joined up service. ‘our world is about people, process and technology, and in that order. Ultimately, we have to integrate the
business into the technology and then manage it reliably – both the IT solution and the associated business processes.’
‘Having English as the global language of business is an advantage, especially operating in worldwide markets such as Financial Services. Plus, there’s a strong history of entrepreneurialism in the UK which we thrive on.’
What Logica does for its clients is brought alive in even few of the many examples, ‘We process £3 trillion of daily turnover in the SWIFT and CHAPS international and domestic banking systems. We pay 10% of the UK workforce through our payroll systems – and process more than a $100 billion of salaries
Our world is about people, process and technology, and in that order. Ultimately, we have to integrate the business into the technology and then manage it reliably.
globally per year. We keep the water clean and manage waste water. our software supports the missions of a third of the world’s satellites, providing the systems to produce the weather satellite images for more than two billion people.’
Logica has a team of about 500 security professionals based across Europe who are trusted by governments and commercial organisations alike with their critical security challenges. They help their clients comply with international security standards – many of which they helped to write – and open up new channels of business whilst mitigating security risks.
In a world where basic levels of IT are being continuously commoditised, Andrew explains how Logica is dedicated to moving up the value chain within their clients’ business. ‘Increasingly we focus on areas such as business intelligence and analytics: where previously we analysed the past to predict the future, we’re now able to bring more advanced techniques to bear.’
Like the industry as a whole, Logica has a number of centres around the world to process their customers’ work: two in India, one in each of the Philippines, Morocco, and Central and Eastern Europe. And there’s
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a growing emphasis on close partnership working, both with the client and with industry players. For instance Logica work with oracle on a pay as you go basis for the use of their products in their payroll and HR Services
business. ‘For me that’s a real example of how we say we want to work: “Be brilliant together” – which means everybody starting with the client benefit as our shared business objective,’ explains Andrew.
‘Logica’s investments for the future are in areas where we see a real need for sector-specific leadership: developing sustainable transport services; citizen-centric public services; the use of smart meters in utilities’, he continues. ‘our focus is, to make the return on investment for our clients’ even more compelling and, as ever, aligned with their strategy.’
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They help their clients comply with international security standards – many of which they helped to write – and open up new channels of business whilst mitigating security risks.
The growing drive towards sustainable business is driving Logica’s strategy and, as Andrew explains, ‘That is broader than “green business”; it’s supporting strategies which allow a company to grow organically while continuing to provide the best possible service. Toyota, for example, is a company which recently highlighted that its troubles were due to growing too fast to be able to maintain quality. We want to work with clients to help them grow in a sustainable way’.
The pipeline of talent coming into the industry matters to the business and the sector as a whole, so Logica reaches out to schools through schemes such as Go4IT which encourage more young people into the
industry. And increasingly Andrew sees a wide variety of skills and experience as relevant to the industry’s growth, ‘In addition to the core IT skills, we’ve recently been hiring from other sectors, from former civil servants right through to call centre experts, because it’s understanding how technology is used across different industry sectors which will drive our success. I’d absolutely encourage anyone to consider a career in this industry: it’s always changing and that means it’s always challenging and interesting’.
Logica has a team of around 500 security professionals based across Europe who are trusted by governments and commercial organisations alike with their critical security challenges.
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BT – BUiLdiNG A NETwORK FOR THE 21ST CENTURYBT is a major telecoms provider in the UK today, employing about
100,000 people across 170 countries. Transformed from the state
owned monopoly it was 25 years ago, it has grown to become a global
FTSE100 business.
Fixed and mobile technologies are becoming more intertwined: a cellular network is underpinned by a fixed network – and a fixed network going into people’s homes, more often than not these days, has a Wi-Fi tail.
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Dr. Tim Whitley, BT’s Group Strategy Director, sees the cross-border, global mindset as essential to the business, ‘The internet is tearing down international barriers. The big brands which have emerged in the last 10 years, or even 5 years, don’t think in terms of national markets. They think about their product in a global context: that’s a defining factor of future success.’
BT’s home market, the UK, is one of the most competitive in the world today with around 300 different service providers. ‘We service all parts of the value chain, with telephony and broadband and a huge raft of sophisticated services for retail and business customers, and we’re a major provider in the wholesale market, enabling a range of industry players to get their services to their customers’, explains Tim.
‘The profound success of the internet has not been technology; it’s not even been the services that have emerged so far. It’s come from the fact that it allows customers to do stuff they simply couldn’t do before. It’s changing the way people socialise, the way they’re entertained, the way they transact business. It’s only ten years ago that the broadband revolution got started, and we’re already on to the next wave of that innovation story.’
‘And a truly remarkable feature of the internet is how it’s effectively expanded the landscape and the cohort of people who can innovate – who can take their new idea and, in an astonishingly short space of time – and reach literally billions of people’, continues Tim. ‘People are connected across the planet in a profound way that was not possible even ten years ago. It’s created a new platform on which innovation can happen. And there are really smart people all over the world who want to invent really smart things to do which make use of that.’
BT is heavily committed to innovation, spending almost £1 billion a year on R&D from digital imaging technology installed by BT in NHS hospitals across London to new broadband services for consumers. And there’s been a shift in where that innovation comes from. ‘Whereas 20 years ago, most of the innovation in the industry was generated in a few major labs owned by the big telecoms players and a small number of universities, today we’re seeing the flourishing of a much more diverse ecosystem’, reflects Tim. The hub of BT’s global innovation effort is still at Adastral Park, where three and a half thousand scientists and engineers are based, but now they also have a presence in Malaysia, in China and California. ‘We have people scanning the world for innovation and a more sophisticated capability to harvest intelligence from a much richer set of places that we ever had before.’
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Expanding well beyond its original core of voice telephony, BT has become a pioneer of digital services – investing in its 21st Century Network, capable of delivering all the super-fast broadband technologies and new services that are coming. Looking to the future, they expect even traditional telephony services to become clever, available seamlessly on multiple devices. Their television offer, BT Vision, fuses together TV, video and the internet – and with the next generation of broadband two-way communication via the TV will become a reality.
optical fibre is a live topic for BT: their fibre-to-the-curb technology offers 40 megabits per second downstream and up to 15 megabits upstream speed – about ten times what most people get at the moment. ‘The other flavour of fibre we’re deploying at the moment is fibre-to-the-premise. At launch that will offer about 100 megabits per second. And the technology is capable of going up to about two and a half gigabits per second: about 500 times the speed of the average broadband connection today. It gives you a feel for the breath-taking change in capability that the technology can deliver.’
Alongside what is offered to consumers – and of equal importance – is the development of new operational practice. Blown fibre technology, for example, was pioneered at BT’s innovation hub in Adastral Park, making it easier to install fibre in ducts under the ground and transforming the industry’s ability to deliver services economically. The business is also investing in intelligent systems, using advanced algorithms to monitor the
performance of the network and pre-empt faults and failure. ‘This is important research for us: data mining to understand what we’re seeing on the network, so we can intervene, not just very quickly after a customer flags a problem, but before they even experience it.’
As Tim sees it, ‘Fixed and mobile technologies are becoming more intertwined: a cellular network is underpinned by a fixed network – and a fixed network going into people’s homes, more often than not these days, has a Wi-Fi tail. The distinction is becoming much less obvious. And ultimately what customers care about is having the best service, however it comes to them’.
So what about 21st century consumers? Tim anticipates that they will be a lot more demanding. Today’s young people have grown up with the internet and are completely familiar with mobile communications and digital devices. ‘The tolerance level has changed. If something doesn’t work, they just move on’, says Tim. ‘So the winners of the future will be the ones who can deliver services that work supremely well to consumers, wherever they are, whenever they want. Demanding customers are a really good thing – because that’s what drives competition and ultimately competition is what makes businesses thrive.’
Digital imaging technology installed by BT in NHS hospitals across London.
We have people scanning the world for innovation and a more sophisticated capability to harvest intelligence from a much richer set of places that we ever had before.
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EpiTiRO – STARTiNG SmALL, GOiNG GLOBALAn entrepreneurial business based in Cardiff, Epitiro is a Welsh
success story. In the UK, they are supporting BT’s transition to its
new 21st Century Network – and facing outwards to world markets,
they’re trusted to monitor the service quality of IP networks for
regulators from Bahrain to New Zealand.
In 2009 Gavin Johns, Epitiro’s Chief Executive, was given the award for the best venture capital backed CEO by the British Venture Capital Association. The business was founded by Johns and Jon Curley, two entrepreneurs who met at Cardiff University. It’s grown to 40 employees, providing a range of services to measure the end-to-end quality of service of IP networks – wired and wireless – and becoming a global leader in parts of this market.
The business has an impressive list of clients, a mix of telecom regulators and network service providers, such as BT Wholesale Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as Plusnet and Virgin, and Mobile Network operators including Vodafone and orange.
Regulators are generally interested in two sets of measurements, either they’re comparing performance between regulated networks or they’re comparing the overall performance of their country’s networks with other countries.
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‘Regulators are generally interested in two sets of measurements’, explains Iain Wood, Epitiro’s Head of Marketing and Regulatory Services. ‘Either they’re comparing performance between regulated networks – looking at download speeds, latency or delay, for example, or they’re comparing the overall performance of their country’s networks with other countries.’ The telecommunications regulators in Singapore, Bahrain, Lebanon and New Zealand are clients. And today over 50% of Epitiro’s business is international.
Broadband has taken on a huge significance for individuals and businesses in the last five to ten years and so Epitiro’s role is vital. Wood said ‘The internet is central to information access and the success of businesses – so this industry is a great place to work. our most significant project has been working with BT on 21CN’.
BT’s new IP network is called 21CN – the 21st Century Network. Epitiro is monitoring the end-to-end user experience for both BT’s old 20CN and the new 21CN. Wood explains, ‘We’re helping to ensure they can deliver consistent quality through real time comparison between the 20CN and 21CN networks. So we also help BT Wholesale demonstrate their own compliance with agreed standards to their customers’.
BT Wholesale’s clientele supply to the extremely competitive consumer and business markets which demand reliability and high quality of service. Service providers are most interested in the internal workings of their network to maintain the quality of their service, but they also use the information to benchmark one supplier’s equipment against another.
Telephone networks around the world are going through the most profound change they have ever experienced. They’re migrating from so-called ‘circuit switched’
networks to IP. Since the start of the telephone, communications have been based on the concept of a physical link – which could be copper, fibre, wireless, undersea cable or satellite – between two parties for either a voice call or data transmission. In the future, all networks will be based on internet protocol where voice and data are split into ‘packets’. The packets are routed to their destination via different paths to ensure maximum efficient use of the network, and re-assembled at their destination to recreate the original content.
Epitiro is successfully exploiting the extraordinary growth of the internet and IP networks and the team expects the business to be four times its current size within two years.
With many opportunities in many areas of the world, Wood says their great challenge is deciding where to focus. They also need cash to fund their growth. Epitiro faces the same problems as many fast growing SMEs, ‘We need to maintain a structure that will support growth and not damage entrepreneurship’, says Wood. Meanwhile they continue to do what they’ve been doing well all along, applying their skills and expertise to the complex business and technical challenges of the burgeoning broadband world.
Epitiro is exploiting the extraordinary growth of the internet and IP networks and the team expects the business to be four times its current size within two years.
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issue around the world. Governments, investors, customers and employees are all pressing for businesses to take on responsibility for their environmental impact – and in the UK specialist firms are emerging to help them respond to that challenge.
Greenstone is a specialist in carbon accounting. Starting out in 2006, on the back of a car leasing firm which helped clients monitor their carbon footprint, the company is now enabling multinationals deliver on their environmental responsibilities, through web-based carbon accounting software and supporting consultancy services.
Greenstone’s first big break came in 2008 when Fujitsu, one of the world’s largest IT service providers, announced their ambition to reduce Co2 emissions by 30 million tonnes by 2020 and to become an industry leader in sustainable IT solutions. The starting point for making that commitment a reality was maintaining a clear and transparent record of the company’s carbon emissions. They engaged Greenstone to help them do that, with an initial implementation of their system, Acco2untenterprise, across 65 sites with more than 250,000 rows of business data.
Greenstone’s Acco2unt solution has given Fujitsu an accurate picture of its carbon footprint, with the ability to analyse and report even down to the level of the energy consumption of a particular building or warehouse. The Head of Environmental Programmes at Fujitsu, Juliet Silvester, is clear about the benefits of putting in place consistent carbon management processes across the organisation, ‘We can see very clearly where our emissions and costs are, which helps us to mitigate them by putting action plans in place. And being environmentally aware is good business: being able to quote our carbon figures in tenders and bids has helped us to win new contracts’.
The young business already has a host of international clients and recently Serco, the service and outsourcing giant with operations in 35 countries and a staff of 70,000, adopted Greenstone’s Acco2unt solution for benchmarking performance, meeting regulatory reporting obligations and modelling the carbon impact of future business scenarios.
In the Carbon Disclosure Project Survey of FT 500 companies, over 90% of respondents flagged climate change as posing either a commercial risk or opportunity to their future success, so Greenstone is growing as part of a significant trend to find technology-based solutions to the environmental challenges of our times.
Greenstone – helping businesses meet their commitments
iNvENTivE RESpONSES TO THE wORLd’S CLimATE CHANGE CHALLENGE
Three graduates from London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Arts founded DIY Kyoto in 2005. Greta Corke, Richard Woods and Jon Sawdon Smith set it up to give people an efficient and elegant way to do their bit for the environment.
‘Jon was looking into ways of monitoring energy consumption at the time and then Richard came up with the adaption of an existing wireless sensor clip technology attached to home electricity meters that would display energy consumption,’ says Greta.
‘After three years of design, development, testing and a few sleepless nights, we produced wattson 01 – a simple, stylish way for people to save on their energy bills. And we know that it can save our customers anywhere from 5% to 25% on their electricity bills.’
The easy-to-use home energy monitor gives people a practical way to respond to their growing interest in protecting the environment while reducing the household energy costs. But a large part of its appeal – in line with many of today’s digital devices – is its stylishness. The team was thrilled at winning the Innovation and Design Award from the Institute of Directors in 2008, as Greta explains, ‘We’re excited that the power
of design is being recognised for changing behaviour. We wanted to use design to do something positive. We want to make a difference to behaviour and create a global impact’.
In April 2010, wattson made No. 33 in the 75 Best Gadgets Ever list in Stuff Magazine, alongside classics like Nintendo and Amazon’s Kindle. As Stuff magazine described it, ‘This is the closest we’ve come yet to an iPod of smart meters – something cool and desirable’.
So the business is growing and DIY Kyoto products are being exported to much of Europe, Asia, South America and Australia – and, in keeping with the global nature of the environmental challenge, wattson’s display screens now allow you to see the cost of your energy in dollars, euros, yen or stirling.
After three years of design, development, testing and a few sleepless nights, we produced wattson 01 – a simple, stylish way for people to save on their energy bills.
DIY Kyoto – inspiring people to do their bit
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ENABLING BUSINESSES To CoMPETEIn today’s competitive markets, across all business sectors, a company’s ability to stay ahead is underpinned by ever smarter technologies and ever more sophisticated software solutions. Whether it comes in the form of faster trading in the financial markets or more stunning special effects in films, the innovations businesses offer their customers are often made possible by innovations in the technology sector. And all over the UK technology businesses are making that happen.
With 130 people around the world in London, Chicago and New York, through to Prague, Sydney and Singapore, FFastFill provides Software as a Service to the global derivatives and commodities markets, from front office trading to middle office allocation and back office clearing and settlements, alongside risk management products which allow their customers – and their customers’ customers – to access these markets.
‘Because all the service side is provided by us within our data centres and within our infrastructure, it enables us to get on and deliver the technology services which are our core expertise, and enables our customers to get on with trading and focusing on managing risk for their customers’, explains Hamish Purdey, FFastFill’s CEo.
While the concept of focusing on the core business is well understood, financial services is a particularly difficult arena in which to deliver the model. As Hamish
RiSiNG TO THE pERFORmANCE dEmANdS OF THE GLOBAL FiNANCiAL mARKETS: FFastFillLondon is one of the world’s leading financial centres – and financial
services companies are heavily dependent on technology for their
competitive advantage. The nature of their business means they have
high performance demands in terms of security and resilience, speed
and scalability. FFastFill is an innovative young company which has
stepped up to that challenge.
There were a number of people who said straight out that Tier One and Tier Two banks simply would not outsource their technology to smaller technology firms for such mission critical activities.
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says, ‘It’s been a real break-through for us to succeed in this challenging sector. When we embarked on it, there were a number of people who said straight out that SaaS was not possible in financial services; Tier one and Tier Two banks simply would not outsource their technology to smaller technology firms for such mission critical activities. We’re proud to have proved that wrong’. FFastFill made a conscious decision that rather than aim to sell directly to IT directors they would present the value of what they could deliver to the end-user departments, and the strategy has clearly worked.
FFastFill’s system is a combination of proprietary technologies and industry standards. So while they own the IP for the inbuilt core of the technology, they work with the customer interface, exchange and clearing house APIs that are publicly published. Alongside their expertise in software as a service for the demanding financial services sector, Hamish considers their main differentiator to be their flexible technology base. ‘We’ve completely re-architected the system that we built in 2003-4 and are seeing the benefit of that now. It’s based on modern open technologies, such as those provided by Microsoft and oracle and others, that have 21st century relational data base technology, which allows easier integration into client systems– and that’s proving to be a significant deployment advantage for us in the market. It enables us to leverage the intellectual property we’ve created.’
To expand their services, they invest heavily in their own product development each year. ‘With our software as a service model, we manage and monitor all the components of the software and all the components of its deployment and activity – which means that when we set out to enhance the software and improve key success factors, such as redundancy or latency management, we have an extensive knowledge base to work from’, continues Hamish.
‘We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of transactions; transactions that have to take place in fractions of a second. We regularly have conversations with our customers about two, three and four milliseconds – which is a very insignificant amount of time to most people, but can be the difference between profit and loss for our customers. So the requirements in our industry are extreme.’
Hamish acknowledges that, like all technology companies, their ability to innovate is critical to their success. And an important metric they seek to improve on is data centre utilisation so, driven in part by their customers’ growing concern about creating a greener economy and in part by rising power costs over the past few years, they’re working hard with their data centre and server providers to minimise the power they use.
FFastFill’s customers include well-known global financial institutions: JP Morgan, Credit Suisse among others – and HSBC is a recent win. ‘It’s our challenge continually to be the best at what we do and provide as many options as we can within the niches we serve’, explains Hamish.
We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of transactions that have to take place in fractions of a second – which can be the difference between profit and loss for our customers.
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‘There are two major centres for derivatives in the world, London and New York, which means that one of the key things the UK provides for us is people with a huge depth of knowledge of the industry we serve. We have an employee community that understands how these instruments work and how technology can be applied to better how they work.’
So the FFastFill teams respond to their clients’ priorities: for example, a very significant proportion of the London Metals Exchange trading is done on FFastFill’s systems and one of the key products on that exchange is copper, and one of the important arbitrage opportunities in copper is on the Shanghai futures
exchange – and therefore, like many companies today, FFastFill is being drawn into the Chinese market by the expansion of its clients.
‘We certainly consider ourselves to be a truly global company,’ says Hamish. ‘We have all the time zones covered. We have a ‘follow the sun’ support model – and that allows us to ensure all our support people are working in their own time zone, in their own day, that provides real benefit in resource allocation and the quality of people we can attract.’
The business has data centres in London, Chicago, New York and all the major Asian trading centres, and from there they link to their other facilities via global connectivity clouds, which minimise costs while providing a focused presence at the sharp end of the
business where the trading is done. ‘The globalisation of FFastFill has been crucial to attracting Tier one customers. We can’t provide solutions to customers without an Asian leg, without a US leg and without a European leg to the business.’
Today FFastFill has customers doing millions of lines a day of futures trading volume through their systems and demand is still growing, with additional levels of algorithmic trading volumes and market data. And the business is looking to expand into new markets, ‘The world we work in today is derivatives, which is only a slice of the financial services sector. So we’re looking at new asset classes: foreign exchange, cash bonds
and equity products – because with the work we’ve done on the underlying architecture adding extra asset classes is very feasible’. The team is even exploring entirely new product sets or industries where their skills and technologies can be applied.
‘Software as a Service is absolutely the future of how software will be delivered in the 21st century,’ says Hamish confidently. ‘Companies are looking to move this way because it’s the most efficient way to deliver high quality enterprise grade applications. And from our perspective, as a vendor, we see the management and monitoring of our software systems means we can deliver a higher quality service to our customers – which at the end of the day is the only factor we’re focused on.’
Software as a Service is absolutely the future of how software will be delivered in the 21st century… because it’s the most efficient way to deliver high quality enterprise grade applications.
1London has the world’s largest foreign exchange market with 23% of the global total – plus 42% of foreign equity trading and 70% of global trading in international bonds14
London has branches of almost every international bank and financial institution in the world15
The UK financial services sector spends £7 billion every year on ICT services16
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BRiNGiNG THE wORLd iNTO THE CLASSROOm: RMTechnology is broadening educational horizons, opening up what
teachers can bring into the classroom, what students can access
outside the classroom – and how networks of teachers, educational
administrators, parents and students can be linked up into a single
dynamic community. And just as UK consumers have an appetite for
the latest digital devices, so UK teachers are quick to adopt technology
in the classroom.
RM is an educational technology and solutions company which describes itself as having a single mission: helping teachers to teach and learners to learn.
The company invites its customers and partners into the REAL Centre, a demonstration centre dedicated to Rethinking Education and Learning, which aims to inspire school leaders, educational consultants,
architects – anyone involved in educational thinking – with fresh ideas about how they might set up a classroom, a school, or even a whole school community to make the most of technology.
Terry Sweeney, Chief Executive of RM, says of the Centre, ‘People can come here, bringing pupils with them if they want, to see what can be done, to try things out and then go back to their school and consider what might work for them. We don’t pretend there’s a one size fits all solution for every school’s needs. It’s about opening up possibilities and helping them to do their thinking’.
‘We see ourselves as being the technology partner to our clients, but also providing the resources that teachers and pupils use to bring learning to life, including the assessment part of the process which monitors how well pupils are understanding the concepts they’re introduced to’, continues Terry. In his view, the revolution created by the internet is the world of content and resources it enables teachers to use in the classroom, and the ability it offers for young people to take their learning out of the classroom.
Seeing his own daughter set off to school each day laden with books, Terry hopes that soon her load will be lightened by online access, ‘She will be able to have everything she needs for her learning and all the content she has created available to her in the cloud, brought down to her when she wants it, via whatever device she’s using at the time. I believe that’s a real change that will happen in the next ten years’. He sees RM’s purpose as making that change a reality, ‘That’s what we do. And it will drive cost reductions and
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We have a number of people who spend six months each year in classrooms with teachers… then they come back into the business and turn those ideas into products.
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efficiencies for the education system, but it will also help her get what she needs in a much more coherent and easy way’.
RM was an entrepreneurial start-up in the 1970s, with two graduates from oxford and Cambridge Universities setting up a technology business in a rented room above a Tesco store on oxford’s Cowley Road. originally, they were focused on scientific instruments for the research sector, but quickly switched to the new world of computing and focused on education markets. The business has thrived over the years by focusing on what technology can do to make these very particular customers successful. The original founders have moved on now, though both remain deeply involved in the world of education. Terry Sweeney is only the fourth Chief Executive in the Company’s 35-year history though and RM’s culture still reflects the aims set in place back in the 1970s.
The UK is a world leader in the use of technology in the classroom environment. As Terry explains, ‘over 70% of UK classrooms have interactive teaching technology – versus just under 30% in the US and 7% across the world as a whole. But it’s not what the delivery mechanism is – a whiteboard or an interactive projector, for example – because that will keep changing. The critical point for us is how we add value in the classroom. We’re focused on the software side through Easiteach, which is our global interactive teaching platform.
If you look at the world that children are coming from to go into schools each day, they’re bombarded with audiovisual stimulus and interactivity; the experience in the classroom has to compete with that. That’s what Easiteach gives teachers the ability to offer; it’s about making lessons more engaging. If it’s not providing value the teacher’s won’t use it; it’s simple’.
Easiteach helps a teacher create a lesson, store it and bring it into the classroom when it’s needed. ‘Like any major product development, you start by listening to your customers’, explains Terry. ‘In our Education Resources business, we have a number of people who spend six months each year in classrooms with teachers, asking them how we can help them deliver teaching and learning more effectively. Then they come back into the business and turn those ideas into products, which are then offered back into the educational community.’
RM also provides learning platforms to help children organise their work at school or at home; to enable parents to follow their children’s progress: what’s on the curriculum, what homework their children have, how assessments are going – even being sent a text alert if their child misses a lesson. As Terry says, ‘We increasingly expect technology to helps us do these things in other aspects of our lives, so why not in education?’ Glow is a great example. It’s a national intranet system which links up the community of all teachers, parents and learners in Scotland – and it was
Children are bombarded with audiovisual stimulus and interactivity; the experience in the classroom has to compete with that.
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Easiteach Next Generation is built on a Unicode base which means that to add another language set will take only a matter of days.
At the Learning and Technology World Forum in London in 2009, 72 Ministers of Education from all over the world came to discuss ICT in education
Over 90% of UK schools use electronic whiteboards – and over 70% of teachers use electronic whiteboards everyday17
100% of English secondary schools are connected to the internet18
designed and built by RM. It’s a source of great pride to Terry, ‘We’re delighted that we won the contract to deliver it. We were up against strong competition from the multinationals but, in the end, it was our deep domain knowledge in the world of education that clinched it’.
And RM has systems which help run the school itself, ‘Schools are no different to businesses in terms of back office operations’, continues Terry. ‘For example, with controlled access to a building or cashless catering, technology is an enabler to run a school in an efficient, effective way.’ With the increased use of computing goes an increased use of power, so how to gain efficiencies in that area is also a major concern to RM. They’ve produced a 50 watt PC which is popular with schools – and called it the ‘ecoquiet’ range.
But the company has also been expanding its geographic footprint, with 3,000 people employed around the world.
RM has operated in Australia for around ten years; they’re in the US and more recently opened an office in the Middle East – and they’re building partnerships to look at entry strategies for the Chinese and Indian markets. ‘It’s a journey’, says Terry. ‘When you operate outside your home territory, the first thing is not to assume that everywhere’s like home. Each place has its own context, so you’re not necessarily going to bring your whole product set to bear. You need to understand where you fit in and adapt your offering to the local circumstances. But build it on a global platform: our view point is that we’re developing for the world, not just for the UK.’ So Easiteach Next Generation is built on a Unicode base which means that to add another language set will take only a matter of days. ‘In ten years RM will be a global company’, claims Terry. ‘That’s our ambition because we really believe we’ve got something to add.’
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A mATTER OF LiFE ANd dEATH iN THE HEALTH SERviCES: SavantHealthcare is one of the world’s growing industries and technology is
playing a pivotal role – supporting frontline professionals and improving
services for patients, while simultaneously driving down costs and
improving efficiency for healthcare providers. Savant is one of the many
software businesses in the UK focused on delivering the next generation
of healthcare services through radically improved access to data and
connectivity across the system.
In any major incident where people are injured, blood is needed. Day-in, day-out, medical staff need supplies of blood in the care of their patients. So it’s vital that the system which delivers those blood supplies is fast, safe and reliable.
Savant is the software company which designed and built PULSE, the system that powers the blood transfusion and transplant service for the National Health Service in the UK. ‘Its role starts right at the
beginning with donor recruitment and session planning and covers the end-to-end process from blood and tissue donations, to testing and separation into different products, through to stock management and distribution to hospitals,’ explains Glyn Jones, the company’s Business Development Manager.
Based in converted farm buildings in Cumbria, Savant was founded almost thirty years ago by a couple who liked life in the famously beautiful landscape around Kendal. Today the business is employee-owned.
‘of our 40 employees, 38 are techies; we have one receptionist and one accountant. The shared ownership structure, the location and the buzz of being part of a successful software business providing vital services to the growing healthcare market means there’s a very low staff turnover’, says Glyn. ‘No one leaves Savant’, he jokes.
PULSE provides accurate, real-time information to everyone who needs to know the state of the nation’s blood supplies – from healthcare managers and public
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Historically the NHS has interacted via paper and snail mail only, but now what we’re doing can allow them to interact directly with donors.
PULSE provides accurate, real-time information to everyone who needs to know the state of the nation’s blood supplies.
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health agencies, to laboratory technicians and dispatch teams – encompassing about 4,500 users at any one time.
As a result of a huge project to consolidate 16 regional bases and three separately managed data-centres around the country into one national service, NHS Blood and Transplant has become the biggest centralised blood management system in the world – for which PULSE handles over two million donations every year.
With the thousands of millions of health records which sit behind the system, database management is one of Savant’s core competencies. Through NHSBT, the Northern Ireland, Jersey and the Isle of Man transfusion services, the PULSE system is deployed in a range of different environments from client servers to the web and even green screen applications, for example in laboratory fridges. And as Glyn says, ‘The system has to be live all day, every day reliably. We can’t go down. If blood can’t be issued, people will die’. To support their users, the team also runs a 24x7 help desk from their HQ in Cumbria.
As the organisation has changed and new opportunities opened up, PULSE has developed to respond to those demands. The software has evolved to manage tissue and organ donations as well as blood and, more recently, stem cells.
And it keeps advancing to take advantage of the opportunities created by the internet and mobile connectivity. More and more PULSE data is being made available over the web, whether that’s for individuals to book their donation session or for hospitals to order blood online. And it’s allowing the health services to explore new routes to respond to one of the central challenges; ensuring that people carry on donating.
‘We’re looking at developing iPhone apps for individual donors and potential donors to manage their own sessions’, says Glyn. ‘It’s very important to find ways to encourage people to donate. Think about it like this; if blood donations were to stop, stocks would only last 3 or 4 days’, he explains. ‘Recently we’ve been moving towards the use of social media, like Facebook and Twitter, where we can talk to donors directly. Historically the NHS has interacted via paper and snail mail only, but now what we’re doing can allow them to interact directly with donors to make their experience as positive as possible.’
Savant has concentrated on the UK market so far, but they are starting to look further afield. After all, the life critical systems are relevant the world over and as Glyn puts it, ‘We’ve got to the point where we can look for opportunities and partnerships outside the UK – and we recognise that the market is now global’.
More and more PULSE data is being made available over the web, whether that’s for individuals to book their donation session or for hospitals to order blood online.
The UK is the largest market in Western Europe for overall IT spend in healthcare worth $6.8bn in 200919
Stalis is a data migration and business intelligence specialist, formed in the 1980s to provide bespoke services to the health sector in the UK. Roger Wallhouse, Chairman of Stalis, who has 30 years experience in healthcare ICT, reflects on the development of the business, ‘When the government initiated a massive national programme for IT to support the health service, we took a long hard look at the opportunity that was emerging. We realised that NHS Trusts would be undergoing real change – and they would need business continuity services’. The company zeroed in on this vital opportunity and developed a range of applications for data migration, data quality and business intelligence.
‘There was a trend for the NHS to pass the bulk of risk onto its suppliers, which favoured larger companies. But increasingly smaller companies are being recognised as an important source of innovation, skills and domain knowledge, and as reliable service providers’, explains Roger.
‘We’re lucky’, he continues, ‘the company is nestled in the heart of the English countryside, an attractive location for its staff to live and work in, and only a stone’s throw from a major academic centre, oxford.’ So Stalis benefits from taking on bright young graduates, fresh out of university, training them up and offering them the chance to grow and develop. As a result, they’ve built up an outstanding track record in staff retention. But because the health sector is notoriously complex, in addition, the business is always on the look out for people who understand health organisations to work alongside the people with technical skills.
Stalis’ expertise in business continuity and the amalgamation and consolidation of data is very relevant beyond healthcare – for example, in utilities. And, although the company’s current focus is in the British Isles, Roger sees plenty of potential in other European markets and has ambitions to build 50:50 national:international split for Stalis’ business in five years’ time.
The opportunity is still enormous for IT to improve how healthcare is provided in a way which will have a direct impact on the care of patients – and Stalis is dedicated to supporting healthcare professionals to manage change in what will continue to be a constantly changing context.
Stalis – managing change in changing times
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THE FUSiON OF TECHNiCAL ANd ARTiSTiC SKiLLS TAKES CENTRE STAGE iN THE CREATivE iNdUSTRiES: Pinewood studiosThe variety and vitality of the UK’s creative industries are a major
contributor to the nation’s modern cultural identity and economy.
Throughout the production process and across all distribution platforms,
digital technology is transforming how the industry operates – creating
opportunities for new international partnerships and new global markets.
And increasingly artistic creativity is becoming intertwined with
technical creativity to drive innovation.
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‘Our vision for Pinewood is to establish a creative cluster that builds on the infrastructure that’s been developed over the years for the film industry, but uses it for other screen-based industries like television and video games. We want to cluster the talents and skills of a whole range of different businesses around the stages and studios at Pinewood so everybody benefits’, says Pinewood’s Chief Executive, Ivan Dunleavy. Built in the 1930s, Pinewood Studios has been home to some of the all-time successes of the silver screen from Oliver Twist to James Bond to Harry Potter – and at the 2009 Orange British Academy Film Awards, the studio won the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Cinema. Today, Pinewood has developed its own vibrant media park with over 300 tenant companies offering a huge array of specialist services to the global film and TV production industry, from special effects to legal services.
one of Pinewood’s most important facilities is the underwater stage, where crews and producers can film safely but creatively underwater. And it’s a good example of how the studio is going digital; linking up the physical asset to shooting in high definition and sending the images direct to edit suites around the site. Ivan aims to extend that connectivity beyond the gates of the studio to link up location shoots and production facilities anywhere around the country and even the world on a secure private network.
In the UK, the Pinewood Studios Group now includes three sites, Pinewood Studios, Shepperton Studios – which also has a history of high profile film making going back to the 1930s – and Teddington Studios in South London, dedicated to television.
The Group is expanding internationally, with facilities in Toronto, Canada; Iskandar, Malaysia and a joint-venture in Berlin, Germany. ‘As a brand in the film industry, Pinewood is very well-recognised, well-regarded’, continues Ivan. ‘And we want to leverage our infrastructure and expertise through other facilities around the world, so we can present new opportunities to our customers in the UK while also providing
It’s by deploying digital technology on a global basis that we’ll be able to offer the assets and services that Pinewood is so well known for around the world.
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capability to international film makers.’ Ivan sees the expanding economies and entertainment audiences in Asia and South America as playing an important part in Pinewood’s business in the future.
Pinewood’s new proposal, Project Pinewood, is an ambitious expansion plan to take what Ivan calls the ‘film factory’ at Pinewood to a new level. The environment being planned incorporates permanent streetscapes, characteristic of some of the world’s great cities, such as Paris, Amsterdam and New York, so they could double-up as locations for film making. ‘We want to make the stages and studios here part of an even bigger creative cluster with a live-work community adjacent to the studios, all digitally connected to the facilities so that a wide range of people in the creative industries can live and work next door to the studios’, explains Ivan.
‘While Pinewood’s well known for its work in feature films, in many instances it’s the same kind of disciplines being used in film post-production which prevail in the computer games industry today. So making sure that production companies really know how to get the best out of the latest technologies represents a huge opportunity – and challenge – for the industry.’
Digital technology is continuing to change production processes across the industry. ‘There’s far more tapeless production in television now; people are recording straight onto servers – whether on location or in the studio’, he continues. ‘There are many different disciplines involved in film making: you only have to look at the end credits of a film to see that. Now, if you’re producing CGI animation, for instance, you don’t just need the traditional creative skills, you need a top maths degree for the kind of applications that technology is using.’
‘We’re proud of the exceptionally high skills base that’s available here in the UK: the creativity, both in front of and behind the camera, is world class. We need to build on those advantages to grow the industry.’ That’s why Pinewood is playing an active part in nurturing the talent of the next generation, recently launching a new apprenticeship scheme, as well as plans for a purpose built Screen Crafts Academy to provide facilities for vocational and craft skills.
Ivan is committed to expanding what Pinewood can offer to the film and creative media industry worldwide, ‘So we’ll continue to invest not only in our physical assets but also in skills and the technical capabilities of the studio. And it’s by deploying digital technology on a global basis that we’ll be able to offer the assets and services that Pinewood is so well known for around the world’.
There’s far more tapeless production in television now; people are recording straight onto servers – whether on location or in the studio.
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As a proportion of GVA, the UK has the largest creative industries sector in the world – at 6.2%20
In 2008 the UK was the 3rd largest film entertainment market in the world, after the US and Japan – valued at around $6.5 billion21
In May 2010 the BBC i-player received 130 million requests for BBC TV and radio programmes22
If you’re producing CGI animation, you don’t just need the traditional creative skills, you need a top maths degree for the kind of applications that technology is using.
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Kuju Entertainment is one of Europe’s leading independent game developers, working across console, PC and handheld platforms for the world’s top operators: Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox 360.
As well as overseas businesses, the company operates a series of three development studios across the UK: Headstrong, doublesix and Zoë Mode. Nigel Robbins, their CEo, believes in fostering a culture that works for the people in each studio and for the type of games they are creating; ‘Development studios need to keep small and passionate about the games they are creating’, he says.
Headstrong, Kuju’s London studio is behind ‘The Lord of the Rings; Aragorn’s Quest’ for Wii and the successful ‘Battalion Wars’ and ‘House of the Dead: overkill’. Zoë Mode have recently produced the critically acclaimed ‘Chime’, and doublesix are renowned for
producing innovative digital download titles, such as ‘Burn Zombie Burn’.
To enable the teams to focus exclusively on developing great games, the studios share non-production services and a common infrastructure, such as IT and Finance. The group also includes in-house R&D, working on cutting-edge tools and technology. They’ve developed their engine, code-named ‘Fabric’, with particular emphasis on the next generation of multi-core devices, and have also made a substantial investment into technology and processes for digital distribution and the social gaming phenomenon. ‘The next generation of platforms is going to look very different’, explains Adrian Hawkins, Kuju’s Chief Technical officer, ‘and we have to consider everything from high powered mobile devices to massively multi-core systems, 3D displays and touch technology’. Kuju is preparing now for the next wave of hardware changes.
Kuju – a passion for winning in the games industry
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The UK is Europe’s largest games market23 and has double the number of console developers of France and Germany combined24
The UK boasts 24 of the world’s most profitable games studios25
MediaCityUK is a state of the art complex being built on Salford Quays. It is designed to provide space for over 1,000 media related businesses. ‘We’re putting a lot of our investment not just into buildings but into the fibre in the ground, data centres and telecoms infrastructure’, says Jason Leggett, the Head of Business Development at Peel Media which is behind the new development.
The site will be home to major parts of the BBC’s operations, which are moving out of London. Many cities across the UK bid to house the BBC but MediaCityUK won because of their approach to the technology challenge, as Jason explains, ‘The media industry is going through such radical change; digitisation, fibre cables, high speed connectivity, that we decided to focus on delivering the best platform for that from scratch’.
The city is well-known for its cluster of creative businesses and the ‘Manchester buzz’ plays an important role in attracting talent and investment into the area. ‘Big media companies often recognise that it can be the smallest teams which are most creative’, continues Jason. ‘one of the first things that potential MediaCityUK tenants ask is, ‘What is the talent pool like in the area?’ It’s easy to impress them with our answers because there’s an excellent educational community here. over 24,000 graduates come out of the universities within just one hour’s drive of the site.’
MediaCityUK – a quantum leap for the digital media sector in Manchester
The UK is Europe’s leading market for the take up of digital TV services
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STRoNG CLUSTERS, HIGH LEVEL SKILLSThe UK has multiple high-tech clusters spread around the country, growing up around different industries – from gaming in Brighton on the south coast to informatics in Edinburgh; from Northamptonshire’s Motorsport Valley across to the South West’s silicon design businesses. The strong centres of excellence in the South East, including Cambridge, Reading, London and Oxford, combine to create a ‘super-cluster’, second only to Silicon Valley.
Each of these, and others, has been established through a powerful mix of technology and academia, finance and enterprise concentrated in one location, which attracts world-class talent, generating further opportunities for entrepreneurialism and innovation – and so a virtuous circle is created.
Since it was founded in 1990, ARM’s network of partners have sold 17 billion ARM-technology based chips destined for a range of wireless, networking, automotive, security and storage devices – including not only 95% of the world’s mobile phones, but 70% of digital cameras, 60% of printers and 50% of hard disks.
It’s their low power consumption that makes ARM’s chips particularly well suited to mobile devices – and the most widely used 32-bit microprocessor family in the world today. And because the business earns its revenues through a mix of license fees and royalty payments, it’s grown with the swift take-up of digital communications. So, for instance, between 2003 and 2008 ARM’s revenue per mobile device increased by 50%.
ARM estimates that to replicate what they deliver, every semi-conductor company individually would need to spend £50-150 million a year – or £20 billion for the industry as a whole. So in designing once and licensing its IP many times over, ARM is spreading the R&D cost of innovation across the industry and playing a key role in making digital electronics cheaper for consumers.
When the company was announced as winner of the International Trade Award 2010, sponsored by HSBC Commercial Banking, Ian Campbell, Chair of the judging panel, paid tribute to what the company has achieved, saying, ‘ARM is a global, competitive, and innovative success story’.
THE CAmBRidGE CLUSTER – A HiSTORiC UNivERSiTY TOwN pUSHiNG THE BOUNdARiES OF THE FUTURECambridge is one of Europe’s most important centres for innovation.
Thousands of high-tech businesses have been set-up in the
entrepreneurial environment in and around the medieval colleges
which make up the university. Among them are ARM Holdings and
Autonomy, two which flourished in the intense activity of the Cambridge
Cluster and have grown to become global leaders in their fields.
ARM designed technology – powering 95% of the world’s mobile handsets
AUTONOmY – LEAdiNG THE wAY iN mEANiNG-BASEd COmpUTiNGAutonomy grew out of the engineering research labs of Cambridge
University and in 13 years, has gone from two people in a start-up to
a $7 billion software business serving 20,000 global companies.
‘‘It’s all about understanding meaning,’ begins Mike Lynch, Autonomy’s Chief Executive – telling the story of what’s behind the phenomenal success of the company he founded with Richard Gaunt in 1997. ‘Imagine all the things a computer could do if it could understand what an email said or listen to a phone call and make sense of it. Now, that’s very difficult to do. Using fundamental technology, Autonomy came up with a solution for that. Once you can get a computer to do that, it affects almost all areas of human life.’
Many years ago, Mike was researching adaptive pattern recognition at Cambridge University when he discovered it was possible to solve some fundamental problems in the area of getting a computer to address meaning. With no commercial experience behind them, he and Richard set up a company and the power of that technology has driven its spectacular growth. It’s been the best performing company in the FTSE100 over five years.
Autonomy was based on the vision of dramatically changing the way people interact with computers and information. And today it’s a world leader in what
Mike calls ‘meaning-based computing’. The main technology they use is Intelligent Data operating Layer – IDoL – which aims to understand unstructured information and perform automatic operations based on that understanding.
Mike picks up the story, explaining why harnessing unstructured information is the key to realising his vision:Information in the world can be broken into two types. There’s structured, which is made up of the ones and zeros and rows and columns of a database. Then there’s unstructured, which means all the stuff that’s designed
The biggest opportunity in the future of the IT world is moving computers on to talk our language, to deal with information in a human-friendly form.
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Cambridge University turns out 1,000 PhD graduates every year – over 50% of whom stay in the area26
Spin outs from Cambridge University attracted £140 million of investment between 2001 and 2006, more than any other university in the UK or US, except Stanford27
The Cambridge Cluster has the second highest per capita investment at £320 per head, second only to Silicon Valley28
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for a human being to interact with, like an email or a phone call, for instance. Eighty per cent of the information in the world is unstructured – and it’s where all the interesting things happen.
Customers don’t send you database tables; they ring you up or they send you emails. If a financial crime is being committed, you’ll find it in the emails; you won’t find it in the database. If you want to understand how to position a new product, you’ll do that by looking at how people react to things. So the important point here is that we should be focusing on making the computer fit our world and our information – the 80% that’s unstructured – rather than the other way round.
What is it about the Cambridge cluster that gives rise to a successful technology company like yours?Cambridge draws in the best talent from around the UK, and indeed outside the UK, and it produces absolute excellence in terms of the science base. So what you have around Cambridge are phenomenally good research people – and by being in the area you get access to these people. What’s happened over time is, as more and more successful companies have emerged, those other skills you need to build a business, such as marketing or good
legal expertise, have come in. So now there’s a really strong cluster of people who together have the necessary skills to create and grow technology businesses.
How does the interface between the research base and the commercial world work in practice?To build a business what you have to be able to do is add the things around the researchers that they don’t naturally bring to you. one of the typical failures you saw in Cambridge in the earlier days was amazing product and no ability to market it. But as the cluster has developed, there are now people in the area with those other skills. They’ve set up their lives here – they may be raising a family and have children in school. So the physical location itself has become an important element in making the cluster productive.
So what’s on the horizon for Autonomy?If you go back just a few years – when we first raised the idea of human-friendly information in the IT world – people didn’t know what we were talking about. Computers dealt with ones and zeros and databases and that was it. over the last few years people have realised that perhaps the biggest opportunity in the future of the IT world is moving computers on to talk our language, to deal with information in a human-friendly form.
And that process is gathering pace. We now have most of the world’s major software companies building the next generation of their products on Autonomy. And we’re seeing Autonomy software appearing in almost every industrial area. So our focus is on accelerating that to the point where computers can become clever enough to deal with our world: that’s the big change that will be very exciting.
What you have around Cambridge are phenomenally good research people – and now there’s a really strong cluster of people who together have the necessary skills to create and grow technology businesses.
Is the UK a good place to do business for a technology company?As a fundamental technology company you have to be doing business all over the world. But the big advantage you have in the UK is the fundamental science base and incredibly creative people who can actually create that fundamental technology. Then you can take that, apply it and market it across the world.
So if you look at the companies that have become successful in UK technology industry in recent years – whether that’s ARM or CSR or Autonomy – what they have in common is fundamental technology that has allowed them to become world class, and product that can be exploited outside of the UK.
How do you see the future for UK technology?What we’ve seen recently is a lot of the roadblocks that prevented the development of very large technology companies have been moved out of the way. We now have multiple examples of companies that have gone from start-up to being world class. What I expect to see now is a lot more of our science base leading to the creation of these companies. So I think it’s a very bright time for technology businesses throughout the UK.
Eighty per cent of the information in the world is unstructured – and it’s where all the interesting things happen.
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‘A cluster is really about people, which means you have to have a place which attracts people’, says Chas Sims, one of the founders of TTP. ‘When people first come here they come for a specific job offer, but also because of the wider opportunities represented by the multitude of high-tech businesses in the area. In effect, the cluster shares the broad talent pool and so the knowledge base grows from the combination of people and place.’
Cambridge University plays an important part in that. It ranks as one of the Top 5 universities in the world and the reputation of its science base acts as a magnet for top talent. Its graduates provide a continuous flow of high calibre talent for the cluster – a quarter of the 300 people working at TTP come out of the university,
for example. And the associations established with the global brand of the university help to promote the companies in the marketplace.
Cambridge Consultants Limited – CCL as it’s known – was the first one of the tech services companies to be established, based at the UK’s first science park which was founded in 1970 by Trinity College, one of the University’s most famous colleges with a scientific tradition going back to Newton. And from CCL grew PA; then TTP and Sagentia, each growing out of the other.
Around the core of these four big tech services firms, a great wealth of entrepreneurial businesses has arisen, forming and re-forming with the waves of new technologies. The rapid evolution of new enterprises makes it hard to pin down the number at any one
TTp – TURNiNG CUTTiNG-EdGE idEAS iNTO COmmERCiAL REALiTYThe Cambridge Cluster is home to many tech services firms serving
global markets, of which TTP is one of the longest established and
most successful. Operating between the academic science of the
university world and the commercial demands of the corporate world,
their skill is to invent technologies which answer the needs of world-
class companies.
A great wealth of entrepreneurial businesses has arisen, forming and re-forming with the waves of new technologies.
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time, but estimates range from 1,000 to 3,500 companies making up the cluster in and around the university town.
And whether they’re start-ups or established players, because they’re providing solutions for companies which are industry leaders with operations around the world, they’re global in outlook. CCL and TTP have both received the Queen’s Award for Export Performance, with around 70% of their business coming from overseas.
Cambridge has developed its own angel investor network in the Great Eastern Investment Forum. other organisations are dedicated to knowledge transfer between the firms and people in the city: Cambridge Network focuses on the collaborative advantage to be gained from the high tech community in the city; Cambridge Wireless has created special interest groups to exploit opportunities in that sub-sector; St John’s Innovation Centre incubates small start-ups. So through these, and other organisations like them, an infrastructure has built up to support the culture of entrepreneurialism.
Chas, who built up the firm’s product engineering division during the ‘80s, sees the defining characteristic of Cambridge’s leading tech services firms as their broad-based capability. ‘The know-how these firms offer is multi-disciplinary: a mix of software, hardware, electronics, optics, new materials and more, all brought together under one umbrella.’
Like the other major tech services firms, TTP have worked for a broad spectrum of consumer products companies over the years, such as Black and Decker and Bosch. one of Chas’ earliest clients was Dymo, who approached TTP when they were challenged by the electronic labelling techniques pioneered by the Japanese company, Brother. Dymo needed to move to a whole new range of technologies and products – which TTP developed for them.
‘The main competitor to the Cambridge technology companies is actually the in-house research and development departments of the companies themselves’, explains Chas. ‘So the question is what makes these major companies go outside to work with a tech services firm? The answer is usually linked to the fact that they’re doing something new and, or, they need a very fast response to a market need.’
He cites the example of a drug company working on respiratory care, ‘You can’t launch a respiratory drug without a delivery device. But a pharma company tends
The cluster shares the broad talent pool and so the knowledge base grows from the combination of people and place.
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not to have those skills in-house. Why would they? Their core competence is identifying and manufacturing pharmacological compounds’, says Chas. So that’s where TTP comes in, producing inhalers and other medical procedure devices for the pharma industry, using the latest technologies. And since another distinctive facet of the Cambridge landscape is the vibrant bio-science cluster, there are many such examples of entrepreneurial tech services companies working with pharma in cross-disciplinary collaborations.
Proficiency across a wide range of industries and technologies has led these firms to develop their own intellectual property over time. Tonejet, for example,
initiated through a joint venture with the Research Labs of Australia, has grown up under the wing of TTP to become the latest in the series of world-leading industrial digital printing technologies to have emerged from the Cambridge cluster, which started with Domino and Xaar spun out of CCL.
The biggest spin off from TTP was TTP Communications, which originated when four people in the company saw new opportunities to develop GSM technology. The firm funded the development phase through selling licenses to major players in the sector and in 2001, it was floated on the London Stock Exchange. TTP Communications invested heavily in 3G technology and was eventually bought by Motorola.
There have been other spin outs from the TTP stable: Wavedriver was a joint venture with Powergen to develop integrated controls for electric vehicles; Myriad grew as a consortium to develop automated chemistry synthesis equipment; TTP LabTech, also in the laboratory automation arena, is an instrumentation company selling into India and China. They are just some examples of the vigorous entrepreneurialism of the Cambridge cluster.
These ventures are complex, often taking ten years or more to develop, with multiple partners. And because they create ground-breaking technologies they often develop along paths not originally anticipated, with the technologies applied in ways not originally envisaged. They may float, or be bought by multinationals which can make use of those technologies or remain as profit centres within the firm – but, as Chas points out, ‘What all these firms have in common is the generation of IP created by the teams which spotted the new opportunity and the know-how to make it a commercial reality’.
What all these firms have in common is the generation of IP created by the teams which spotted the new opportunity and the know-how to make it a commercial reality.
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THE SOUTH wEST CLUSTER – pUTTiNG SiLiCON ExpERTiSE ON THE mApEngland’s South West is home to the largest concentration of silicon
designers outside California’s Silicon Valley.
Swindon Ashburton Bath
Motorola: Established in Devon in 2000 as orthogon Systems and based near the UK’s top wireless town of Exeter – it now leads the way in making broadband access available in rural areas.
PicoChip: Set up in 2000, its technology is used by hundreds of mobile phone networks, including eight of the global top ten in the market, to improve mobile coverage from a broadband connection.
Ubiquisys: Founded in 2004, it used advanced femtocell technology to invent ZoneGate, which improves mobile coverage inside the home – attracting investment from three of the world’s largest venture capitalists.
Gnodal: Started up in 2008 to build innovative technologies which make it possible for today’s huge data centres to be run at less cost and with less power, while maintaining high performance standards.
Icera: Founded in 2002 to specialise in G3 and G4 mobile handsets, it won a Red Herring 100 Global Award– and by the end of 2008 it had opened in China. Icera has gone on to raise over $240 million in venture capital.
STMicroelectronics: a $9 billion global business and a European success story, it developed the processing technology that now powers the majority of UK Freeview set-top boxes and more than half of all the boxes in the world.
Bristol
It all began with Inmos in Bristol and GEC-Plessey Semiconductor, from which has grown up a whole generation of high-tech experts. Today, the region has a cluster of about 50 silicon companies, employing around 5,000 people. The cluster has attracted investment from the global giants which have established
bases in the region – such as HP Labs, Panasonic, Toshiba Telecoms Research Europe and others. And the vibrant start up businesses have raised around £250 million in recent years to develop the technologies and jobs of the future.
In size and scale, in talent and expertise, microelectronics in the South West is a lively and diverse scene established at different times and based in different places – and these are just few examples:
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Swindon
Dialog Semiconductors
EnSilica
Fairchild Semiconductors
Intel Corporation
Maxim
Motorola
National Microelectronics
Institute
National Semiconductor
Riverbeck
Semtech
Swindon Silicon Systems
Telelogic
Tomkins
Ubiquisys
Wolfson
Zarlink
Southampton
ACW
Dolphin IP
Ericsson Southampton
Korusys
NXP Semiconductor
Perpetuum
Philips
TANDBERG Television
Midsomer Norton
Software Radio
Technology
MPC Data
Bristol
3D Labs
Apertio
Art of Silicon
Broadcom
Clearspeed Technology
Digital TV Labs
Gnodal
HP Labs
Icera
Infineon
Invro
Nanotech
Semiconductors
Nokia Siemens Networks
ocean Blue Software
oxford Instruments
Panasonic
Phyworks
Provision
Communications
Pulsic
Silicon Basis
ST Microelectronics
Systems4Silicon
Test & Verification
Systems
Toshiba
Wittenstein High Integrity
Systems
Xintronix
XMoS Semiconductor
Zuken
Ledbury
MMIC Solutions
Chepstow
Imagination
Technologies
Zarlink
Cirencester
Dexdyne
Garfield
Innovision
Phasor Solutions
Cheltenham
ARTiSAN Software
Chippenham
Deltenna
IP Wireless
Westcode
Semiconductors
Malmesbury
Analog Integration
Mimosys
Shepton Mallet
Applied Technology
(UK)
Dartmouth
Eltek Semiconductors
Isle of Wight
RF Engines
Plymouth
Bluestone Technology
Moortec
Syntech Technologies
Xfab UK
Paignton
Bookham
Spirent
Communications
Ashburton
Motorola
Dorchester
Connective Logic
Newton Abbot
RF Microwave Designs
Bath
Amdocs
Apex optoelectronics
Camitri Technologies
Cellulat 3G
Kitna
Intohand
IPL
Mirifice
PicoChip
Power oasis
Silicon South West
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xmOS – Hi-TECH mANUFACTURiNG AT THE HEART OF EUROpE’S SiLiCON vALLEY‘Inside every device like a mobile phone or set top box or DVD player
are sophisticated chips and a lot of those are designed in Bristol’, says
David May, founder of XMOS, an example of one of the more recent
spin-out companies in the Bristol area.
A government investment in a semi-conductor company called Inmos back in the ‘70s kick-started the micro-electronics industry in the South West of England. ‘Not only did Inmos attract other firms into the region, we also started to see spin-out companies’, says David, who worked at Inmos in its early days – until he went to run the Computer Science department at Bristol University in 1995.
He had the idea for XMOS in 2001 but, in the post dot-com bust, it was hard to get investors interested. Then one of his students, Ali Dixon, looking for a final year project, revived the idea, wrote the business plan, and together they raised money from the University seed fund and launched the business around four years ago.
‘What we’re about is producing microprocessors for a new generation of electronic designers. There’s a shift from the time when you designed a special purpose chip for every individual product, to a world in which we’ll create a general purpose chip,’ explains David. ‘It goes hand-in-hand with electronics becoming much more of a fashion industry. You can’t design a new chip for every product; it’s too expensive and takes too long. So XMoS provides the general purpose chips that can be adapted and customised by programming quickly and built into many different products.’
We wouldn’t see India or China, or anywhere, as a threat. We see them as an opportunity. These are potentially huge emerging markets for exactly the kind of things we make.”
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In four years, XMoS has grown to about 45 people and opened offices in California and India. ‘We’re a local company in many ways; we’re rooted here and it’s a great place to be – but we have to be able to operate as a global company as well’, says David. ‘Like many of the companies in Bristol which do design, our manufacture is actually in Taiwan. The packaging and assembly goes on somewhere else; in Malaysia or Singapore. Meanwhile, our customers are anywhere on the planet that designs and builds electronic products, so particularly the West Coast of America, then Korea, Japan and China.’
one of the essential characteristics of the microelectronics design industry is the diversity of skills needed. In their Bristol office, XMoS does the design work, but even so they need people who understand the manufacturing process in detail. ‘We have people who do the physical level design, also people who do the logical design, people who build the tools, do the verification, build the website, design the applications, and people who do the finance and other management skills too. Bristol has one of the best concentrations of this diversity of talent that you’ll find outside the US, and in significant quantities because of the large number of different companies based here.’
With around 15,000 students right in the middle of the city, the University has a significant presence – and around a third of the people working at XMoS are ex-Bristol University students who’ve graduated in the last three or four years. ‘We have a huge retention rate for students who come here to study and don’t leave – which is great because it’s important for a young company like us to be able to draw on that kind of talent pool.’
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Bristol has one of the best concentrations of this diversity of talent that you’ll find outside the US, and in significant quantities because of the large number of different companies based here.
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Consumers buying the electronic gadgets that the chips end up in are interested only in how easy they are to use, but behind the scenes it’s a complex business to produce them. It’s expensive and takes a long time to get to the first product. ‘The point is we’re putting millions of transistors down on a chip and they have to be absolutely right. It costs about $1 million to do just one trial production run’, explains David. ‘Typically it takes a year or more to get to the first thing you can put into anybody’s hands to start building software and applications around. Plus, you’ve got to identify the right customers for the technology and most of them are not here in the UK, so the network has to be built up. So it can be up to four years before you see any significant flow of money – and we’re more or less at that stage now.’
At a time when many see global markets as a threat to British-based companies, David May has a different perspective, ‘We wouldn’t see India or China, or anywhere, as a threat. We see them as an opportunity. These are potentially huge emerging markets for exactly the kind of things we make. We’re currently in discussion with companies in India about them using our technology to build applications on top of. And when you look at the scope for us now, it’s just an opportunity. It’s not a threat’.
one of the most exciting developments is the growing connection between what David calls the ‘artistic creative side’ and the ‘technological creative side’ of the industry.
It is creating new hybrid opportunities. ‘Historically, there have been relatively few direct links but over the past few years the two have come much closer. Film production today relies heavily on computer technology – while computer games are famous for their high-quality graphics.’
‘Some years ago, I had this vision looking at the credits on computer games and animated films. They listed all the conventional film roles; cameraman, set design… then all the computer roles; animation, software design and the rest of it. I thought, ‘Why are these two different groups of people?’ So we started a Masters programme at the University to make it possible for people to study both in one course’. David believes educating people in these diverse disciplines is very important because it can produce more effective and imaginative results.
‘With companies like Apple, the electronics creativity goes into making it possible to fit all the technology into a beautifully designed must-have product – and as soon as it’s out there on the street it demands content: you’re downloading iTunes, searching out new applications.
‘This is clearly the future of the industry: the integration between the styling sense, the technology sense and the provision of the content. And Bristol has pretty much all the talents to do that stuff.’
One of the most exciting developments is the growing connection between the ‘artistic creative side’ and the ‘technological creative side’ of the industry.
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WoRLD-CLASS UNIVERSITIES, CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCHThe UK has 4 of the world’s Top 10 universities – and many significant centres of excellence across the country. And there is a growing trend of collaboration between the academic and business worlds, which can be seen in the number of spin-out companies, the incubators established to support new start-ups, the strength of entrepreneurial clusters growing up around university centres. Global businesses have been founded on ground-breaking discoveries and the reach of Knowledge Transfer Networks is expanding to bring together leading academics and businesses to deliver new collaborative R&D projects. So one of the key attractions for companies looking to partner and invest in the UK is access to the world-class academic research base.
‘Our particular expertise combines mobile telecommunications with knowledge of renewable energy to produce systems that supplement or replace diesel generators with solar and wind power’, explains Ivan Harris, Chief Marketing Officer for PowerOasis.
The addressable market for Poweroasis’s solutions is expanding fast. The number of mobile phone subscribers in the world globally is expected to increase to well over 6 billion over the next 5 years. That growth is going to require 1 to 2 million new mobile base stations to be
deployed. And 95% of those new mobile subscribers are going to come from emerging markets where they have no access to a reliable electricity grid.
‘When we talk to our customers, who are the mobile network operators, they’re interested in reducing their costs. Providing power is one of their top three opex items around the globe. And in Africa, it represents
pOwEROASiS – iNvENTiNG NEw TECHNOLOGiES FOR A LOw-CARBON ECONOmYPowerOasis produces technology solutions that allow mobile network
operators to reduce the diesel consumption in their networks. In 2005,
their early research into the application of renewable power in telecoms
began in a programme supported by the Universities of Bath and
Bristol at Motorola’s UK Research and Development site in Swindon:
a good example of the growing trend in the UK for academic researchers
to join forces with business to spin-out new high-tech companies that
can respond to today’s global challenges.
We allow them to supplement – or even replace – diesel fuel with renewable solar or wind power, which has almost zero operational cost.
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almost half of their opex – the No. 1 line item in their operational expenditure. And the base stations which serve these remote communities have been using diesel generators, which are very expensive to keep going, with diesel having to be transported to the site, sometimes even by helicopter.
‘So the technology solutions we’ve invented allow them to optimise the running of their diesel generators and to supplement – or even replace – diesel fuel with renewable solar or wind power, which has almost zero operational cost. So we’re both reducing their costs and reducing their carbon footprint.’
The aggregated environmental benefit could be significant. The average base station today emits about 40 tonnes of Co2 a year – the equivalent of two homes in the US or running six family-sized cars for a year. Ivan estimates that if they manage to get half of the new off-grid base stations onto their system and powered by renewable energy, they will save 40 million tonnes of Co2 a year; the equivalent of the carbon footprint of a city like Sydney or Barcelona, or the whole of Bangladesh. That’s why they’re
convinced that their innovative solution benefits everyone: the mobile companies, the consumers and the environment.
‘Good engineering and business skills are essential to compete in this space and we’re very fortunate in having a number of excellent universities in this area. So we can tap into that large talent pool’, says Peter Bishop, Chief Technology officer. ‘And now that there’s
a critical mass of cutting-edge technology businesses in the South West, there are more and more reasons for people to gravitate to the area.’
Set up in 2007, today the business has a team of 15 full time people, serving a truly global market. ‘100% of our business is done overseas’, says Ivan. ‘our customers are in places like Sri Lanka to Qatar, or even the beautiful island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific.’
So their major opportunities lie in places around the world where the infrastructure is poor and the demand for modern communications is high. The worldwide ‘green telecoms’ equipment market is expected to be worth around $300 billion by 2013 and about 46% of that will be in areas where Poweroasis systems are most relevant. As Ivan puts it, ‘The market where we can deploy our systems is huge’.
The worldwide ‘green telecoms’ equipment market is expected to be worth around $300 billion by 2013.
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Knowledge Transfer Networks
An initiative of the UK government’s Technology Strategy Board, Knowledge Transfer Networks were set up to facilitate the flow of knowledge between businesses and academic institutions – and to accelerate the pace of innovation. With over 15 Networks established to date – representing a membership of around 50,000 – the technology related KTNs include digital communications, electronics, sensors and photonics, nanotechnology, and digital systems which encompass the key enabling technologies for ICT.
The Director of SETsquared incubator in Bristol, Nick Sturge, is clear what he’s there to do, ‘We take in very early stage entrepreneurs with innovative technologies and help make their ideas happen. There are incubators all around the country now, which is fantastic because it means we can support a broad spectrum of ideas and make sure they become valuable for society’.
SETsquared was established by a collaboration between the four universities of Bath, Bristol, Southampton and Surrey and backed by government funding, to focus on developing high-tech high-growth enterprises based on industrial and academic IPR. To date, it’s helped raise over £350 million for new enterprises in the area, and achieved five IPos.
Nick Smailes, who is Poweroasis’ CEo today was Director of SETsquared in its early days. He and Pete Bishop, Poweroasis’ CTo, credit SETsquared and the Bath Ventures Innovation Centre with enabling their team to make the most of the commercial opportunity of their innovation, ‘They supported us through the incubation period with both advice and funding; helping to develop the business plan and introducing us to the right networks of venture capitalists’.
Recently, the high-tech investor, MTI, led a £1.5 million round to take Poweroasis to its next stage of development.
Incubators: making ideas happen
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The building the Studio is based in is at the heart of what was Glasgow’s ship building industry. The physical steel making and welding that took place decades ago have gone, but have been replaced with new technology. Professor Paul Anderson, who heads up Digital Design
Studio’s commercial projects, is excited about the potential, ‘Today we’re digitally prototyping ships and complex oil platforms, so we’re building the virtual equivalents of the engineering feats that used to happen here. All that conceptual engineering and high-end technical creativity that’s in our heritage continues in the present day’.
Paul explains why their work has become so important in recent years. ‘Basically, anything that people touch and interact with can now be modelled. And being able to manipulate 3D images – whether they’re of cars, buildings or bodies – is a great way of designing a product or practising a skill.’
The simulation work they have done for Ford Motor Company’s advanced design studios in Detroit proves the point, ‘We’re creating virtual prototypes of new car designs, which are being used to test new concepts, reduce risk and cut time to market. So the company can build several digital prototypes before they make final decisions on which one they are going to put into production’.
THE diGiTAL dESiGN STUdiO – ART SCHOOL CREATiviTY LEAdiNG THE wAY iN TECHNiCAL iNNOvATiONThe Studio is part of one of the oldest art and design institutions in the
UK, the Glasgow School of Art. Today it’s at the forefront of the digital
revolution. With the largest virtual reality lab in the UK, they are
building 3D designs for everything from cars to medical training.
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Anything that people touch and interact with can now be modelled. And being able to manipulate 3D images is a great way of designing a product or practising a skill.
The team at Digital Design Studio uses advanced laser scanning to produce 3D models of buildings and even cities – including their home town of Glasgow. ‘We went from street corner to street corner picking out the streets and buildings we needed to cover and scanned them in from different vantage points, and processed the images to end up with a unified 3D image of the cityscape’, explains Doug Pritchard, who heads up the Visualisation team. ‘Glasgow’s built environment has been going through major changes and the Council wanted to help the local community get a better understanding of just what’s been going on in terms of regeneration and the construction of the modern city.’
Recently they’ve been working with the National Parks Service in the United States to capture a 3D model of Mount Rushmore, ‘People can’t actually get close to the mountain,’ says Doug, ‘so this is a way of getting a clearer idea of what it looks like’.
one of the most exciting projects going on at the Studio at the moment is about teaching anatomy through interactive simulation. ‘We believe it’s going to transform the future of medical education, not just in Scotland but worldwide’, says Paul. Working with the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Glasgow and NHS Education, they’re pioneering sophisticated animation techniques to help medical students and surgeons practice operations before doing them in real life. ‘It’s going to allow people to touch and feel anatomy in an innovative way, which will reduce risk at the same time as significantly enhancing teaching and learning.’
‘our business is global. We’ve got a strong base in Scotland, but we’re doing projects all around the world. What we’re building for people are digital data sets, so they can be sent anywhere across the globe in a moment’, he explains. ‘And our work has grown as design has moved from the conventional world to the digital world where everything is built in 3D inside a computer
– but also, just as important, where we can now visualise that data and enable people to interact with it.’
As well as their commercial activity, the Digital Design Studio offers two Masters degrees, in Animation and in Sound for Moving Image, which are focused on the use of advanced digital technologies. ‘one of the reasons we’re based here in Glasgow’s digital media hub is that we’re close to BBC’s headquarters in Scotland, to STV and a whole range of companies creating digital content. That’s a rapidly growing industry worldwide, so we’re not just producing graduates for Scotland, or even the UK. our graduates are going anywhere across Europe, the United States or the Far East.’
The people leaving the Masters programmes go into a wide range of disciplines, from engineering to broadcast. This cross over between high-end technology and high-end artistic creativity, and the multiple ways those skills can be applied, is critical to the Studio’s future.
Paul is enthusiastic about the potential, ‘We’re expanding rapidly. We’re taking on new staff. We’re bringing in new technologies – particularly interactive technology. So in the future we’re certainly going to be bigger, but in global terms we’re going to be very competitive because we’re focused on specialised high-end markets’.
We’re teaching anatomy through interactive simulation: we believe it’s going to transform the future of medical education, not just in Scotland but worldwide.
Our work has grown as design has moved from the conventional world to the digital world where everything is built in 3D inside a computer.
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THE UNivERSiTY OF SOUTHAmpTON – pAviNG THE wAY TO A SmARTER wEBWhen Dame Wendy Hall was involved in the early days of the web as
part of the community of early pioneers, it was impossible to imagine
the impact it would have on the world. Now Dame Wendy is one of the
leaders of the newly established study of Web Science at the University
of Southampton, with Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt and others,
where they are at the forefront of creating the next chapter of the web.
Is your study of Web Science where the technology and social aspects of the web come together?When we talk about Web Science, we start by talking about how the first web grew – because if you understand that you can then extrapolate forward as to how things might happen in future waves of the web.
In the early ‘90s, the internet was there, the network infrastructure was there, and we were ready to share information on it, in a way that was easy.
There were other systems around at the time but they were quite hard to use and what Tim did with the web was pull all the ideas together – the idea of hypertext, linking documents over a network with the network protocols – and developed a set of easy to use standards. Tim’s real legacy is the open standards and that he made them free, so he didn’t make it into a commercial enterprise. He said, ‘I’m going to give this away for free, so that everybody, anybody, can set up a web server, can put up a web page, can read what’s on the web’.
And that’s what other people – including myself – didn’t get at that time that is so important about the web. Either all the information’s there or very little of it will be there; you’ll just get islands of stuff. His argument was everyone’s got to use it or nobody will use it.
The beauty of the web is how it’s evolved. If you look at it now, anything you want to find generally is there. But when we first started using the web there was nothing; it started off as one website. And then there were two, and then there were ten, and then there
were a hundred. Search engines used to publish lists of new websites. Can you imagine that? It’s hard to remember it was only 15 years ago when that was the state of affairs.
And Brin and Page the founders of Google only published their algorithm for Google in 1998. It was transforming because it used the links as well as the text in the documents to do the searches. It wasn’t till 2000-2001 we were all using Google and now you can’t imagine life without it.
When the first companies were trying to sell things online, they were selling into a market that didn’t exist – because nobody had a computer at home. Then came the development of online companies – Amazon, ebay and others. It’s a chicken and egg process. People didn’t know what the web was going to be until it was there – and now it’s there we totally take it for granted.
And the technology develops too. The initial browsers were read only; you couldn’t write to the web unless you learnt to write html. But software developers noticed that people wanted to write to the web in natural language, so they created software that made it easy for them to do it. Then people started wanting to put diaries on the web: they became web logs and then you got the blog software. Now you just take for granted that anyone can set up a blog – and that led to the blogosphere. And then we’ve got the wikis. And next we get into social networking, which is an amazingly recent phenomenon that dominates our lives.
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The web doesn’t stop evolving as a technology, as well as a large complex social system; an ecosystem.
The UK is home to 8 of the Top 10 universities in Europe – and 3 of the Top 5 technology universities in Europe: Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College, London29
The UK is ranked the 2nd strongest research base in the world, second after the US30
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I’m fascinated by all these things because they come from simple ideas. Facebook was to enable students at Harvard to get to know each other. And Twitter was an idea some people brainstormed to restrict the words in a miniblog… So it starts off as something completely banal and yet it’s now used to save lives, raise money for campaigns, and even the police are using it to talk to people in their local communities.
The web is a technology; it’s built by engineers, we build systems. But it actually grows because people use it and put content on it. Then you get into a feedback loop when people start doing things with it, and then software developers respond to how it’s used. So the web doesn’t stop evolving as a technology as well as a large complex social system; an ecosystem. Understanding that is what our research is about.
How does this link with the movement towards linked data? It’s about making a smarter web. At the moment, effectively everything on the web is still presented to us as a document. The original vision was it wouldn’t just be about documents; it would be about data as well.
Machines can analyse documents but they can’t understand what they’re about or what’s in them. So take the number 42: is it my street number, is it my age or is it the answer to a question in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? So to get to the next stage when you put the data out, you have to put the context around it so machines can interpret it. So in the web of linked data, we’ll ask questions and get answers back because the data will be freed from the documents.
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You have to think that if the web has become the world’s document management system, it’s now going to become the world’s database and spreadsheet. That’s a phenomenal shift. But we don’t know what tools and technologies we need to make it workable until the data’s out there. otherwise it’s too
theoretical. So it’s imperative to get the data out there and then see what we need to make sense of it.
So do you see this as a new chapter in the story of the web?Absolutely. once the data goes up people start doing things with it immediately; this is the web story.
There’s a whole move to open, transparent government which is getting UK public data up on to data.gov.uk, with a site launched in January ’10. one of the first data sets the government put up was transport data for London, including where the bicycle accidents are.
Within 24 hours of that data going up, someone had produced an application for an iPhone that showed you where the black spots for cyclists were in London and plotted you a path between home and work that avoided them.
The BBC were a big driver in the first web and they’re going to be a big driver in this new wave of the web. They’re publishing their archives indexed by linked data. So if they publish, say, a Beethoven symphony that was recorded at the Proms, they link it through to the biography of Beethoven in Wikipedia – and then you’re into the network of all the other composers. So you’re linking two completely different data sets through this technology, which is quite amazing.
And the museums are starting to do it now. The British Museum, for example, has decided their entire catalogue is going to be linked data and we’re helping them with that work. So there will be pioneers in the world who will start doing it.
Do you see your department as building the talent base for what you’ve called the future wave of the web?We first started talking about Web Science in 2005. We’d been thinking about this issue of how tipping points are created and evolution. And we realised there’s nowhere you could go and study how the web grows. You could come to a university to learn about technologies or you could go to a social science department to learn about how people use the internet and the web. But there was nowhere that put all that together.
So it’s the combination of technical and social study – but it also encompasses law makers and economists, policy makers and governments who determine how the web grows as well. In order to understand this much bigger picture we decided that we needed to give the study of these phenomena a name, and we called it Web Science.
At Southampton we now have a large doctoral training centre in Web Science, funded by the Research Councils, which will train 80 PhD students over the next five to eight years. And we have a big Industrial Forum of companies interested in doing projects with those students – because understanding these issues will help business too. As more and more businesses exist on the web – from the big multinationals to the small start-ups – they’ll want web scientists in the future. That’s our hypothesis.
As more and more businesses exist on the web – from the big multinationals to the small start-ups – they’ll want web scientists in the future.
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BUILDING BLOCKS FOR THE FUTURENew rules and new ways of working are emerging in the global economy of the 21st century. Businesses are increasingly collaborating and establishing new partnerships to expand their opportunities for trade and investment in the global markets. The UK’s long-standing commitment to free trade and open markets makes it a hub for connectivity in the technology sector worldwide.
TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY BOARd – A CATALYST FOR iNNOvATiON iN THE UKThe Technology Strategy Board – TSB – was established by the UK
government to promote and support the development and exploitation
of technology and challenge-led innovation. A central theme is making
the link across the worlds of academia and business; facilitating those
connections that are so often the catalyst to finding new solutions and
new commercial possibilities.
For instance, to date, the TSB has established 15 national Knowledge Transfer Networks. Each Network focuses on a specific field of technology or business application – from digital communications through to nanotechnology – bringing together people from universities, research and technology centres, business and finance to accelerate the pace of innovation through knowledge transfer and the sharing of ideas.
And complementing the Networks is the Knowledge Transfer Partnership programme, which places high-calibre, recently qualified individuals from the academic world into businesses on specific innovative projects. With over 800 businesses now participating, the programme has become a tried and tested way of enabling companies to draw on the UK’s world-class research base for knowledge, skills and technologies they consider to be of strategic competitive importance. By increasing business interaction with the university knowledge base, the programme provides company-based training for graduates, at the same time as delivering real benefits to the business.
The Collaborative Research and Development Competition is the mechanism through which the TSB invests in proposals in which businesses and research communities work together on projects to deliver new products and services. Projects applying for funding must involve two or more organisations, at least one of which is a business.
one company which recently succeeded in winning funding from the TSB, through their Small Business Research Initiative, is Data Transfer and Communications Ltd. The problem they are aiming to fix is mobile phone security. It is a huge challenge for the industry and consumers alike – and as technology has become more sophisticated so people store more and more sensitive details on their mobile phones, from family photos to bank details.
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The Hot Products Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) set the challenge for designers and technologists to work together to create solutions in three specific areas: making mobile handsets themselves harder or less desirable to steal, making data stored on handsets harder to steal and making future m-commerce transactions secure and fraud proof.
The SBRI competition was set as part of an initiative backed by the Design Council and the Home office. Fifty-three companies applied and three were awarded funding to develop their technologies – Data Transfer and Communications is one. Their developers are already at work, refining the technology on the i-migo, a Bluetooth device which can be wirelessly connected to any mobile phone or electronic device. I-migo was showcased – alongside other cutting edge technology as part in the UK technology pavilion at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The Home office has the option to purchase the product as part of the programme. And market testing already promises strong take up when the product is launched – especially in the corporate world where security breaches can be devastating. As Saban Demirbasa, from Data Transfer and Communications, acknowledges, ‘it’s this development grant which has been the catalyst to the business being able to build the device ready for production and get the right industry partners involved in taking it to market.’
over 700 projects are currently supported by the Collaborative R&D programme and £1 billion is being invested in technology and challenge-led innovation from 2008 to 2011. The programme has engaged with around 1,500 businesses so far and – as the name suggests – collaboration is always at the heart of it.
Intellect UK is the leading trade association in the UK technology sector, representing a broad base of around 800 SMEs and multinational companies. Through the member companies, tens of thousands of individuals come together physically and virtually to respond to areas of common interest, from the use of ICT in public service organisations, in the life of consumers, in the environment.
John Higgins, Director General of Intellect UK says: ‘I spoke recently at the launch of the first Masters degree for Information Leaders at a leading UK university. I argued that the challenges for today’s information leaders are some of the most exciting and demanding in the business world. It’s no wonder that some of the country’s best young (and not so young) minds are being attracted to work in the UK information and communications technology companies. These companies are at the leading edge of change in virtually every aspect of our lives. Change in business, change in public services and change in the way society works.
‘The industry I know in the UK is great at turning technology into practical solutions, drawing on our world-class universities and producing intelligent and independent leaders. We’re good problem solvers and dependable deliverers. Let’s face it no-one benefits from a failed project and, although dealing with change is always uncertain, we’ve learned faster than most how to succeed. And we’re connected in every sense; our communication infrastructure is good and getting better, we’ve a history of global trade and we’re real team players.
‘I’ve worked in the sector in the UK and in Silicon Valley and I found that when it comes to flexibility and “can do” attitude – contrary to received wisdom – the companies I dealt with in the UK, especially, but not exclusively, the SMEs, were open to new ideas and trying new ways of doing things.
‘So I commend the UK tech sector. Great jobs in excellent companies tackling some of the world’s most important and interesting, and yes, sometimes very difficult, challenges.’
Intellect UK – high-tech companies working together
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UK TRAdE & iNvESTmENT – pUTTiNG UK TECHNOLOGY ON THE mAp UKTI’s teams worldwide are on a mission to open up new opportunities
for trade, research and investment in the new global economy.
Was Rahman
Carmen Ayo
UK Trade & Investment – UKTI – is the government department that works with UK-based businesses to promote their success in international markets, and encourage overseas companies to look at the UK as their partner of choice.
With 1,300 people working in Embassies, Consulates and High Commissions in 96 countries, the department has a global reach. UKTI also deploys 60 specialists with commercial experience and deep knowledge of today’s technologies, sectors and markets, and a network of advisors with private sector experience to support businesses in all parts of England.
They help UKTI teams both attract high quality investment and research into the UK and help UK companies trade. one of them is Carmen Ayo: her specialism is ICT and her territory is the USA. She takes missions of UK companies out to America, making the connections which can help them access the opportunities in the global supply chains of major US-based technology businesses in a way they would find hard to achieve on their own. And she brings delegations in from the US to show them what the UK has to offer, so she’s familiar with the innovation coming up in businesses large and small, all over the country, ‘It inspires me to see what’s going on in the UK and I hope that more and more companies invite us to work alongside them to find new partnerships and new opportunities to trade. Facilitating that is what we’re here to do’.
Each of the team of specialists brings their expertise to bear in a different part of the world: Was Rahman is linking up Indian and UK companies to help them expand their prospects for international trade. With extensive experience of building relationships that can flourish in the context of the global marketplace, Was identifies the combination of world-class universities and multiple high-tech industry clusters across the country as critical assets for the future success of the UK technology sector.
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FUTURE STORY UK TECHNOLOGY
Pace: For people who love a fast moving market and exciting technology that’s constantly evolving, it’s a great place to be.
RM: The revolution of the internet is the whole world of content and resources it enables teachers to use in the classroom.
Stalis: Smaller companies are being recognised as an important source of innovation, skills and domain knowledge.
Pinewood Studios: It’s by deploying digital technology on a global basis that we’ll be able to offer the services that we’re so well known for around the world.
Kuju: Made a substantial investment into technology and processes for digital distribution and the social gaming phenomenon – preparing now for the next wave of hardware changes.
Logica: We have a growing emphasis on close partnership working, both with the client and with industry players.
ARM: In designing once and licensing its IP many times over, ARM is spreading the R&D costs of innovation across the industry.
BT: The big brands which have emerged in the past 10 years think about their product in a global context: that’s a defining factor of future success.
DIY Kyoto: The closest we’ve come yet to an iPod of smart meters – something cool and desirable.
FFastFill: Software as a Service is absolutely the future of how software will be delivered in the 21st century.
Greenstone: Is part of a significant trend to find technology-based solutions to the environmental challenges of our times.
Digital Design Studio: With the largest virtual
reality lab in the UK, the studio develops 3D designs for everything from cars to medical training.
Savant: More and more PULSE data is being made available over the web, whether that’s for individuals to book their donation session or for hospitals to order blood online.
MediaCityUK: We’re putting a lot of our investment not just into buildings, but into the fibre in the ground, data centres and new telecoms infrastructure.
Epitiro: Successfully exploiting the extraordinary growth of the internet and IP networks.
XMOS: Bristol has one of the best concentrations of this diversity of skills that you’ll find outside the US, and in significant quantities because of all the different companies based here.
SETsquared: Building high-tech, high-growth businesses based on industrial and academic IPR.
PowerOasis: A good example of the growing trend in the UK for academic researchers to join forces with business to spin-out new high-tech companies that can respond to today’s global challenges.
O2: The UK is a great place to do business because it’s an open trading nation with an open regulatory system.
Spoken by different voices across a wide range of different businesses, they bring alive what matters to them about operating in the UK: the appetite of the nation’s consumers to experiment with smart digital technologies and services; the open regulatory and trading environment – connected to the European and global marketplace; the capability to deliver innovation to other industries to enable them to compete; the convergence of the creative industries with the tech world; the series of powerful high-tech
clusters around the country with concentrations of skilled people and a world-class research base in the universities.
So everywhere you look today, you begin to see the future story of technology in the UK. And whether your goal is to trade, to collaborate or to invest, there is a huge variety of businesses inventing new technologies and creating new opportunities to serve customers all over the world.
UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) is the government department that helps
UK-based companies succeed in the global marketplace and companies from
all over the world access opportunities in the UK. Its services are tailored to
the needs of individual businesses, offering knowledge, advice and practical
support. So whether you are aiming to expand your international trading links,
exploit new technologies or access technical talent in the UK, invest or partner
in the UK, or locate in the European market, UKTI can help you do that.
If you would like to become part of the future story of UK technology,
you can contact UKTI at:
Tel: +44 (0)20 7215 8000Email: [email protected]
TTP: A cluster is really all about people: it shares the broad talent pool and so the knowledge base grows from the combination of people and place.
Autonomy: The big advantage you have in the UK is the fundamental science base and incredibly creative people.
Nokia: We have innovations triggered in the UK that have been transported to other parts of the world.
Southampton University: As more and more businesses exist on the web –
from the big multinationals to the small start-ups – they’ll want Web Scientists in the future.
UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) is the government department that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global marketplace and companies from all over the world access opportunities in the UK. Its services are tailored to the needs of individual businesses, offering knowledge, advice and practical support. So whether you are aiming to expand your international trading links, exploit new technologies or access technical talent in the UK, invest or partner in the UK, or locate in the European market, UKTI can help you do that.
If you would like to become part of the future story of UK technology, you can contact UKTI at:
Tel: +44 (0)20 7215 8000 Email: [email protected]
Disclaimer:Whereas every effort has been made to ensure the information given in this document is accurate, neither UK Trade & Investment nor its parent Departments (The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) accept liability for any errors, omissions or misleading statements, and no warranty is given or responsibility accepted as to the standing of any individual, firm, company or other organisation mentioned.
The paper in this document is made from 50 percent recycled waste pulp with 50 percent pulp from well-managed forests. This is a combination of Totally Chlorine Free and Elemental Chlorine Free. The inks are vegetable oil-based and contain resins from plants/trees.
Published August 2010 by UK Trade & Investment© Crown CopyrightURN 10/1097