1. What is your role at ITPS?
As Managing Director of ITPS and head of the leadership team my role is to identify, develop and direct business strategy to achieve our aims. Business is about relationships, and I play an active role in ensuring that our customers are well looked after, and feel a part of ITPS.
2. What does ITPS do?
We are a North East-based company working with a national and international client base, delivering strategic IT consultancy, a range of IT implementation services, cloud, communications, managed services and security, as well as support services and workspace and disaster recovery. Our 135-strong team are experts in tailoring public, private and hybrid cloud solutions and providing complex programme delivery,
underpinned by our own £4m high-security data centre facilities in County Durham. We have been on the front line of the technological revolution for the last 20 years, helping organisations of all sizes and in all sectors take advantage of technological advances. Many of our clients and staff have been with us since day one, and we are very proud of that.
3. What gets you out of bed in the morning?
Knowing that what we do underpins the achievements and prosperity of every one of our clients. We measure our success by theirs.
4. What makes ITPS different?
While I’m pleased to say that our reputation for technical excellence is pretty much unrivalled in the industry, we’re not in the business of selling technology, we are solvers of business problems. We don’t start new business relationships by talking about technology, we start by asking the client about their business objectives and what’s stopping them from achieving them, and then we look at how the effective use of IT can
enable their goals to be met.
Several years ago we asked our clients to describe ITPS in three words, and the resulting ‘integrity, quality, expertise’ response became our mantra and was absorbed into our branding. Those values are what we live by. While every business needs to make money and create employment, a key element of our mission is to add value to the community around us. While we are committed partners of larger charities such as St Oswald’s Hospice, the Percy Hedley Foundation, the Chronicle Sunshine Fund and the Great North Air Ambulance Service, we also support a range of smaller good causes nominated by our staff. 2020 brought hard times for so many people, it is more important than ever that businesses step up and help wherever they can. This year in particular we have provided a considerable amount of support for food banks, which sadly provide a valuable safety net for families.
5. What are the business’s great strengths?
The commitment and ‘can do’ attitude of our people, and the breadth and depth of our expertise. As providers of services key to critical national infrastructure, the last rollercoaster 10 months of helping hundreds of organisations make a rapid switch to secure home working and maintain business as usual through some very difficult circumstances has reinforced my belief that we really do have the best people in the
industry. In the early days of Lockdown 1.0, we safely and swiftly migrated over 10,000 users across to remote working, which was the result of a phenomenal effort by our team. We believe in teamwork and collaboration to get the very best outcomes for our customers and give them the reassurance that their business is safe in our hands, whatever level of business they place with us.
6. What are the primary market/sectors?
We work across a wide range of sectors, including manufacturing and engineering, and with all sizes of private and public sector organisations, from SMEs to multi-national corporations and essential bodies such as emergency services, the NHS, local and central government, and financial services.
7. Do you have growth plans for the future?
The last 20 years have been an interesting ride, and it’s been a privilege to play our part in the evolution of flexible and cost-effective ICT infrastructures and services that have transformed our world. IT has gradually become a utility model, with businesses turning to expert partners to manage some or all of their needs on a flexible contract. They only pay for what they use, benefitting from reduced costs, faster speeds, greater capacity, and effective management and monitoring.
ITPS is well placed to meet the need for emerging new business models, and we expect further growth as a result of that. Our core aim has always been to help our clients get the most out of technology. It’s a
policy that has seen us through 20 successful years and it will continue to be our mission as we move into our third decade.