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Bdaily talks technology with Perfect Image

It’s technology week on Bdaily. We talked to Andrew Robson, CEO of North East IT company Perfect Image, to find out his perspective on the current UK technology industry.

First of all, could you briefly outline Perfect Images’ offering, and a little background to the company?

Perfect Image is a full-service IT service company that manages organisations’ IT infrastructure and designs and creates software solutions. The software solutions we produce are bespoke projects that drive real business benefit for our clients and are often focused around Microsoft Dynamics CRM/ERP, SharePoint and QlikView business intelligence technologies. The fact that we can provide end-to-end services covering the design, delivery
and management of our clients’ software and hardware means we have a focus on making sure that all of these elements work together to provide great long-term value. We’ve been operating from Newcastle for over 21 years and have a wide range of clients from larger organisations such as G4S, Bellway, Akzo Nobel to SMEs across the UK.

Can you share your view of the technology sector landscape in the UK, and where you believe your organisation sits within it?

Overall, the IT sector in the UK is in good shape despite the economic backdrop and it continues to innovate and adapt to consumer and business needs. Probably more than any other sector you have a number of individual technology companies that rapidly rise and fall, but the overall health of the sector is good which is reflected in the continuing shortage of skills in the UK. As a service company we have evaluated and worked with a wide range of technologies over the last 21 years and we have and will continue to adapt to provide our clients with what we believe are the best technologies for their businesses. For example, one of the biggest changes over the last couple of years has been the increasing power, capability and use of consumer IT, most obviously with smartphones and tablets. This in turn has led to changing requirements and expectations in the business-to business sector where we operate. For instance, from an infrastructure point of view we work on projects that involve provision of cloud, resilient data centres, thin client and remote access solutions to support 24/7 working from a range of different devices. We also support a wide range of different devices now (which aren’t always owned by our clients) and deal with all the security and other risks that they bring.

What do you think are the greatest strengths of the UK sector?

The UK IT sector is well regarded globally and Sage, who is on our doorstep in Newcastle, has become one of the largest business software companies in the world. There’s a lot of innovation in the UK and we have great strengths in software and services, helped by the fact that English is the lingua franca of the IT world.

…And the greatest weaknesses?

The UK isn’t home to any of the real technology powerhouses. Whilst there are good companies and people here, we don’t seem to have been able to produce a home-grown hardware or software giant in the way that the US or Asia have. Whether that’s down to a lack of ambition, insufficient availability of finance or being risk averse, by comparison to the US in particular, is difficult to say.

What most excites you currently in the sector?

Although the phrase and idea has been around for a while, “the internet of things” has to start becoming a reality over the next few years. This is the concept of more and more everyday objects and devices becoming connected to the internet so they can be controlled or collect information. This might range from current household objects like your TV or boiler to devices on buildings and roads. There are some early prototype devices being shown today, including at the recent Consumer Electronic Show, but I’m not brave enough to predict where this will end up and how soon!

How do you think IT will change over the course of 2013?

Phones and tablets will continue to improve rapidly and unless Apple have a new product release this year they may start to lose ground to Microsoft Windows 8 and Android devices which have been improving rapidly. We think businesses will continue to be much more strategic about what IT they invest in and, if they haven’t done so already, invest in infrastructure and cloud solutions that will support the flexible access to software and data that their staff, customers and suppliers will increasingly expect. In particular we expect virtualised applications and desktops, like those we provide through our Vspark service, will become increasingly common.

What tips would you offer to other sectors who want to stay ahead of the curve in their technologies?

One of the great advantages of being an IT service provider is the opportunity to get to work with a wide range of different types of business in great depth. The one thing that never fails to surprise is that the challenges and processes of completely different businesses can be quite similar when you analyse them. So my advice would be to look to other sectors and see how they use technology to make their businesses more efficient or innovative and see if you can apply that to your own circumstances.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .