Member Article

Why this North East entrepreneur is in demand from the likes of Amazon, Google and NASA

Tech savvy entrepreneur Mark Costigan, who hails from Wallsend in North Tyneside, has joined an elite list of British businessmen to have invented a device in demand from world-leading organisations such as Amazon, Google, GCHQ and NASA.

Mark is the man behind SergeantClip, a network and infrastructure cable management system, increasingly-believed to harness the potential of saving companies millions of pounds in downtime and loss of service.

Designed to help IT engineers ensure that once a cable has been removed from a device it is definitely replaced in the correct port, Mark says the innovation’s niche lies in the fact that it reduces the risk of human error, speeds up an often tricky process and saves customers money along the way.

How does it work?

Mark, who has received investment from the aforementioned companies, says he designed the device after recognising the scale of the task facing engineers removing, and replugging, large quantities of cables.

The clip is slipped around the cables, making it straightforward to plug them back into the right space once the work has been completed. Risk of plugging them back into the wrong port is literally eradicated, explains Mark.

“They [Engineers] have to put in a lot of painstaking work upfront to identify and document the correct ports to plug them back into,” he said, “and the potential for error in this situation is considerable.”

“Someone innocently plugging a cable into the wrong port could literally bring an organisation to its knees and the implications of that can be far reaching.

“The SergeantClip removes that possibility and at the same time significantly reduces the time – and the cost – usually involved with this kind of work.”

Orders for the SergeantClip have come from organisations including Disney Cruise Lines and the Las Vegas Police Department, whilst a number of educational establishments in both the UK and the USA are using the device.

Mark added that he now hopes the UK-manufactured clip will become standard practice for networking or cabling worldwide.