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Ebow fully deserves the NetApp UK Sales Individual award – he has been instrumental in growing our relationship with NetApp over the past 18 months
Krishna Keshvara
I think particular credit is due to our joint technical teams who have designed and implemented some world class solutions together and our resulting customer satisfaction has been outstanding.”
Martin Hellawell
You have to respect the race – it eats a lot of people up and spits them out. The crowd was brilliant though, handing out jelly babies to keep us going (I had more than my fair share.) Plus, I got to run alongside Amy Childs and her two bouncers!”
James Pritchard
A marathon has always been on my bucket list, I’m so glad I did it, and in support of a fantastic charity that makes such a difference to the lives of terminally ill children. I hit a wall at the 17-mile mark but the crowd really pushed me on.
Alistair Musonzah
Charity work is fundamental to the Softcat ethos; it’s great to give something back, and it fuels our strong teamwork ethic. Comic Relief is one of our biggest charity efforts, and hosting a call centre enabled us to directly assist in raising a substantial amount of money in the space of just six hours.
Martin Hellawell
Softcat may have experienced a degree of good luck in terms of securing framework places in the early days, but there’s been nothing lucky about our qualitative tender responses since. Success here can largely be attributed to our implicit understanding and innovative ‘customer first’ approach – to our public sectors customers, along with the significant inward investment in growing our public sector team and expertise.
Andy Bruen
We know how frustrating it is calling out of hours with a technical issue and having to run through your entire account history with a new engineer. We can provide our customers with quality, consistent support for their customers, at any time, anywhere.
Colin Brown
Many of Softcat’s customers have global operations, and with offices as far away as Hong Kong, America, and Thailand, they want their end-users around the world to be able to talk to friendly, knowledgeable people outside of UK working hours.
Simon Walker
We’re always fundraising as a company – we just can’t get enough of it! It’s good to do something new – and it’s a privilege to support Comic Relief, especially on its 25th anniversary.
Charlie Harman
Charitable work is deeply infused into our work culture, so we’re absolutely thrilled to have been selected to host a call centre for Red Nose Day. Every year our employees nominate a charity they’d like to fundraise for, and we host a May Ball to generate donations. Red Nose Day is one of our largest charity efforts and we also raised almost £17,000 for Sport Relief last year, so we’re aiming to raise as much money as possible for Comic Relief. We’re aiming to top that this year.
Martin Hellawell
Las Vegas is famous for its spinning roulette wheels and Lady Luck, but Softcat doesn’t believe in gambling with its valued partners. This award recognises the consistent hard work and outstanding customer service provided by our sales and technical teams; we don’t take risks but we’re definitely in it to win it – for HP and our customers.
Martin Hellawell
Inclusion on this framework is recognition of the hard work and investment Softcat has made in the healthcare sector over the last three years. It’s no longer enough for a supplier to simply ship a competitively priced piece of hardware from A to B on a next-day basis. IT departments are adopting new, flexible ways of working and embracing initiatives like BYOD (bring your own device), which creates new issues such as device support, management and security. Softcat’s unrivalled experience of complementary technologies allows clients to make informed decisions that maximise budgets and deliver ‘real world’ efficiencies, whilst not losing any of the control needed within a healthcare environment.
Jamie Burke
This is a real accomplishment for Softcat and our trusted partners. It was a hard-fought tendering process where keen pricing, innovation and a ‘genuine value-add approach’ were key to both the successful suppliers and the NHS.
Andy Bruen
As proven by this year’s official listing as one of the UK’s best workplaces by ‘Great Place to Work’, we already had a unique, dynamic work culture – we just needed a workplace to match it. We’re not your typical company, so why should we settle for a typical workplace?”
Martin Hellawell
We are delighted to have been awarded a place as a supplier on the software contract. It reflects our historic association and strengths in selling software. Inclusion on more and more national university contracts is allowing Softcat to have more meaningful cross product conversations with university customers, helping to deliver considerable ‘value add’ in our relationships.
Andy Bruen
We look forward to working closely with SUPC member institutions and assisting them in providing best value software licensing solutions for both staff and students.
Nick Berry
We’re looking for people who want to work with cutting-edge technologies to deliver business-critical customer solutions. Our consulting and support positions offer the chance to work with great technology and great teams.
Sam Routledge
Having been nominated for two key Thames Valley Business Magazine Awards, we didn’t think this week could get any better, so we are thrilled to have won both. As a business we put a lot of energy into our social and charity commitments and I’m pleased that the Business of the Year award acknowledges those efforts. And obviously I’ll now be expecting an endless stream of innovative ideas from our ‘Business Management Team of the Year’ – they’ve got a lot to live up to!
Martin Hellawell
We are delighted to receive this prestigious award for the third year in a row. As always, we have our employees’ enthusiastic commitment to upholding the Softcat standard to thank for our success. We ensure that we recruit – and keep hold of – the very best people, and constantly strive for improvement and expansion in our product and service offerings. We’re continually trying to better our performance, and achieving the ‘Reseller of the Year’ award for the third year running really reflects this.
Martin Hellawell
Softcat is growing at an incredible pace, doubling both its headcount and turnover in just two years, and attributes that in large part to its focus on employee and customer satisfaction. I look forward to helping the company to build on the remarkable things that it has achieved.
Colin Brown
Softcat has won many awards on the national stage, but this is the first European IT industry award we’ve won.
Martin Hellawell
Good leadership from the very top of the organisation and good use of social media for customer interaction have helped Softcat to deliver strong customer retention and sustained growth over the last three years.
Jo Causon, judge for the Huawei Customer Focus Award category
Softcat attracts and retains the best talent to support growth in this innovative IT business.
Simon Perryman, judge for the Croner Employer of the Year Award category
It’s great to be in the running for these two awards, which we see as being interrelated. We believe our human resources policy, which aims to ensure the professional welfare and satisfaction of every employee, is instrumental in driving excellent customer service and business success.
Shelley Ferrigno, Softcat’s HR and recruitment manager
This year has been a challenging environment for British businesses: these finalists demonstrate how companies are succeeding in the current climate through innovation, originality and tenacity. It’s good to see a broad range of companies both in sector and size – an impressive representation of the potential British businesses have. Congratulations to all our finalists.
Baroness Virginia Bottomley, Chair of Judges
In the next financial year we will continue to focus our energy on our employees and customers. It is the hard work of the Softcat team and positive attitude towards our customers that will drive us towards our next big revenue milestone, and the one after that.
Martin Hellawell, Softcat’s managing director
Employee welfare is the centrepiece of absolutely everything we do and everything we are as a business. We have always done our best to keep our people enthused at work, to encourage a culture where people care about each other and the community we are building together. We have a very open, democratic structure at Softcat, and it works very well for us: our employees feel engaged; they feel that they belong, that they are part of something big. You feel the sense of togetherness and belonging in everything from our day-to-day work to the effort we put into raising funds at our charity events. We believe that this special culture is a huge part of what motivates us to provide an excellent level of service to our customers. And that, in turn, is what keeps us growing.
Shelley Ferrigno, Softcat's HR and recruitment manager
The standard of entries this year was particularly high so to have achieved 10th place is indeed a significant achievement, one which Softcat should be very proud of.
Tom O’Byrne, chief executive of Great Place to Work UK
Every single employee can take credit for this: they have all contributed to making Softcat a great place to work. This accolade isn’t about our directors and managers; it’s about all of us. It recognises what we have all achieved together. And we’re delighted to have done so well, and to have it recognised by an international standard. Being a great place to work is more important to us than anything else.
Martin Hellawell, managing director, Softcat
It makes me so proud to work for such a fantastic company. I have been at in the Marlow office for just over two years, and have loved every minute of it. I think Softcat gives you better opportunities to progress in your career than you would find anywhere else. I have had a lot of support and encouragement.
Rory Watts, account manager, Softcat
We are helping more and more of our customers to enjoy the benefits of Mimecast’s cloud-based approach to email management, removing the need for on-premise storage, reducing risk and improving data security. We would like to thank Mimecast for recognising our efforts, and for being a great company to work with.
Dave Simpson, Softcat's commercial director
For the fifth year running, Softcat has added tremendous value to what we do. Their hard work and commitment have been instrumental in helping us to retain our customers and maintain our strong year-on-year growth. We are delighted to present them with this award once again.
Alan Kenny, general manager, Mimecast
This award follows hot on the heels of our Commercial Partner of the Year accolade from Cisco and winning HP’s Storage Partner of the Year Award, which should see CPC’s membership benefit from our stand-out competencies in storage, backup and networking. It’s another important step forward in our strategy to expand and grow our service offering into further education and the wider education space.
Andy Bruen, Softcat’s public sector frameworks manager
The team at Softcat never fails to impress. We are proud to call them our Partner of the Year. This is a tribute to their outstanding year-on-year revenue growth and burning passion for customer service.
James Vyvyan, director of channel sales at Sophos
We would like to thank our colleagues at Sophos for helping us to win these awards. Their mobile security and encryption products are very popular with our customers at the moment. It also helps that we enjoy such a positive relationship at every level within the organisation.
Dave Simpson, Softcat’s commercial director
We’re seeing strong growth across all of our security services. Outsourcing firewall protection is nearly always more cost-effective than hiring in-house firewall experts, as it offers 24-hour monitoring of your infrastructure and gives assistance as and when you need it. Our managed firewall service customers have nothing to worry about when it comes to servicing and maintaining their infrastructure – we take care of it all, monitoring their firewalls 24 hours a day for glitches and intruders.
Simon Walker, managed services director, Softcat
After securing places on recent University print and audio visual frameworks Softcat’s inclusion on the ITRAP agreement supports our vision of becoming the number one supplier of Information Technology to this sector. Over the last 18 months Softcat have employed in excess of 100 graduates which means we have an excellent understanding of how technology is currently being used in Higher Education to both deliver and enhance the curriculum
Nick Berry, Softcat’s education business development manager
Softcat are delighted to have been awarded a place as a supplier on the ITRAP contract. We felt this appointment was critical for the continued progression of Softcat’s brand in the higher and further education market space, and reaffirms our commitment to broadening our engagement within the sector. We’ll be looking to bring a refreshing change for the universities procuring their IT accessories and peripherals through the agreement.
Andy Bruen, Softcat’s public sector frameworks manager
A number of our clients are already using the service, and so far the feedback is excellent, Customers really want to run these critical scans but just don’t have the time to do it. Our service ensures our customer don’t have to buy and maintain the appliances themselves. The Secure 24 x 7 NOC team takes care of proactively reviewing the results and highlighting critical issues for them. Cloud Softcat’s xStorm service enables our customers to be confident that their external facing infrastructure is patched against the latest vulnerabilities.
Simon Walker, managed services director at Softcat
Compliance with the ISO 27001 and PCI DSS security standards is important, of course, but plain common sense is the best reason for businesses to perform vulnerability scans. If you keep your public-facing infrastructure secure, it helps to prevent hackers from stealing your data, your money or your patents. That’s why we are launching this service for our customers.
Robert Pooley, IT security business manager at Softcat
We are really pleased with the results. We get a lot of positive feedback from customers and do our own surveys, but it’s great to see this validated and recognised by an expert third party. I think customer service generally in the UK is just not good enough. I am convinced that the key ingredient for success in our industry is excellence in customer service and at Softcat we have become obsessed with continual improvement in this area. If anyone wants to know why the company has doubled in size in the last two years, that’s pretty much it. However, this is work in progress – we can still get a lot better.
Martin Hellawell, managing director of Softcat
The Softcat results knocked us over. The customer culture is so strong in the organisation, it just shines through. A lot of people talk about employee satisfaction leading to customer satisfaction, but satisfying customers is no longer enough these days – you need to delight them, and Softcat is the best example we have seen of this in practise. The only two organisations who have ever scored higher in our process both employed less than 15 people and their business is a very personal service. These are the best results of a company employing a significant number of people we have seen.
Charlie Williams, business development director at IIC
There is clearly a market for ad hoc video conferencing and document sharing, and iMeet is a particularly attractive, modern solution,” he said. “We feel that our customers will find it easy to use and will enjoy its simple, elegant user interface.
Sam Routledge, solutions director at Softcat
A key focus for PGi in 2012 is on developing distribution channels for iMeet in Europe. Softcat is a leading UK reseller, with a high profile customer base and quality reputation. We are delighted to align with Softcat to offer iMeet to their business customers, giving them an innovative way to meet in video that is simple, personal and always available – anywhere and from any device.
Micheal McHugh, PGi’s European channel sales director
We’ve come a long way from the Softcat that we used to be. In the past we focused predominantly on software licensing; today we are recognised by HP as its top-performing partner in the hardware business. We have become a lot more comprehensive in what we offer: everything from managed services, including cloud-based support, to standalone technical services, covering a wide range of options for our customers. It’s great to win these awards.
Martin Hellawell, managing director of Softcat
It’s easy to see why we awarded the top accolade to Softcat this year. They consistently deliver quality and an impressive mix of solutions to their customers, and they have outstanding growth figures to show for their efforts.
Kevin Matthews, HP’s enterprise storage, server and networking channel manager for the UK and Ireland
This is the culmination of many years of hard effort. We have invested in our very own multi-million pound network operations centre (NOC) in Marlow, with data centre infrastructure in London and Manchester, and have won a string of awards establishing us as a ‘partner of choice’ within cloud computing. We now look to the future for public sector IT procurement in the UK.
Andy Bruen, Softcat’s public sector frameworks manager
We are delighted to have our cloud platform validated by inclusion in the G-Cloud Framework, and excited by this opportunity to assist public sector organisations in reducing cost and gaining access to a more flexible IT architecture. As an HP Cloud Centre of Excellence and Microsoft Cloud Champion, as well as recently being named VMware Partner of the Year, we are ideally placed to support our customers in their journey to the cloud.
Simon Walker, Softcat’s managed services director
We’re excited to be forging even closer links with our university customers. We have recruited 80% of our employees directly from a graduate background, so there is a strong adjacency and empathy between Softcat and our university customer base. This year we are looking to recruit more than 100 new account managers, and it’s extremely valuable to canvas the opinions of recent graduates to understand how the higher education sector is making use of technology.
Andy Bruen, Softcat’s public sector frameworks manager
The framework offers us an invaluable vehicle with which to shine and excel within the wider education sector. Historically our core competencies have been seen to be in the server and storage space, where we directly employ 30 or more comprehensively qualified in-house engineering professionals, and retain apex vendor accreditation. Our education customer base can only benefit from Softcat’s service delivery through CPC’s brand new IT framework.
Andy Bruen, Softcat’s public sector frameworks manager