TechWeekEurope has announced the shortlist for its first Tech Success awards – with front runners including giant data centres,a water utility and a Primary School in Wales.

The Tech Success awards are designed to celebrate the achievements of IT managers and CIOs in end-user companies.  The arrival of cloud and mobile technologies is ushering in a new era, where IT departments can become more responsive to user needs, and TechWeekEurope is recognising this with a user -focused set of awards for companies that are capitalising on this change.

Who’s got the best IT projects?

In its first year,  the Tech Success Awards attracted a strong field of more than 80 entrants, and the panel of editors had a tough time debating the merits of all those sent in. If your project is not in the shortlist, don’t despair, you have done good work and your users are surely grateful.

Who is on the shortlist?  Here are the names, decided by TechWeekEurope Editor Peter Judge, and our panel of judges, including Ian Osborne, Intellect UK; Clive Longbottom, QuoCirca; Liam Newcombe, Romonet; and Mark Taylor, Sirius IT.

Green Project of the Year
  • Veolia Water – which saved a million litres of water a day using a monitoring system from i2O Water, which remotely diagnoses leaks and problems
  • Cadoxton Primary School – which installed a solar-powered ICT suite using low-energy terminals, working with Solar Ready
  • Memset – a hosting company which worked with Surrey University to reduce energy consumption from 28W per virtual machine, to 4.7W
Cloud Project of the Year
  • Orbian – Supply chain finance company moves to virtual data centre from Adapt
  • Doner – eCRM furm moves to private cloud with and saves 60 percent on hosting bills using Pulsant
  • O2 – Mobile phone giant gets users on new contracts quicker using CloudSense
Mobile Project of the Year
  • Surrey County Council – BlackBerry phones and tablets let the council’s youth services work quickly with confidential data
  • Laing O’Rourke – Construction firm uses mobile devices to make sure its staff can all get home every day
  • Stockport Homes – Social housing provider automates customer visits using Android tablet
Public Sector Product of the Year
  • Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust (CHUFT) – Health team uses QlikView apps to monitor patient care and reduce mortality
  • Harrow Council – Parking services works faster using online forms from FirmStep
  • NHS Institute – Central health innovation body uses the open source Alfresco content management system to make its documents more accessible
Most Innovative Project of the Year
  • Farrell Heyworth – Estate agent uses social media and analysis to find out what customers really want
  • Jaguar Land Rover – Virtual high-performance computing clusters help manufacturer go quickly from “virtual cars” to real machines
  • YouG0v – Polling and market research firm moved its data centre from Berlin to the UK by virtualising it first

In the first year of the Tech Success awards, there were two categories where we felt we didn’t have enough entries to justify giving a prize. Big Data, it seems is not yet established enough, or else Big Data users are still keeping their best results secret. Either way we didn’t have enough entrants to choose from.

Meanwhile Open Source is very well-established, and we are aware of many great projects in the UK – but we didn’t get enough applications in by our deadline for this prize.

The entries we did receive for these categories were redistributed to other categories where they fitted, and we will redouble our efforts to round up a powerful shortlist for both Big Data and Open Source next year.

We will finally announce the winners of the Tech Success awards in a webcast on 6 December at 11.30 GMT. Please join us, either through our Live Events channel or through the embedded player below.

In partnership with

Peter Judge

Peter Judge has been involved with tech B2B publishing in the UK for many years, working at Ziff-Davis, ZDNet, IDG and Reed. His main interests are networking security, mobility and cloud

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