Dorset: Another record year for Blue Chip as investment pays back
IT specialist Blue Chip has reported another record year with turnover increasing from £18 million to £20m for the year 2012/2013. This growth has predominantly come from providing additional value-added services, rather than the traditional reseller approach of equipment sales with services as an add-on.
Managing director Richard Cook said: “We have seen year-on-year growth even throughout the economic downturn, as our business strategy has focused on a customer-centric, one-stop-shop environment with investment in our business services offerings.
"More and more customers are valuing our expert and independent consultation and long-term relationship approach to deliver the right-fit solution for their businesses – whether that is traditional on-premise hardware, cloud-based infrastructure with the associated cost savings, or a hybrid. By partnering with all the major vendors we are able to look closely at the customer’s exact requirements and use our expertise to recommend a right-fit solution that will benefit the organisation well into the future.”
Another significant area of success this year has been the number of customers subscribing to Blue Chip's cloud-based solutions. Cook continued: "Last year we announced investment in our cloud offerings including building an extensive computer platform to enable the business to deliver Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and online backup to customers – the latter for which we have just won the eVault European Award as Best Service Provider.
"In the past 12 months, customer uptake has been beyond expectations, with revenues exceeding the forecasted £1.5m, growing from £750,000 per annum in 2011/2012 to £2m in 2012/1013.
"Moving forward we are investing a further £1m over the next three years to expand from two to four datacentres, with the addition of two significant IaaS Platforms in order to triple the capacity available for customers.”
Blue Chip’s successes are taking place against a backdrop of service excellence following the introduction last year of a customer service programme to benchmark performance against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It tracks and monitors the services delivered throughout the organisation to provide service excellence across the board, while setting stringent Service Level Agreements (SLA); performance against these are currently exceeding 98% on average.
“Customers are delighted with the end-to-end approach and the fact that we are evaluating our own performance,” said Cook. “It has not only been a major factor in customer retention, we have gained new customers, since competitors simply cannot compete with our full-service offering and value for money.”
Further investment in the business’ office and training facilities, the recruitment of 30 additional technical staff to service a growing customer portfolio, plus a significant up-turn in the requirement for projects as the economy starts to recover, are also key factors in this year’s financial announcement.
Cook summed up: “We have worked hard and invested in our infrastructure, service offering and technical capability over the past two years and are beginning to see how successful it is, both for our customers and for our business as a whole. With the successes of our projects teams in addition to our year-round business services and cloud-based offerings, we will be watching this specialist area of our business closely as confidence in the economy continues to grow and businesses look to upgrade and enhance their IT systems with the latest money-saving technologies.”
