14 technology
Success celebrated at Southampton Science Park
The past few months have seen a flurry of success for Southampton Science Park tenants, with five companies raising funding, and six businesses moving into the newly- refurbished Science Centre.
The launch of the Science Centre late in 2013 has so far given six innovative businesses the flexible space they need to grow. These are: EchoVista, a company developing a system of ultrasonic droplet dispersal to replace windscreen wipers; SoftIron, a pioneering computer business launching the world’s lowest energy server boards; Mobile Onboard, which provides mobile ticketing (including the Science Park bus service) and wi-fi for the transport industry; isodo3d, a company providing personal, professional and production 3D printers as well as 3D printing services; Cascoda, a SETsquared member which is creating high- speed low-energy semiconductors, and SAL Scientific, which provides services and solutions to organisations that use mammalian cells in their drug discovery.
As well as this, the Science Park has seen an influx of funding in recent months with five tenants being awarded grants totalling over £450,000 to help develop their businesses.
parliamentary candidate for Southampton Itchen for the 2015 General Election, to pay a visit to discover how the Park is encouraging growth and investment in the region. She was keen to see how tenants are using science and technology in novel ways to solve real world problems, and the innovative work being done by the Park itself. The Catalyst Centre and the new ’pay- as-you-go’ lab facilities were also high on her agenda.
Davis commented: “I have no doubt that advanced technology and manufacturing centres like Southampton Science Park will be part of the future, and we should celebrate and extend them. It made me proud to think that such a great institution, providing jobs by developing technology and advanced manufacturing, could be right there on our doorstep.“
Aurora Medical, a company creating innovative orthopaedic design solutions has received funding from INTERREG, financed by the European Regional Development Fund, and Humaware, which develops mechanical prognostics, has been awarded funding from the ’Enabling the Digital Rail Competition’.
In addition SEaB Energy, SoftIron and Cascoda have all been awarded funding from the Future Solent Green Growth Programme. The Science Park has close links to the programme and its tenants are regarded as a priority for research
and development (R&D) funding in the region.
SEaB Energy, the global pioneer of mobile micro power plants, will use its grant to create seven new jobs as well as allowing the company to establish a new prototyping facility for R&D; SoftIron has used its grant to move into the Science Centre to continue its R&D programme, and Cascoda has also used its funding to move into larger premises in the Science Centre. Its new office now incorporates a specialist R&D area, enabling it to take on more staff.
This recent activity prompted Rowenna Davis, the Labour
Southampton Science Park CEO Peter Birkett said: “It’s exciting to see our tenants being successful with their funding applications. The increasing availability of government grants for science and technology companies is really helping small businesses to flourish. Our investment in young dynamic businesses through the premises and services that we provide here is really paying off and helping to make Southampton a ’go to’ place for science and technology companies from start- up to maturity.“
Details:
www.science-park.co.uk
Blue Chip invests £1m in partnership with Vodafone Training
IT specialist and training provider Blue Chip, headquartered in Poole, has expanded its industry- leading cloud capability and cloud services offering, investing a further £1 million in the best available datacentre capacity and infrastructure at Vodafone’s prominent Tier 3 datacentres in Leeds and Uxbridge.
Boasting high-capacity, high- availability, first-class connectivity and built-in resilience, Vodafone’s datacentres offer Blue Chip customers the highest-level security and most robust server, security and storage infrastructure available, said a spokesperson from the company.
www.businessmag.co.uk
He added: “The investment in this standard of infrastructure is further demonstration of Blue Chip’s commitment to a fast-growing national customer base, as more businesses move away from strictly on-premise solutions to cloud infrastructure and services.“
Anthony Green, sales and marketing director, explained: “This expansion is part of our ongoing investment programme to provide customers with complete, high-end and secure cloud or hybrid cloud, on-premise solutions – a strategy that has already set Blue Chip apart with customer uptake more than three times the anticipated level for 2013/2014.
“The addition of datacentres in Uxbridge and Leeds has doubled our datacentre locations from two to four and added two significant IaaS Platforms.
“This will enable us to fulfil the extraordinary demand from customers wishing to subscribe to our industry-leading, cloud- based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and cloud-based business solutions.“
Consultation
Blue Chip is offering businesses a free cloud computing and IaaS consultation to find out whether cloud is right for them.
It is also running a free-of-charge SharePoint 2013 workshop and demonstration, which will take place at Blue Chip’s training suite at its headquarters in Poole on the morning of Thursday September 11.
This will be an open forum for attendees to explore new ways to share work, organise projects and teams and discover people and information, as well as publishing content to SharePoint from any Microsoft Office application with the ability to share documents with people inside or outside a business.
Details:
www.bluechip.uk.com THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – SOLENT & SOUTH CENTRAL – SEPTEMBER 2014
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