Emnico Technologies, the Swindon-based IT support and software services company, has been awarded a substantial grant from the Technology Strategy Board (www.innovateuk.org) to develop a new IT product that could help to improve the competitiveness of small and medium-sized companies across the UK.
The Technology Strategy Board – the UK’s national innovation agency – is based in Swindon and works to accelerate economic growth across the UK by stimulating and supporting business-led innovation.
Upon receiving the grant, Emnico managing director, Heydar Faramarzi, said: "Like many other businesses, Emnico Technologies has needed to continuously diversify in the current economic climate. This Technology Strategy Board funding has enabled us to take a major leap from incremental advances to a significant innovation with real economic and business value."
Emnico’s development project focuses on efficient ways of identifying valuable data from IT infrastructures, and the processing of this data to extract commercial knowledge to improve the speed of IT fault diagnosis & recovery, provide tailored IT advice to clients and supply better information to application vendors about the causes of software bugs and IT failures. The project will see Emnico working in partnership with Kasra Technologies, based in Cambridge.
The project outcomes will improve the competitiveness and growth of small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) as a result of better utilisation of IT for increased productivity, improved reporting, and better quality of service that they provide to their end-users. SMEs will also benefit from reduced service downtimes and maintenance costs that will arise from the combination of highly efficient IT support service and more proactive and tailored IT advice.
The total cost of Emnico’s development project is £540,000 and the Technology Strategy Board has offered to fund half of this. The award follows the company’s success in the “Harnessing Large and Diverse Sources of Data” funding competition, which resulted in the Technology Strategy Board agreeing to invest £5 million of government funding in twenty-one new research and development projects across the UK aimed at helping stimulate the development of innovative technologies and strategies to enable businesses to extract greater value from large and diverse data sources.
Emnico took part in the national competition following a meeting at the Technology Strategy Board’s Swindon office, where Heydar Faramarzi met Zoe Webster, now head of technology at the Technology Strategy Board.
Ms Webster said: “Nearly two-thirds of commercial innovations originate in small companies and we need to encourage and nurture this vital source of wealth-generating new products and services. We are very pleased to support Emnico Technologies’ project. While the company is on our doorstep here in Swindon, their work could benefit companies across the country.”
