Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

Not every entrant can walk away with the glittering baccarat crystal obelisks when the gala presentation dinner is held in February 2004.

But they will all experience an unrivalled stimulus to their growth strategies through a number of guaranteed spin-off benefits throughout the process including:-

• Outstanding PR and promotion in Business Weekly and on our phenomenally successful website

• Increased profile to boost morale of staff, clients, suppliers and investors

• The opportunity to benchmark progress against contemporaries

• A showcase for products and services which could help raise vital growth capital

• Outstanding opportunities for networking and winning new business as executives of world-leading organisations attend the gala dinner

• Crystal obelisks and consultancy prizes for the winning companies in six categories.

There are four major categories in the main body of the Awards programme – Innovation (principally for hi-tech and biotech companies with innovative products and services); Growth & Expansion; Private Company of the Year and Quoted Company of the Year.

On top of all of these accolades comes the Business of the Year Award, designed to find the company – regardless of size or status – which has stood out above all others for its commercial progress.

The East of England Development Agency is once again sponsoring a separate ‘Spirit of Ingenuity’ Award aimed at recognising out-of-the-box thinking.

All the Awards categories are judged by leading East of England business executives, making them the most credible B2B awards in the UK.

Dr John Brown, chief executive of reigning ‘Business of the Year’ Acambis – the company which has delivered a huge stockpile of smallpox vaccines for the White House – calls the competition “the region’s leading business awards.”

Gerald Avison, chief executive of former champion business TTP (The Technology Partnership) says these Awards have helped a number of top companies raise growth capital and their status on the world stage.

Whatever your size; regardless of your industry sector, these Awards are designed to help in your growth strategy. Even if you are a one-man band or a very young and embryonic spin-out from a local University or research organisation we want to hear from you.

The quality of the sponsors has been enhanced even further this year. Leading chartered accountant and business adviser, Deloitte & Touche, is backing the competition for the first time as sponsor of the Growth & Expansion category.

It joins major sponsors – law firm Mills & Reeve and English Partnerships, the government’s regeneration agency – the London Stock Exchange and EEDA as quality backers of a quality competition.

Make sure you enter!

NEW ENTRY

BT Exact

(Innovation category)

BT Exact is BT’s research, technology and IT operations business.

It offers expertise and experience in information and communications technology (ICT), backed by a team of over 6,000 technologists and one of the world’s largest communications research and development facilities.

As the centre of technical expertise for the BT Group, BT Exact has established a record of world-first achievements.

BT Exact also runs BT’s IT infrastructure – one of the world’s largest, allowing over 300 million secure transactions a day, and includes one of the largest intranets in Europe.

It serves hundreds of BT buildings with a sophisticated corporate information network that delivers a host of leading technology and services to the BT workforce.

The company’s massive mainframe and mid-range server estate delivers around 900 of BT’s mission critical computing systems, plus 600 new, integrated packaged solutions a year.

BT’s computing operations have been ranked among the world’s best by a leading analyst – with its mainframe services named the world’s most cost effective for the last two years running, while its mid-range services have also been ranked in the top quartile.

Headed by chief executive officer, Stewart Davies, BT Exact’s expertise is well known across the world and it has developed an extremely valuable intellectual property portfolio. It is able to exploit this in a way that no other IPR developer is able to through innovative approaches such as NVP Brightstar and IPVALUE.

BT Exact’s partners and customers include world-leading organisations in the business and academic world. The work they do together challenges and drives forward the state-of-the-art. Many of the products and services it has developed for use within BT compare favourably with those available on the external market, and BT Exact is therefore working with other parts of BT to commercialise its technological capabilities and enable BT to tap into new markets.

At BT Exact’s core are BT’s world-renowned laboratories at Adastral Park, Martlesham, near Ipswich, which have been responsible for some of the world’s most far-reaching telecomms technology advances.

For example, development of single-mode optical fibre enabling much more efficient use of optical fibre, now used worldwide; and the development of the technology and worldwide standards behind passenger phones on aircraft, submarine optical fibre cables and videoconferencing, amongst others.

BT Exact has people based worldwide – including locations across the UK and in Asia, continental Europe, and North America. Its Adastral Park laboratories, located at one end of the Cambridge-2-Ipswich Hi Tech Corridor, provide BT Exact’s headquarters and is home to one of the highest concentrations of technologists in Europe.

As one of the East of England’s largest hi-tech employers, BT Exact is a founder member of the Cambridge Network and plays an active role in the regional community.

NEW ENTRY

NVP Brightstar

(Growth&Expansion category)

In February 2003, BT Exact announced that it had teamed up with New Venture Partners (NVP) to create a new, independent corporate venturing partnership to be known as NVP Brightstar.

The new organisation was given exclusive rights to create new start-up businesses with BT Exact using BT’s extensive and developing intellectual property portfolio, and is backed financially by Coller Capital.

NVP Brightstar started trading on 1 April 2003 and initially purchased the majority of the existing portfolio of technology ventures developed by BT Exact’s corporate incubator, Brightstar.

Since trading began, the focus within NVP Brightstar has been to establish and bed-in its portfolio of new businesses. To date, each of the businesses has generated significant revenue and value. The deal has also been good for the East of England because it has created a significant number of new jobs in the region. NVP Brightstar has also opened a new office locally in Adastral Park.

Now that the companies are well established and all the activity around the NVP Brightstar deal has settled down, the business is turning its attention to growing the portfolio further. It is currently working closely with BT Exact with a view to finding the next successful NVP Brightstar company. A new venture is expected later on this year.

The business has also been looking at building and strengthening its network with other large corporate R&D labs and expects to make some announcements in the autumn.

The model created by the deal remains unique and between NVP and NVP Brightstar 44 companies have now been created, both here and in the USA. There are also some great announcements in the pipeline, so watch this space!

Harry Berry, managing partner of NVP Brightstar, said: “It has been a very exciting couple of months for NVP Brightstar.

“Whilst our main focus has been on establishing the four existing companies, we have also been seeking out new businesses.

“Our unique agreement with BT means we have access to all BT’s exciting portfolio of technologies. We are currently studying a number of disruptive technologies for their potential to create new ventures.”

The initial portfolio of businesses based on BT Exact’s intellectual property (IP) includes:-

• a.p.solve, the provider of intelligent fieldforce management solutions;

• Azure, the telecoms revenue assurance specialist;

• Evolved Networks, the provider of artificial-intelligence-based software that automates telecoms network design and provisioning, delivering substantial time and cost savings;

• Microwave Photonics, developer of new enabling technology that will revolutionise enterprise wireless LANs (WiFi) and mobile cellular infrastructure;

• Psytechnics, leading developer of voice quality measurement software that integrates into telecommunications test equipment, VoIP devices, switching platforms and mobile networks.

It was one of the first businesses to successfully spin out of BT Brightstar in December 2000. As part of the deal struck earlier this year, NVP Brightstar acquired a significant stake in Psytechnics from BT.

NEW ENTRY

Abcam

(Growth&Innovation category)

ABCAM, a Cambridge Life Sciences company with a niche in antibody archiving, has entered the Growth & Innovation category of the Awards.

Abcam, based on Cambridge Science Park, was founded in 1998 by Dr Jonathan Milner who, like many life science researchers, was frustrated by the time it took to locate and select antibodies essential for his research. “This was largely due to poor information and out-of-date catalogues from the vast range of suppliers who were spread across many countries.

“In some cases, I also experienced difficulties with companies whose products were unreliable and whose customer service was slow and unhelpful. My vision was to build a company that offered reliable products, great customer service and that would enable researchers to quickly find the best antibodies for their research.”

Embracing the Internet, Abcam built an online catalogue to enable researchers to find their products in a matter of seconds.

Five years on and with thousands of products across its range, Abcam ships to scientists in over 50 countries around the world.

“Since our inception Abcam has been committed to three fundamental principles that have seen us become the first choice for thousands of life-scientists throughout industry and academia,” said Dr Milner

The company has developed web-based systems that enable it to quickly identify cutting-edge products, make them rapidly available to customers and deliver them quickly throughout the world.

Abcam handles same-day despatch and overnight delivery to almost anywhere in the world , using its in-house order processing system which it has integrated directly with FedEx’s international despatch system.

Abcam’s catalogue is updated regularly throughout the day with new products and new information.

Abcam has continued to improve its capabilities and is now acknowledged as the first choice for thousands of life-scientists throughout industry and academia.

Abcam has already spun out a new company – Cambridge Theranostics Ltd – to explore some exciting research in the area of atherosclerosis diagnosis and therapy.