10/11/2017 - Market news
Acturis scoops 1st prize at Clearwater International's Cloudex awards
Acturis, pioneer of the development of electronic trading for commercial insurance in the UK, has been announced the winner of the 2017 Cloudex awards. The company has featured in the top three at Cloudex over the past few years. Today it provides its platform to many of the UK’s largest general insurers and brokers.
Now in its fifth year, Clearwater International launched its Cloudex awards as the business was keen to profile the most innovative and emerging companies in the UK cloud industry. Since then cloud technologies have transformed the way companies do business, both internally and externally, across virtually every sector of the economy.
Following the success of previous awards, this year’s distinguished panel of judges drew up a shortlist of 20 companies before selecting their overall top three, plus a ‘one to watch’ winner. The judges remarked that this year saw a very high quality of entries across a broad range of sectors. As Emma Rodgers, Director at Clearwater International said: “It demonstrates that the cloud is now all-pervasive across different markets. Even those sectors which have traditionally been slower to adopt new technologies are now seeing take-up.”
Matillion, a provider of purpose-built ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) solutions for cloud data platforms was announced as runner-up. Kimble Applications, a professional services automation solution designed specifically for consulting organisations came third with Thoughtonomy, a ‘virtual workforce’ provider highlighted as the ‘one to watch’
Theo Duchen, Co-CEO, Acturis Group, said: </strong>“We are very grateful for the recognition. This is not a one day wonder, this is 16 years in the making! It has been a gradual climb and we are finally seeing the benefits of that. Because we are a pure disruptor in a very conservative market it has taken persistence and a connected offer to win over customers, and it takes a while for such a conservative market to have the courage to embrace the cloud.
“But what we do has massive benefits for productivity. We are now the biggest player in Germany and are looking to replicate that in other geographies in Europe and beyond.”
Matthew Scullion, Founder and CEO, Matillion, commented:</strong> “We are at the intersection of two very interesting dynamics and from day one of our business we wanted to be at that meeting point. Firstly you have the cloud, a once in a generation opportunity for IT. And secondly you have the rise of data analytics. Businesses today use data to compete more than ever, and 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years with companies becoming aggressive around that.
“This award is wonderful for us. It is fantastic to be recognised as a company that means something in the UK cloud space. Today we are selling across 40 countries and the recognition from these awards also has a dollar value in terms of winning new customers.”
Rob Bruce, VP Marketing, Kimble, said: “This award is fantastic because we are really starting to get recognition in the market. We are seeing 70% year on year revenue growth and more than half of our business is now with the US. We are very niche and there is a lot of latent opportunity in the market, there are a lot of businesses to go at. We are bringing strong innovation to the market and AI is really meaningful in our world now.
“40,000 people are using Kimble every day to do their job and we are using AI to encourage people to operate their businesses in the right way, getting the very best from software capability.”
Terry Walby, CEO, Thoughtonomy, commented:</strong> “There has been a lot of hype around AI but we have reached an inflexion point where you can make it real for business without having to have huge transformation in the way they operate their business.
“We set out to create a platform which says ‘there is a better way of doing this and a better way of leveraging the technology’. We are creating an environment where you can effectively democratise AI and we are making it easier for companies to be self-sufficient, creating a platform that allows people to layer knowledge and remove barriers.
“We are taking people on a journey. The cloud enables us to do all this, and we are a true born in the cloud company.”
