NORTH-EAST based IT firm ITPS is celebrating winning a European industry award for its expertise in helping clients cut operating costs by outsourcing their IT infrastructure management and development.

The Gateshead business beat 140 resellers across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region to collect the CA arcserve European Managed Services Partner of the year trophy, awarded by US-based software giant CA Technologies at its Partner Summit in Barcelona in May.

Managed services is the hot area in IT, and sees organisations effectively outsourcing all or part of their IT function to lower costs, strengthens customer relationships and improve financial management.

The judges looked at ITPS’s track record and level of technical consultancy and engineering expertise, the number of clients it supports and the security and speed of its three ISO27001-certified data centres, which underpin its cloud managed services offering. The company has invested £750,000 in high speed connectivity and a further £750,000 in its Cisco UCS platform, which combines computing, networking and storage in one simplified and cost effective environment.

The award was collected by Paul Anderson, operations director at ITPS, who said: “This award is a real honour for our team, who are 100% committed to helping clients get maximum value from their IT investment.

“Organisations are turning away from trying to expect their in-house IT team to handle day to day issues and keep pace with technology developments, and towards working with an expert managed services partner who can make sure a business has a robust IT infrastructure that keeps pace with their needs and continually delivers the best return.

“A third of the European competitors in the running for this award operate only in the managed services arena, rather than having high level expertise across a wide range of areas as we do, so it was even more gratifying to bring the award back to the North-East.”