Tech East Member Spotlight: IJYI

In the spotlight this month is IJYI: a software development and DevOps firm based in Ipswich. We caught up with founder, Chris Pont, about life at IJYI. We discussed their committed involvement in the East Anglian tech community, as well as how he hopes to see the company develop over the next year.

 Hi Chris! Can you tell me a bit about what you do at IJYI? 

 I co-founded IJYI in 2014 with my business partner, John Nicholson. We are a software development, DevOps, and cloud consultancy firm. Clients come to us with an idea or problem, and we help them boil it down, deploy a solution, and offer ongoing support if necessary. One way we offer this is through our five-day sprint workshops. This is a very defined process which takes a business problem and spends five days prototyping a solution. We end the sprint by interviewing our clients’ customers on the fifth day. This helps our clients understand how their product ideas are seen by other people.

We are proud to hold a number of accreditations that help us better serve our clients. We’re a Microsoft Azure partner, as well as an Amazon AWS partner. These partnerships allow us to provide better support on cloud projects. We are also one of just a handful of Microsoft DevOps partners in the UK.

What inspired you to found IJYI?

John and I are both ex-IT contractors, frustrated by the industry of enterprise software development.

Typically, there isn’t enough collaboration in enterprise software dev. There are too many ‘middle men’ getting in the way, and customers don’t have much input in the solutions that will affect their businesses.

We founded IJYI as a software consultancy that champions collaboration. We invite customers to spend time at our offices as we work on their projects. We encourage customers to be ‘hands-on’, making changes and asking questions as we work. We find that enabling the customer to be part of the journey generally means they’re more satisfied by the outcome. To us, they’re not just clients – they’re a part of the team.

How has the last year been for IJYI?

It’s been a little crazy! We moved premises at the end of last August, and are now based in the Connexions 159 building in Ipswich. We were the first business to move into this new office facility, which allowed us to have our pick of the spaces and build a custom area that suited the company. We created a dedicated collaboration space, which is fantastic for our sprint workshops and brainstorming among the team.

We have also grown the team to keep up with our influx of new clients. We have taken on six new team members over the last three weeks, and hired a new business development manager back in January. We are already booked up for work over the next three to six months – it’s going to be busy, but exciting!

Where do you hope the company will be this time next year?

Over the next year, we hope IJYI will gradually take on larger projects and continue on our growth trajectory. We currently have 22 employees, and would like to expand the team by another third over the next year.

We are committed to supporting the East Anglian tech community, and we’d like to increase our involvement with this in 2018/19.

Can you tell me about IJYI’s involvement in the East Anglian tech community so far?

We sponsor the regular SyncIpswich meetup group.  IJYI has a very important role here: we provide the pizzas! We also take part in the East of England Agile User Group meetup.

We also like to get involved with larger events, too. We were a silver sponsor for the first ever DevEast conference in Ipswich this year, and will be a headline sponsor in 2019. Next year’s event is set to be even bigger and better, and is relocating to the Ipswich Corn Exchange so it can host even more developers!

We are also a headline sponsor of the next Norfolk Developers Conference taking place in 2019.

One of things that helps cultivates London’s reputation as the ‘tech capital’ is its large number of digital meetup groups. We want to replicate this ‘meeetup culture’ in the East, and use it to help develop our own tech scene.

In your opinion, what is it that makes East Anglia a great home for tech businesses?

While we’re a strong tech presence in our own right, East Anglia’s close proximity to London doesn’t hurt. It has certainly helped IJYI acquire some of the larger clients that have helped us to grow.

We know of several talented individuals from East Anglia who previously had to commute to London for a career in tech. However, the growth of our home tech cluster has allowed us to retain some of the great talent we used to lose to London. This, in turn, allows East Anglia’s tech scene to grow further.

What challenges does East Anglia need to overcome in order to be a top five tech cluster by 2020?

I think marketing is one of the largest challenges for our tech scene here in East Anglia. We need to make sure that people beyond the region know that these clusters are growing. While many are aware of Cambridge’s tech presence – mostly due to Cambridge University – Norwich, Ipswich, and beyond don’t receive the same recognition. We need to get much better at showing off our achievements to the rest of the country!

We have a great community of tech experts in East Anglia, but we need to make sure the skills and knowledge present here are maintained – meetup groups are very important for this. If tech is to continue to grow in the region, we need to ensure there’s enough talent to support it.

And finally, why did IJYI join TechEast?

To us, TechEast represents lots of great businesses working together, so we wanted to be a part of that community.

The ability to use the TechEast embassy for hot-desking is also a big draw. We popped in to the new embassy at Runway East recently and we were very impressed by the facilities! We made use of the space for a workshop, and it worked perfectly. It’s really useful to have the ability to head to London early when you have a meeting, but still have somewhere you can go to get some work done!