SCOTTISH technology firm NVT Group is on track for a “record-breaking” year as it continues to reap the benefits of delivering projects at major international sporting events.
Managing director Hamish Fraser said the company, founded 30 years ago by chairman Stephen Park Brown, is on track to generate turnover of up to £10 million in 2018. It had already matched last year’s turnover, of £6.9m, in the first seven months of the year.
The expansion has NVT on course to deliver annual profits in the region of £700,000 to £800,000 – more than double the £315,696 it achieved in 2017.
Mr Fraser said the Bellshill-based company is benefiting from the innovations it developed for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014, when it provided a range of technology to the event. Those innovations have since been enhanced and redeployed, including at the Glasgow 2018 European Championships this summer.
Mr Fraser said NVT’s work at Glasgow 2018, which saw the city stage cycling, swimming, and gymnastics events while Berlin hosted athletics, had been a “massive success”. He stated: “As part of our growth figures, that is a very strong pillar in that performance.”
Asked how important it has been for NVT to establish a track record in providing services to major sporting events, Mr Fraser replied: “I think they have been strategically important. This journey started back in 2012 when we won the public sector tender for the Commonwealth Games.
“We subsequently went on and delivered additional multi-sport projects out in Baku in Azerbaijan (the first European Games in 2015), which was a piece of international business we would never have had had we not won the Commonwealth. Equally, we’d never have moved on and won the European Championships had we not had that unique capability in Scotland, actually, to understand and deliver multi-sport event technologies.”
He added: “We wouldn’t have been anywhere near those projects if we hadn’t done the Commonwealth Games. It was a real breakthrough moment for us.”
Mr Fraser, who succeeded Mr Park Brown as managing director in January, highlighted the role played by brands developed by NVT in its expansion. These include cloud platform Viia, which was used at the European Championships. He described it as a “real enabler” for organisations to move from “legacy on-prem[ises] infrastructure to really embracing the opportunities that cloud-based strategies can give.”
He also cited the impact made its Concepta product, first used as a tool to analyse data from multiple sources at the Commonwealth Games. NVT used it to assess how its infrastructure performed during the event, with clients now adopting the technology to analyse their security risks and measure their performance against “industry baselines”.
Mr Fraser said: “Concepta, as a tool set, allows you to visualise contextually-relevant information for any number of business challenges. That’s actually a product that’s going to give us real opportunities to internationalise this business.”
At present, NVT’s international activity is confined to supporting clients with operations overseas. But Mr Fraser said that, as brands such as Viia and Concepta grow through global distribution channels, it will expand globally.
The company’s headcount currently stands at more than 70, having grown by 10 percent this year. More recruitment will follow before Christmas. Mr Fraser said: “We’re delighted with the talent available in the marketplace for us to grow the business.”
Mr Fraser added he was cheered to see three women move into positions in NVT’s senior management team, meaning females now account for 25% of the leadership group. But he acknowledged that, as an industry, technology still struggles to attract more young females. He said the industry has to do more to highlight the breadth of roles that IT has to offer.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here