25th Quorumversary 2024 Article Banner Charles and Andy

Quorum was founded in 1999 by Andrew (Andy) Watson and Charles Scott. The pair embarked on a mission to provide cutting-edge solutions to businesses while providing the best possible place to work.

They fostered an environment where innovation thrives, and they want every team member to feel valued, empowered, and supported.

Andy and Charles had a shared vision and passion and saw the potential for what Quorum was to become. Their combined and sometimes differing attributes and expertise laid the foundation for what would become a leading force in our industry.

As we celebrate a quarter of a century of Quorum and reflect on what has made us successful, we asked Andy to look to the past and Charles to look to the future!

Andy, what message would you like to share with employees, customers, and partners as we celebrate this milestone?

“You don’t do many things for 25 years.

When I was younger that was the average mortgage duration or more than life in prison(!)

I floated around my early life and career, dabbling in this and that. I’ve sold plastic fasciae for oscilloscopes, I’ve sold office stationery, I’ve sold PCs in multiple companies, I’ve painted walls, waited tables, chopped onions, sang, played guitar, sold IT training and taught technical training courses.

But in 1999 I was at a crossroads in my career.

I had been offered a job and relocation as a consultant in Oxfordshire. I also had an offer from an ex-work colleague Charles Scott, to start a consultancy company. (I didn’t find out until later that I was his third choice).

Obviously, I accepted his offer to start up Quorum, a consultancy specialising in Microsoft Internet technologies, that later developed into a fully featured IT Services company.

I often wonder what would have happened if I had chosen path B.

134(ish) people would have different jobs than they do today and many, many more would have had different career paths over the years.

I would have likely never met a lot of people I consider to be my friends.

People who we have helped through difficult times may not have had a caring employer to turn to.

There are a lot of things that would have gone differently had I not chosen to build Quorum over the last half of my life with Charles and everyone else who has been on this journey with us.

One thing I am sure of. A lot customers would have had a vastly inferior service ?

I am proud of everyone we have had through our company, everyone currently wearing their Quorum colours with pride and all our extremely diverse range of customers.

And now Quorum is employee owned I feel grateful that the company is in safe hands and will continue hopefully for at least another 25 years.

But me…would I have had it any other way?

Of course I wouldn’t!”

Charles, what future trends do you foresee in the industry, and how is Quorum preparing for them?

“Adapting to an ever changing IT landscape is one of the best elements of my job and why I genuinely love technology.

At Quorum we keep up with this change through massive investment in training and certification.

We sent over 20% of the company to major international technical conferences last year and this huge emphasis on training and education is one of the things that sets us apart from our competitors.

Growth areas in the coming year are going to be:

– Artificial Intelligence. As well as all of the outreach and board level education work we’ve been doing around GPT and Large Language Models, we’ve been involved in several practical implementations of the technologies as well as deploying and securing some of the myriad of Microsoft Copilot implementations.

– Data Insight and Integration. Modern businesses now have a plethora of applications available to them, but are finding it increasingly hard to get a single view of what is going on or to provide consistent views of the data. Our Managed Insights and Managed Integration services allow for the flow of data from one application to another and the consistent and cohesive reporting and dashboarding across multiple client platforms.

– Security. Our Managed Security Service is currently providing next generation level security monitoring and proactive management for our existing managed services clients. Instead of simply monitoring and reporting of potential breaches we are actively closing potential holes and acting ahead of time to ensure that our clients remain secure as new threats arise. Our monitoring and analysis process is powered by AI to ensure that we can scale and remediate exposures before they become breaches.”