All this week The Glasgow Times is featuring the six candidates hoping to be voted Glasgow's Favourite Business for 2021.

The award, sponsored by this paper, is part of the Glasgow Business Awards organised by Glasgow Chamber of Commerce with Royal Bank of Scotland as the main sponsor.

The Gaelic word 'iomairt', which translates to enterprise, gives information technology and cloud computing company iomart its name. 

It's fitting, given that they continue to lead the way in the industry since being founded by Angus MacSween in 1998.

Newly appointed CEO Reece Donovan says that, in its simplest terms, the work they do is all about helping other businesses succeed. 

“Let's say you sell cars. Your main business isn’t about IT and you won’t necessarily have a team who can help you.

“You want to focus on how your branding your business or how you’re going to sell your cars rather than struggling with IT.

“So what we say is 'let us do that for you'.

"We’ll look after the tech side of things like dealing with websites or e-commerce and all of that good stuff that might not be part of your core business but are vital to your success.

“It sounds quite techy I suppose, but I always like to think of ourselves as an extra pair of helping hands.”

Glasgow Times:

Pictured: CEO of Iomart Reece Donovan

iomart have grown to impressive heights over the years, now owning 13 data centres in the UK with over 70,000 customers.

However, a year of working during the global pandemic has pushed the team to re-evaluate the business from the ground up. Reece said: “I think it’s been a challenging year for everyone.

“We’ve had to look at different ways of working, our people and how we all communicate.

“We were really impressed with our ability to flip from working in the office to working almost 100% remotely.

“So we’ve taken the opportunity to re-evaluate the way we work and we’re looking to introduce a hybrid model of some teams being in the office and some working from home.”

With headquarters based in Glasgow, the city is a major part of iomart's history as well as its identity as a business.

Reece says a major aim for their future is to help ensure that Scotlands tech industry thrives.

He said: “We recently changed our core values because covid has forced us to seriously think about the business and whether we’re doing the right things or focusing in the right places.

 “I think it’s going down really nicely. It’s not all about making money, it’s about building a career for people and helping them gain skills.

“I think Glasgow is a great place for doing that because there are fantastic universities and that history and pedigree are there for the business which we are immensely proud of.

“It’s important to think about it in two ways. On one hand, we want to build iomart and progress it into the most successful business it can be, but we also care about building peoples capabilities so that Scotland can flourish.

“There aren’t many big businesses in Scotland and we feel we should be playing our part to help the economy and train people so that they can go on to use those skills worldwide.”

It's an admirable approach which is a clear indication of the core values on which iomart was built. 

To further show their appreciation for their home city, members of the team at iomart have been involved in volunteering projects at local garden projects as part of their newly revised values.

It's investing in initiatives like this and celebrating the employees that are at the heart of the business that will be an essential element in iomart's future growth.

Reece said:“We’ve recently started doing a bit of charity work which is just such a nice thing to be doing.

“We had a team of about ten volunteering with the Belville Community Garden and the Shettleston Growing Project.

Glasgow Times:

Pictured: The iomart team get to work.

Reece said: "It was great, everyone was out with their wheelbarrows and t-shirts. They all came back stiff the next day and saying that they hadn’t worked that hard in ages.

“I know it sounds trite, but our focus is all about our people. They’re our biggest priority.

“We’re immensely proud of the work we’ve achieved.”

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The Glasgow Business Awards are hosted by Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland. Winners will be announced at the award ceremony at DoubleTree by Hilton on October 7 2021, with voting for Glasgow’s Favourite Business opening on Monday 23rd August 2021.