This is a significant moment for Dootrix. To ensure we continue to deliver excellence as we scale, Tom Fitzgibbons is joining our new-look executive team as Chief Operating Officer with myself as CEO and Kevin Smith as CTO.
Tom has enjoyed an impressive and varied career that gives him a wide range of perspectives on how to manage growth. He’s been an Insights Manager at Tesco, Head of eCommerce & IT at Figleaves.com and, most recently, Managing Director at Zoocha, where the company saw significant growth under his stewardship. His mix of expertise in analytics, marketing, business strategy and operations management will stand Dootrix in excellent stead.
In the coming months we will make more top-level appointments as the need, and the right people, present themselves to support our growing portfolio of enterprise and SMC clients, and to support our own business development and continued growth.
The reorganisation at the top reflects that we’re now leading a larger, more dynamic organisation with distinct teams offering complementary expertise to provide joined-up, robust, intelligent solutions to complex business challenges. The Dootrix of 2023 is competing with, and working alongside, some of the best known SI’s. And we’re there for a reason; we’re a fast-moving, agile and formidable team of people who really know Azure and its huge capabilities inside out.
Dootrix is a very different company now than it was when we launched back in 2011 – though even then we were focused on what everyone came to call the cloud before we, or anyone much else, had started to think of it as such.
Kev and I started Dootrix because we saw the full potential of what were emerging, now main stream, technologies. Although, in those early days, a lot of potential clients were struggling to see the opportunity.
Our world view had shifted with the launch of the iPhone. It fundamentally changed how people experienced technology by building a much more personal, emotive and physical connection that had a profound impact on perceptions of brand quality. We felt – rightly as it turned out – that this experience of consumer technology would shape people’s expectations of functional and workplace technology.
But while plenty of businesses happily pulled us in to talk about how the future would be mobile, very few wanted to allocate a budget to it. So, while the business world caught up with our vision of how things would be moving to mobile, we focused on building web and desktop applications as well as backend integration solutions.
As the market advanced, and we started to build more mobile applications, it was becoming apparent that they were just one piece of the puzzle in an increasingly complex and varied technology landscape. Most business logic – the guts of any application – needed to exist as backend services accessed through API’s and presented through multiple channels including desktop, mobile and web.
Our outlook continued to evolve. All the physical (or virtual) hardware, all the database servers and middleware we’d been used to working with, and even some of the hardware infrastructure in-between, were starting to be abstracted away and replaced by microservices in the cloud. As networking and infrastructure became code, we found ourselves upskilling and developing as software engineers to embrace cloud infrastructure engineering.
Dootrix was one of the first to embrace that shift, which is why Microsoft referred to us as ‘born in the cloud’. In many ways that was where Dootrix forged its identity.
Likewise, we’ve been on a parallel journey as a team of people. At the beginning it was just Kevin and me. We expanded into a small dev team based at the ostrich farm; quirky, quick on our feet and punching hard – a little like the ostriches. Then, in a move accelerated by the pandemic, we embraced remote working, shedding the constraints of basing everyone around a physical space; we still maintain hubs for meetings, but we extend far beyond those.
We’ve grown in numbers, in expertise and in the scope of the services we offer. We’re providing consulting, technology services and digital transformation to major clients like Heathrow, Confused.com, the 999 services and GRIDSERVE, and earning a reputation for expertise and for consistently delivering industry-leading quality. As we’ve grown, we’ve developed new services, such as architectural ownership that provides a governance and a coordination layer to multiple teams working on multiple projects across a client’s IT estate. We’ve distilled our experience and expertise into a series of accelerators that get our clients a long way down the track of establishing, or modernising, their cloud estate by providing them with a modular framework of landing zones and ready-built tools, that can be quickly adapted to their specific needs.
In short, with a growing roster of enterprise clients relying on Dootrix to develop intelligent solutions to complex problems – because we offer nimble, collaborative Azure expertise – exciting times lie ahead.
If you’re looking for a mature, dynamic tech partner to solve your business challenge, get in touch