Ixis specialises in Drupal, an open source platform used to build websites, and its team of 18 staff are based at the Brew House on Wilderspool Park, Stockton Heath.
The company offers a mixture of web consultancy, development, hosting and support services to the public sector, leading charities and multinational businesses. Clients include Westminster City Council, global charity VSO, leading insurance company UK General, TES Education and the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations, The British Council.
Ixis was founded by Chris Haslam, 34, and Mike Carter, 35, who previously worked together at a health start-up. The pair found themselves looking for a new venture utilising their technical web experience.
Chris, of Frodsham, said: “We were two self-confessed ‘techies’ with a passion for programming and open source technology and came up with the business idea to provide IT consultancy and web development support. We chose the name ‘Ixis’ simply because it was one of the few four letter website domains remaining and it was snappy.”
Before long, the duo took office space at The Heath in Runcorn and embarked on the business which in the coming years grew into bigger premises at Daresbury Innovation Centre, before moving to the Brew House.
Speaking about how Ixis has grown over the ten years, Chris said: “We moved away from providing general web and IT consultancy and focused on our niche, which is the open source content management platform Drupal.”
Drupal powers millions of websites and applications around the world and is built, used and supported by an active community of more than a million users and developers.
Chris continued: “Ten years ago, not many people had even heard of Drupal but we invested heavily in it and became specialists in it. We ensured we contributed back to the Drupal community via modules, sponsorships and organising local camps and have felt the benefits of those contributions in later years especially as Drupal gained in popularity.”
In 2011, Ixis took on business development manager Stephanie Hosny to help drive the company forwards in developing business, client services and marketing Ixis’ products and services.
One of the major highlights for Ixis was being one of the first companies to be selected onto the public sector procurement framework the G-Cloud. This allows the public sector to procure cloud products from a list of suppliers via an online store called CloudStore.
“We were an early advocate about the merits of the framework which has led to a dramatic shift in public sector procurement in a short space of time,” Chris added. “We can now work directly with the public sector rather than being sub-contracted by the large outsourcers which ultimately results in more efficient delivery and often large cost savings.”
This has given Ixis the opportunity to compete with and win work from large service integrators on contracts such as Bristol City Council and the Care Quality Commission.
Ixis continues to power to success and Mike, of Norton, says this is down to building up a strong client base over time.
“We have an excellent reputation and the majority of our clients have been working with us for many years. This means we have a high percentage of recurring revenue and our aim has always been about sustainable long term growth."
Ixis is set to record its highest turnover to date at the end of this year and is on target to achieve £1.6m in revenue, and has doubled its workforce from nine to 18 in the last year. In 2012 Ixis acquired Wrexham-based Drupal agency Leafish to expand its Drupal hosting and development skillset.
Mike added: “We look forward to the future and continuing to work with a diverse mix of businesses in a world where digital is becoming more and more important. The Government has a strategy to improve digital services in the public sector and we want to continue to play a part in working with this sector to improve their digital services.”
