Harrogate Start-up, Interact Wins Twice At The IT World Awards

Interact, a newly launched machine-learning tool that optimises energy efficiency for servers, has won Silver for ‘IT Project of the Year’ losing out to Atlassian, and Bronze for ‘Start-Up of the Year’ at the IT World Awards.

The start-up featured amongst well-known winners including IBM, RedSeal, and Google. The prestigious IT World Awards recognise the latest products, solutions and services that are raising the bar in the industry, and are usually hosted in person in San Francisco.

Interact was launched in December 2020 by Techbuyer Group, a global sustainable IT solutions provider with its HQ in Harrogate, following a two-year Knowledge Transfer Project (KTP) between Techbuyer and the University of East London. This generated ground-breaking research recently published in the IEEE Transactions for Sustainable Computing.

The verified, peer-reviewed results revealed for the first time that refurbished machines provide the same performance as new machines, and that the latest generations of servers are not always the best choice when it comes to energy efficiency.

Interact’s first software tool generates concrete, vendor-neutral recommendations for data centre IT hardware professionals, enabling them to analyse their current hardware and optimise the costs, energy reduction, and carbon savings in line with their specific requirements.

Rich Kenny, Director of Strategy at Interact, who won Gold GLOBEE for ‘CTO of the Year’ for Techbuyer in the same awards, states: “We are really excited to see Interact winning Silver and Bronze at the IT World Awards. Despite only being around for six months, we have already made it up there with big names including IBM and Luminance. This a testament to the hard work of all our team members and partners, and the effectiveness of our first software tool.”