Softcat Education blog is born

Hi and welcome to my (our) first entry for the Softcat Education blog!

Six months into my Softcat journey, it seemed like the ideal time to start our blog and share some of the progress we have made, the things we are up to, and perhaps most importantly, reach out to get some feedback on how we better engage with our education customers and what you want from Softcat as your IT partner.

With nearly 10 years in education ICT, I joined Softcat last year, with the exciting task of developing the education business. The thing that stood out most was the obvious passion for 2 things – happy staff, and even happier customers. It’s a simple recipe based on the former driving the latter, and helps us provide the highest levels of service to all our education customers.

The 2011/ 2012 academic year has been a landmark one for Softcat in education so I thought I would share some key developments.

We have invested heavily in building a great team of 16 education account managers, with a balance of experience and graduate recruits, giving us great coverage and market knowledge as well as fresh ideas and perspective.

We have enjoyed many successful events from the madness that was Bett 2012 to a personal highlight of mine - joining all the Headteachers from Warrington Primary schools for 3 days in the Lakes for their annual conference!…all other groups of schools, please do get in touch as we would love to join you at similar events you are holding! These events have helped us build a better understanding of the challenges faced for education establishments and ensure we have the right knowledge in the team and portfolio of solutions available.

We have also had huge success in getting onto numerous new education frameworks, providing us new routes to provide more products and services to more education establishments. It is our intention to gain access to every key public sector framework, so watch this space for more news on this over the coming months.

Over the years (and more recently too) we have built strong partnerships with major Education IT vendors, and have been fortunate enough to be named partner of the year by many. This simply means we can give our customers access to the latest leading technology, assist in making the right decisions and ultimately provide the best possible value products and solutions for an establishment, whatever the budget. We are currently arranging several local events for schools and authorities to get to grips with the latest technology, from tablet devices, to software and security.

You will be hearing lots more from us in the coming months, so do look out for a number of initiatives that you can get involved in, ranging from prize draws for sports kits, to joining our teacher forum and helping us better understand your needs.

We hope you have had a great year so far, and look forward to working with schools, colleges, higher education establishments and our key partners during this busy summer term.

If you want to get in touch with the team and I, we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a line at education@softcat.com, @Softcat_Edu or @nickberry74 on twitter.

Thanks for reading…more from the team soon!