Rich Kenny, Group IT Director at Techbuyer won Gold GLOBEE for ‘CTO of the Year: IT Hardware’ at this year’s IT World Awards for launching Interact: a new software product that optimises carbon load and energy efficiency in data centre IT hardware.

This year’s GLOBEE 2021 ‘CTO of the Year’ winners include Joan Trainor from IBM, Dr. James Smith from Webscale and Tyle McMullen from Fastly. Rich’s start-up, Interact also took home Silver for ‘Software Product of the Year’ and Bronze for ‘Start-Up of the Year’.

Techbuyer is a global sustainable IT solutions provider that specialises in buying, refurbishing, selling, upgrading, or repairing servers, storage and networking, laptops, and desktops. Its HQ is in Harrogate, where Rich Kenny leads security, sustainability, and innovation strategies.

Rich launched Interact as a Techbuyer Group start-up in December 2020, following a two-year Innovate UK funded Knowledge Transfer Project (KTP) between Techbuyer and the University of East London. Rich and his team carried out hundreds of hours of server benchmarking to estimate the energy consumption of servers, based only on their IT hardware configuration.

The results of this server energy efficiency research were recently published the IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing, which Rich co-authored alongside his colleagues Astrid Wynne, Sustainability Lead and Nour Rteil, KTP Associate Developer. The paper reveals that since 2015, the efficiency of CPUs is no longer doubling, and that refurbished machines can actually be a more energy efficient choice for today’s small and medium sized businesses.

Interact’s first machine-learning tool generates vendor neutral recommendations on which servers and configurations are best for return on investment and energy savings. It is the first tool of its kind to offer non-intrusive energy efficiency optimisation analysis for today’s data centre IT hardware managers, and enables every client to get concrete recommendations for their exact infrastructure.

The IT World Awards recognise outstanding commitment to accelerating growth and innovation in the IT sector globally. This is usually a physical event in San Francisco, but this year they were awarded virtually. As well as launching a new business, Rich was also recognised for his IT department’s 50% growth over the past 12 months, and the development of a sustainability committee to record progress on Techbuyer’s UN Global Goal sustainability targets.

Kevin Towers, CEO at Techbuyer states: “Rich consistently goes above and beyond, and his energy and enthusiasm really stands out from the crowd. Techbuyer Group’s new business, Interact, is changing the way that data centre hardware managers think about their IT infrastructure, and builds upon previously unseen industry findings. Rich has led Interact’s success, all whilst helping to drive Techbuyer’s exciting global growth over the past 12 months. Rich is a very worthy winner of this prestigious award.”

Labelled as an essential business during the pandemic, Techbuyer welcomed a 169% increase in new customers between March and July 2020 in comparison to the previous five months. 95% of these orders were for refurbished solutions.

Techbuyer also won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise for International Trade in April 2020 and ‘Circular Economy Business of the Year’ at the IEMA awards later that year.

Techbuyer is a sustainable IT solutions provider that provides servers, storage and networking equipment, laptops, desktops and their components from over 150 brands including HPE, Dell and IBM. The company can also support entire IT life cycles by buying, refurbishing, upgrading, repairing, or replacing existing technology.

Techbuyer has over 15 years of experience maximising IT budgets worldwide. For help meeting your specific IT requirements, get in touch today. Or you can organise an interview with our Group IT Director, Rich Kenny through their LinkedIn.