New technology consultancy launches in Jersey

Giles Crouch & James Hope

A new IT consultancy has launched in Jersey, providing infrastructure strategy and consultation, integrations for business mergers and acquisitions, cloud solutions and technical project management.

The brainchild of directors Giles Crouch and James Hope, the business has experienced a significant demand for its services despite – or possibly because of – the challenges and restrictions posed by lockdown. Equipping clients to enable home-working has been an unexpected driver for the new business.

Giles explained to Channel Eye: “Logiq has just turned one year old and we have seen our client base grow rapidly. When we first talked about forming a start-up, we wanted to identify creative solutions to help people and businesses thrive. New technology allows business transformation, making everyone’s lives that much easier. We wanted to concentrate on the foundations, the infrastructure, which allows businesses to grow and utilise the new and ever-evolving features available to them.”

Giles added: “We were quickly approached to work on a high-profile merger of two finance companies headquartered in the Channel Islands. It was a dream come true. In Jersey terms, it is an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often and to be asked to lead the infrastructure integration for such a large project straight away was extremely exciting. It showed that clients had faith in us.”

Giles and James met while working at the Channel Islands tech firm C5 Alliance. After some initial discussions, they agreed that the market could be ready for a niche consultancy, with specialist skills being provided by trusted partner companies, where the need was identified for security or business intelligence, for example.

James said: “This was a big step for us, taking the risk to work for ourselves. But it has turned out well, even with the arrival of Covid unexpectedly changing the working environment.

“We already had experience in corporate and public sector projects, including in Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud migrations, but the demands on business to suddenly roll out remote working on an unprecedented scale meant that our skills were even more relevant in the market. In fact, we had to reconfigure one key project because the initial aim of having 20% of staff working from home necessarily became 100% of staff instead.”

While projects to enable mobile working continue to be a significant requirement among Logiq’s clients, Giles and James look forward to their own next developments. The team has already grown with the introduction of associate technical consultant William Graham coming on board.