‘There remains a wealth of untapped opportunities to continue to transform organisations through technology’
Used properly, the cloud can empower organisations to swiftly adapt to dynamic market conditions and explore novel concepts, products, and tools.
Computing’s Cloud Excellence Awards recognise the very best of the UK’s cloud industry, from the most innovative and compelling products and vendors to the top use cases from end-user firms.
This year’s winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Thursday 18th September in London.
One of the finalists is Codemakers, who is in the running for the Most Innovative Cloud Product or Service.
We caught up with Antony Stevenson, B.Sc. (Hons) MBCS, Managing Director at Codemakers, to know how do they plan to capitalise of main opportunities for the industry in the coming year.
Antony has over 20 years of experience in the software industry, starting his career as a junior developer at a FTSE 100 company prior to embarking on a Computing Science degree at The University of Manchester.
Antony has since developed his career in software consultancy and development, setting up Codemakers and ultimately its subsidiary SaaS companies Metrotech and Shipmate, both of which represent successful mainstay providers in their respective fields. As Group Managing Director, Antony continues to lead on business analysis and scoping new product features, transforming client requirements into practical, user-centric solutions.
Why do you think awards like the Cloud Excellence Awards matter?
While most of the media’s attention centres around shiny exciting consumer tech products, it’s typically people like us who are building and maintaining the less glamorous tech “behind the scenes” that helps make much of daily life run that bit more smoothly. The Cloud Excellence Awards therefore give us the rare opportunity to shine the light on the many hardworking professionals who keep this important, lesser-known tech ticking, while celebrating achievements in our sector among our peers, clients and partners.
What would winning this award mean to your company?
As a small niche software development studio based in Derby we recognise that we aren’t a typical entrant to these awards, and we are up against some very strong competition from some internationally renowned names. We entered to prove to the industry that smaller providers can still produce highly effective solutions that deliver true value for clients without the need for 7-, 8- or 9-figure budgets, so winning this award would not only represent a huge achievement for us, but would also give other niche teams in less obvious places the confidence to put their solutions forward in future.
What would you say is your company’s proudest achievement over the past year?
Our proudest achievement has been the completion of our strategic shift from being a bespoke web and mobile application development studio to a self-sufficient Software-as-a-Service provider. We can now focus on building and maintaining a much smaller set of products to the highest possible standards of user experience, performance and security, for clients who truly value our products and customer service. Being able to push a well-crafted new feature into production and immediately have it being used by thousands of people is truly rewarding for all our team.
What have been the biggest challenges of 2025 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?
We all strive to deliver our best work in an increasingly uncertain world, with the heightened necessity to consider and manage the variety of associated risks – especially cyber security. With increasingly powerful tools in the hands of malicious actors, we all face unprecedented intolerable threats that require a more proactive approach to mitigate and prevent. As software developers we now must place security at the forefront of all requirements, while considering operational implications and this necessitates a change in mindset across teams to make sure everyone does their part in building and maintaining secure systems.
How do you think the industry has changed over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?
AI is certainly the buzzword of our time; my concern is the industry continues to capitulate to its use purely to maintain outward competitiveness without truly considering the value it delivers, or indeed whether it is truly AI at all. Not all great systems are or require AI, and perhaps as an industry we need to explain that better.
What do you see as the main opportunities for the industry in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?
There remains a wealth of untapped opportunities to continue to transform organisations through technology. In my consultations with prospects and clients I find it surprising how many processes are still carried out manually, even on paper – and ahead of every well-crafted, essential spreadsheet lies an opportunity to produce a secure, process driven, collaborative business application. Prototyping tools make it faster than ever to test out and share ideas ahead of build, helping stakeholders with decision making.
Cloud Excellence Awards will take place on 18th September in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.