Global award hat-trick for Harrogate sustainable IT business

Techbuyer has struck gold, silver and bronze at this year’s IT World Awards in San Francisco.
Rich Kenny, Group IT Director at Harrogate-based Techbuyer, was awarded a Gold GLOBEE at the 2021 World IT Awards for launching an innovative new start-up, growing his IT team by 50 per cent during the pandemic, and leading sustainability projects.Rich Kenny, Group IT Director at Harrogate-based Techbuyer, was awarded a Gold GLOBEE at the 2021 World IT Awards for launching an innovative new start-up, growing his IT team by 50 per cent during the pandemic, and leading sustainability projects.
Rich Kenny, Group IT Director at Harrogate-based Techbuyer, was awarded a Gold GLOBEE at the 2021 World IT Awards for launching an innovative new start-up, growing his IT team by 50 per cent during the pandemic, and leading sustainability projects.

Rich Kenny, Group IT Director for the Harrogate-based sustainable IT firm, won Gold GLOBEE for ‘CTO of the Year: IT Hardware’ for launching Interact, a new software product that optimises carbon load and energy-efficiency in data-centre IT hardware.

Interact also took home Silver for ‘Software Product of the Year’ and Bronze for ‘Start-Up of the Year’ at the awards, which are usually announced at a physical event in San Francisco, but this year were bestowed virtually.

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Techbuyer specialises in buying, refurbishing, upgrading and selling used computers and data-centre equipment. Founded in Harrogate in 2005, it has since expanded operations into mainland Europe, the US and the Asia Pacific region from its Hornbeam Park HQ.

Mr Kenny leads security, sustainability, and innovation strategies at Techbuyer.

He 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.

He 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.

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

Kevin Towers, CEO at Techbuyer, said: “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.”

As well as launching a new business, Mr Kenny was also recognised for his IT department’s 50 per cent growth over the past 12 months.

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