Future looks bright for Lancashire IT solutions specialist celebrating 20 years

Celerity, which is based near Kirkham close to AFC Fylde’s football ground, offers a range of IT services from hardware to cloud and IT management services.

The business was set up 20 years ago by Chris Hall and Chris Roche, who had been colleagues in another firm, and now it turns over in the region of £35m employing 60 people mainly based in the North West and North East.

Over the first 15 years the company secured contracts as an enterprise Infrastructure provider with a range of national customers in the financial services sector, and later branched out to provide managed services, data protection and data visualisation, plus cyber security, as the IT world developed.

The firm weathered the 2007 financial crash due to the nature of the customer base with Celerity providing services to big names and public sector organisation.

Craig Aston, chief operating officer, said: “We are still growing, 10 per cent people-wise each year. It’s a great local success story. We provide IT solutions, whether that’s services or infrastructure to large organisations, banks, car makers and local government

"We are a little company that tends to punch above our weight, due to the quality of our people and the knowledge we have in certain parts of the IT world that few others have.”

"We are doing things that are very important to people, its not always trendy like cloud based services, but it is mission critical stuff.”

He said that some of the biggest changes over the years were change in the nature of the market from every organisation having IT equipment on their site to now much of it moving to the cloud and to services.

In November 2021, Celerity sold a third of the business to the Business Growth Fund, a private equity organisation set up at the height of the financial crisis by the major high street banks.

Over the past three to four years has seen the firm focus on bringing through more graduates in recruitment and the company is looking to grow further with a constant hunt for local talent.

He said: “There is a huge amount of talent in the region, with the number of quality Universities around and the graduates they produce. The new cyber security centre to be built at Samlesbury is going to make the area hot for IT talent and we see that as a real positive in the future.”