Building a bigger and better Birmingham

Why Intercity is committed to investing in the Midlands Business Engine

Birmingham is a centre for innovation. With a population of over 10 million people and over 800,000 businesses, it’s also home to a lot of untapped potential and recognition. We’re looking to change that.

As a brief recap, in 1951, Birmingham-born mathematician and computer scientist, Conway Berners-Lee was part of a team that created the Ferranti Mark 1: the world’s first ever commercially-available electronic computer. After marrying Mary Lee Woods (also from Birmingham), they worked on a team that developed computer programs for the Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers.

They had a son in 1955, the now world-renowned Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1989 put forward a proposal for the World Wide Web. You could say that Birmingham gave the world the Internet.

The current buzz around Birmingham is infectious. There’s an energy that attracts entrepreneurs to take their first steps into the world of business here.

Earlier this year, Birmingham was named the go-to destination for start-ups outside of London, with 12,108 new businesses establishing themselves in 2017 alone. That’s one-and-a-half times the number of new businesses opening in Manchester.

So why choose Birmingham?

With world-class accelerator schemes, plentiful budget-friendly office space, and links to major global markets, why would you want to be anywhere else?

As a Birmingham-based business, it’s only right that I talk about Intercity Technology. Founded back in 1985, we’ve always been believers in being the first to try things. In the world of technology, you can either innovate and become a leader, or let someone else go first and try to catch up.

We were one of the pioneers of the UK mobile phone industry, being brave enough to take the lead, and becoming one of the first telecommunications providers at the time to sign a Vodafone partnership agreement in the UK. We were also the first UK company to be granted a licence for cellular services in the Netherlands.

Since 1985, we’ve expanded (acquiring two further businesses) and established sites outside of Birmingham as we’ve grown our product and service portfolio.

We’re proud to say that we’ve evolved from our humble beginnings, and can now offer customers not just mobile services, but cloud services through utilising our own data centres, managed services through the Intercity Security Operations Centre (‘ISOC’), as well as network maintenance and support.

We’re currently in the middle of some significant construction that will show the industry and the Birmingham-based neighbours that we’re committed to expanding our Cloud & Security services and innovating for the future of Intercity.

With the likes of Andy Street (Mayor for the West Midlands Combined Authority) channelling his own corporate background to create opportunities for other businesses, and to build an innovation hub, it’s an exciting time to be a Birmingham-based operation.

The Midlands Business Engine, a coalition made up of Government authorities, Local Enterprise Partnerships (‘LEPs’) as well as local businesses, is committed to collectively cementing Birmingham as the only destination for aspiring entrepreneurs in the UK and overseas.

Ongoing attempts to attract the likes of Channel 4 to the West Midlands after the successes of the Commonwealth Games and the Coventry City of Culture accolade will only raise the profile of our city.

At Intercity, we’re particularly interested in fostering measures that will feed into the ‘Innovation & Enterprise’ arm of the Midlands Business Engine’s work, which we’ve started to address through our own apprenticeship and graduate schemes. We’re invested in innovation. We may have been in business since 1985, but this is only the beginning...

[subscribe-form]