Today Sitekit celebrates 30 years of delivering innovative, ground-breaking digital solutions.
From a stair landing in a remote croft in Skye, we’ve come a long way. In our 30 years we’ve gone from the remote monitoring of machines, to people – while helping to develop a world where people have access to digital services which are seamless, safe and secure.
Where it all starts
Sitekit began life as Bambi Engineering on the 6th February 1989, the name a tribute to founder Campbell Grant’s nick-name in school. The company performed analysis of telemetry systems for the Scottish oil industry, predicting when machines required maintenance. In the days prior to the internet the company worked remotely by teleworking, posting floppy disks of analysis from Skye to Aberdeen.
With the birth of the Web, Bambi Engineering was renamed Gael.net Ltd, reflecting an increasing focus on delivering website, e-business and multimedia solutions. Chris Eckl, Sitekit’s tech guru, arrived with the new millennium to deliver one of the world’s first content management systems: Sitekit CMS. They launched their debut product at CeBIT Germany where it proved to be an immediate hit. By 2003 Sitekit CMS had proved so popular with clients that Gael.net was renamed to Sitekit Ltd. It was by that time already in its third version; Sitekit CMS v3.
A focus on innovation
In 2008 with Sitekit CMS going strong, winning international awards and powering large volumes of customer websites, the company began an increasing focus on R&D as a means of sustaining growth. Sitekit Labs, a division focused exclusively on new and innovative technologies was opened by MIT professor Mike Grandinetti that year.
As digital health came to the forefront of the government’s health priorities in the UK, it launched the dallas (delivering assisted living lifestyles at scale) initiative in 2011. Sitekit’s efforts with R&D left it in a position to bid for and win a place on all four dallas consortia as a technical authority. Out of dallas emerged one of Sitekit’s flagship products, the eRedbook – which after four years of successful piloting in London is now set to be rolled out nationally.
Identity goes digital
During the dallas initiative we identified digital identity as a fundamental building block in digital – seeing it as an essential component of joined-up integrated systems. After experimenting with Microsoft Azure AD B2C digital identity capabilities a strategic decision was made to focus one of our core competencies on identity. Flagship clients Nuffield Health and Lloyd’s Register were signed on to test platform capabilities in 2016. Successful delivery saw the division begin to rapidly grow, with central government coming onboard in 2017. Following a successful PoC in 2018 Sitekit won a major contract with an international payment provider to deliver a universal identity layer that supports user owned and controlled digital identities – ensuring our commitment to ground-breaking digital innovation is maintained.
Sitekit at 30
Sitekit now operates across three divisions located in Skye, Edinburgh, Oxfordshire and London. From our base in the Isle of Skye, Sitekit Solutions continues to deliver web and digital solutions. Our digital health division, Sitekit Apps, is based in Oxfordshire and London, servicing our digital health suite of products. Digital Identity is delivered out of our Edinburgh offices as Sitekit Systems – soon to be rebranded as Condatis, named after the Celtic God for the confluence of rivers. An appropriate name for a division delivering integrated systems based on secure digital identities.
Founder Campbell Grant, comments: “I am immensely proud to have watched this company grow over the past thirty years from a handful of people in Skye to a national company employing over 100 staff. I’m delighted to be in a position to sponsor 2019 #DigilnventorsChallenge and give something back to Scotland’s robust digital community.”
This article was originally published on www.sitekit.net.