Company Pondering South West England winner: C4L
C4L has been chosen as a regional winner for South West England in the HSBC Company Thinking initiative. 
Following its nomination as a South West England regional finalist and Imagined Exchange check out to the UAE, C4L has been declared a regional winner in the HSBC Business Considering initiative.
Matt Hawkins programmed his first pc at the age of five. Some 31 many years later, his web infrastructure firm C4L has a turnover of £7.8m, which he expects to increase to £12m this year and soar to £100m above the following five years.
Managing director Mr Hawkins set up C4L in 2000, 4 many years following finishing a computing and company degree at Brunel University.
The firm reckons to give about 1pc of the UK’s world wide web backbone, housing tens of thousands of server computers in information warehouses near its head office in Poole and at 40 other web sites across the United kingdom.
Supplying web services to companies which includes some of Britain’s significant telecoms groups, it also has operations in Amsterdam and is setting up bases in New York, Singapore and Los Angeles. The organization at the moment employs 57 employees in the United kingdom.
“As far as the United kingdom is concerned, we’re what sits behind cloud computing,” Mr Hawkins mentioned. “We’re portion of what tends to make the cloud work. To the public, our buyers are the cloud and we are the underlying infrastructure.
“At the second, quite small of our organization is overseas but we’ve received a whole lot of demand now. Our consumer base wants us to consider the technological innovation that we have created to other nations. In five years’ time I think exports will be 80pc of the enterprise.
“My driving aim is just to do items far better than what’s in the market place. That is why I set the firm up and that’s why buyers use us – due to the fact we can do it much better and a lot more expense-effectively.
“The net we are rolling out at the second is a thousand instances quicker than the UK’s current regular broadband speeds.”
C4L’s accomplishment has been recognised with it getting judged a regional winner of Enterprise Considering, gaining access to funding of up to £6m and an extra financial reward of up to £120,000.
“This feels amazing, brilliant,” explained Mr Hawkins. “I dreamed of winning it. I’ve been a finalist in organization awards before but this is the first time we’ve in fact won something.
“That’s anything I’ve constantly aspired to. It’s great to be recognised. We know what we’re undertaking and it is good when other individuals do as nicely.
“We’re going to re-invest the funds. We’re coming out with some new technologies which are actually clever, and we’re going to reinvest the cash and place it back into that.”