Kainos Tops Up its Trophy Cabinet Winning 'Large Company of the Year' at the Aer Lingus Viscount Awards

Belfast, N Ireland Thursday 02nd May, 2013 - Thriving technology company Kainos has today announced that it has been crowned 'Large Company of the Year' at the Aer Lingus Viscount Awards ceremony held at the RAC Club in London last week. The Aer Lingus Viscount Awards, in association with Ulster Business, honour those companies that have forged vital economic ties between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Kainos has also won two other major awards for being a top employer to work for, most recently being ranked 55 in the Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For 2013 list, which recognises the UK's most engaged and supportive employers. Kainos, a specialist independent IT systems integrator, applications and professional services company which works with state-of-the-art technologies, has long prided itself on the calibre of its workforce, crediting this with the business's meteoric rise despite the recession. The company's talent is highly qualified: 98% of staff are university graduates with over 80% of delivery staff holding first-class technical honours degrees. Kainos employs innovative recruitment practices too, to actively attract the best young talent from universities across the UK, Ireland and Poland. Initiatives here include an annual summer 'AppCamp' (see http://appcamp.co.uk/) and the most recently launched recruitment initiative targeted at the brightest A Level students seeking a career in IT. The Earn as you Learn scheme will allow students to earn a living and develop real-world expertise and experience, as trainee software engineers, while simultaneously studying part-time for a degree which Kainos will also fund. 'We are delighted to be honoured with such a prestigious Aer Lingus Viscount Award,' commented Brian Reid, Kainos's head of sales and marketing. 'We are enjoying significant demand for our agile and open source technology skills and services from UK government and in particular from within the Government Digital Service (GDS) where we are delivering many exemplar projects. This coupled with continued growth in our Healthcare and Workday practices is fuelling our business momentum and recruitment ambitions.' Kainos is currently pursuing an ambitious three-year growth plan which will see it double its staff count to over 650 people, and effectively double annual revenues to over £65 million, by 2016. Last year Kainos announced a multi-million pound investment to fund the creation of new software engineering jobs in the UK.