Grainger Town and Project North East make winning combination in e-commerce industry

Westgate House, which hangs over the end of Westgate Road and Collingwood Street, built in the Sixties and now waiting for the bulldozers to come and level it, epitomises the rise of the cheap quick build architecture that came to blight Newcastle. Our city, only a short time before, boasted some great buildings including markets, theatres, halls and offices, a sign of the vibrant days of the North East. This grimy decline was epitomised by the film ‘Get Carter’ and just a few hundred yards away is Pink Lane into which Michael Caine walked in 1971. Pink Lane was then seen as being at the heart of the city and ‘where it’s at’.

Pink Lane together with the small block of surrounding buildings and cobbled alleys is just as exciting now and still, "where it’s at". However we shouldn’t be surprised, in medieval times this area played a major role in the prosperity and development of the City and beyond. It also offered protection as part of Hadrian’s Wall, and during the Industrial Revolution became the base for major entrepreneurs who left their indelible mark on our heritage.

Those entrepreneurs are back in the heart of the city and they are moving ever faster with the aid of new technology. The Enterprise Agency Project North East and the Grainger Town Project have invested positively in creating the right infrastructure for small hi-tech businesses to survive and thrive in this now tight-knit digital community. What has drawn them to this particular area of Newcastle is the ‘Big Netty’. The brainchild of Project North East’s Richard Clark and Tim Dixon of TDC Networking Consultancy, this two megabit ‘pipe’ provides a broadband private circuit Internet facility linking ten Project North East buildings. It covers eight miles of leased lines and a half-mile of fibre-optics and provides 70 SMEs with network access 60 times faster than a home computer modem and 32 times faster than ISDN. Individual users are offered Firewall protection, direct connection for specialist applications, cluster links, private tunnels and web applications.

This area has already given rise to the nickname ‘Silicon Alley’ due to the large group of visionary e-business, new media, e-marketing companies that have set up a solid commercial base in this area.

Companies like Enigma Interactive, with a growing team of designers, programmers and producers have completed the latest on-line music finder system for EMI. Based in this new hi-tech Tele-village they are able to compete on a global basis, thanks to the "Big Netty". Enigma’s Managing Director Steve Grainger says, "It has also been attracting attention from our competitors, some of the south’s larger multimedia providers".

Orchid Software has satellite ‘partners’ in India and Silicon Valley in the USA. Their global workers are conveniently placed to enable Orchid to provide a genuine 24 hour service. Orchid’s Managing Director Ajay Sood explains that, "Products can be developed and checked continuously. As one employee stops on a project, another picks it up and continues with it on the other side of the world. The technology we have in our premises provided by Project North East gives us that facility."

So what is the perception in the market place of our region’s talented new breed of hi-tech companies? David Jeffries, Creative Director of Mere Mortals who deliver 3D and 2D design and animation on-line and for TV stated "We compete both nationally and internationally on the basis of how effectively we can deliver a product. We believe we can deliver an excellent product, often for considerably less expense than a similar service from a South East based organisation". David adds, "Moving into Silicon Alley has given us the advantage of two key things beyond just the space itself. Firstly the two-Meg Pipe provided by Project North East has enabled us to do business globally, and secondly the simple well focused grants from Grainger Town has helped us buy the best equipment and software. Now we have contracts with companies in the Netherlands and USA producing TV Graphics and Computer games. We are a very specialised service with a narrow sales channel so global ability is essential to how we do business and Project North East and the Grainger Town Project has given us that ability."

The entrepreneurs who run these businesses have been referred to as the ‘Little inventors’, a great reminder of the strong history of the area and the impact that the North East made in engineering and mechanical brilliance. The region boasts strong creative Universities and a new spirit of enterprise in IT, design and new media, which carry the aspirations of the region forward into the next millennium.