David Coveney is our director here at interconnect/it, having started the company back in 1996. An experienced coder (and enthusiastic table football player!), Dave has a hands on approach to leading team interconnect/it, mainly heading up project, sales and account management.
How did you get into the world of web development?
As an individual, I never directly coded for the web, but developed system that got rendered to the web, mostly within corporate environments. But enterprise work, although in many ways rewarding, can be quite niche and in my case involved a lot of travel. If you spend the majority of your nights sleeping in hotel rooms, that can have an impact on your life in many ways. Then Oracle took over PeopleSoft, which was the product I most worked with, and given I wasn’t a fan of Oracle’s corporate culture I decided to drop out of that market.
And from there you went on to establish interconnect/it?
Kind of. As you note above, the company started in 1996, but it traded as just me for many years. In 2006 the first thing I did was to hire my friend James Whitehead with a terrible offer of little pay and some equity and then give it a new name.
What do you think makes a successful company?
I think a company has to provide meaningful employment to its staff and meaningful results to its competitors. Do that and the rest comes naturally. It’s not hard to persuade people to give you money when you provide results.
To date, what has been your favourite project to work on?
I’d say The Spectator’s website, because they were really in the doldrums when they came to us needing some tricky solutions, quickly. They’d spent a fortune with a much larger company that had failed to deliver the promised results. Within a few months we’d turned around their website and they’ve continued to grow. To be a part of that, and it was fantastic to hear that Boris Johnson said to their digital editor “I see you’ve got a proper website now!”
What’s next for interconnect/it?
The services business will continue with its organic growth, but we’re planning more work on products. We have a lot of assets that we’ve sat on. Some is available freely on GitHub but isn’t necessarily ready for general release. We have a new member of staff starting with us this summer as a product lead, in order to help us get that intellectual property out to the broader market. So expect The Auditor 2.0 to come out, along with a super special project I can’t talk about right now, as well as some tools aimed at the developer community. Watch this space!
