Case Study: The Wilton Centre

The Wilton Centre is a spacious and diverse site offering office, laboratory and pilot plant accommodation in Redcar near Middlesbrough.

The spacious complex contains a range of office and technical facilities set in a 75 acre landscaped park with its own lake and courtyards.

The site, which was first opened in 1974 by ICI, has around 500,000 square feet of which around half is office space and the other half is laboratory and pilot plant accommodation.

It is home to over 50 companies, including a number of prestigious multinationals from chemical, research, technology and design sectors.

Steve Duffield, The Wilton Centre’s accommodation manager, explains more about the site and how they approach ICT:

“The Wilton Centre has a diverse mix of tenants from pharmaceuticals, to government funded companies and consultancy firms. Therefore, it is vital that we offer varied and excellent facilities right across our site and that includes a strong ICT infrastructure.

“We offer very in-depth all inclusive packages to our tenants and are unique in the fact that we can set everything up so that the tenants only pay one bill – this makes us a very attractive option for a wide range of businesses.”

The ICT infrastructure at the Wilton Centre is one facet of these all inclusive packages, as Steve added:

“We have some companies based here who are large, multi-national corporations. For them, they may well have ICT partners and links which they completely manage themselves.

“However, for our small to medium sized tenants we can offer everything from a telephone service and internet connectivity, up to features such as WiFi and video conference facilities. We also have our own IT support company who look after the Wilton Centre and many of our tenants.

“We offer practically anything to do with ICT that a tenant would need to set themselves up for business and we are immensely proud of our ICT infrastructure.”

Steve believes that having a sound IT infrastructure is vital, to both the Wilton Centre and its tenants. He added:

“For us, IT is at the core of everything we do. No business can survive without some level of IT in place and we are, of course, a business. We’ve got our IP phone system that gives us flexibility to operate and our own dedicated leased-line for our business together with the 100 Mb circuit that we provide to our tenants.

“We installed the line about two years ago fully aware that it wouldn’t make money for us until now. But we installed it to future-proof ourselves as we knew that soon businesses would be looking for faster speeds and better connectivity and we wanted to be at the head of the new technology.

“We want to make the process of relocating to the Wilton Centre as easy as possibly for potential tenants. The facilities and infrastructure we have in place here means that a tenant could sign to move in one day and be fully operational the next. We’ve geared everything around simple, quick connectivity that means our new tenants aren’t waiting around for everything to be set up, potentially missing out on business.

“Many of our new tenants take up IT services that we offer – and these aren’t designed to be a money-maker for ourselves, they are designed to attract businesses to relocate to The Wilton Centre.”

The Wilton Centre achieved Leading Edge status under ict active and Steve explains the reason behind the centre’s desire to be assessed:

“We were in the process of improving our ICT infrastructure and services and found out about ict active via our UKSPA membership. It became a means of being able to benchmark what the building had to offer and what it possibly could improve on. We were able to look at what we had in place at the centre against an industry recognised British-standard.

“ict active set us a benchmark of where we were and where we wanted to be. We could then promote ourselves to potential tenants by showing them that our ICT has been assessed and accredited by an independent organisation. This gives us a clear edge over our competitors.”