The Department's annual Hall of Fame Awards celebrate the success of companies founded by our graduates and staff. There are now more than 350 companies in the Hall of Fame and every year, we solicit nominations from them for two categories of award – the Company of the Year and the Product of the Year.

The awards ceremony that we held in April 2025 (see the winners, above) marked 20 years of these awards. So we asked some former winners what receiving the award had meant to them.

"Winning that award was definitely a positive. It was a challenge for a small company to be noticed, so every piece of recognition helped us."

Duncan Grisby

In spring 2005, the very first Product of the Year award was presented to Tideway Systems. As co-founder Tim Coote explains, this three-year-old IT discovery software developer "was trying to solve a business problem for large firms that were deploying large-scale IT systems without fully knowing what they already had. Our tool identified all their existing physical hardware and virtual machines, giving them a view of what they had and how it was configured.

"This could be very useful: it might remind them, for example, that they'd never closed down that hole in a firewall they'd opened earlier. Or it might reveal that they were heavily dependent on one particular machine, or were using equipment in a way that was not compliant with its licence."

But for a relatively new start-up (Tideway was founded in 2002), attracting customers was a challenge. And there, receiving the Product of the Year award really helped, recalls fellow co-founder Duncan Grisby, who collected the award at the inaugural ceremony.

"Winning that award was definitely a positive from a marketing perspective," he says. "We were a small company in the enterprise software space, so it was a constant challenge to be noticed, and every piece of recognition was very helpful to us.

'Prestigious awards influenced customers'
"One of the biggest challenges," he adds, "is that many enterprise customers have policies in place that bar them from purchasing from small companies. That meant we were continually having to persuade prospects not only that our software addressed their needs, but that it would be so valuable to them that they should get exceptions to their procurement policies. Awards from prestigious organisations were very much a positive influence on that."

Tim Coote agrees. He had joined Tideway (from CapGemini) to run its commercial services and had a team working with customers to educate them about using the Tideway tool. "We were looking at their IT systems in a new way and of course, discovering mistakes," Tim remembers. "That can create a culture of fear, so we needed to educate and enthuse clients about the advantages and value of doing this – for example, mapping everything in your IT systems gives you a much clearer view of what assets you own and how old they are."

Acquisition created opportunities
BMC Software acquired Tideway Systems in 2009, "which immediately created opportunities for us, because now BMC was the right sort of organisation to sell into the enterprise market," says Duncan. "We were lucky that within BMC we had executive sponsorship from leaders who could see the value in the way Tideway had operated. Unlike other acquisitions by BMC, and the industry in general, the R&D organisation from Tideway was able to continue to operate largely unchanged, rather than being absorbed into a large corporate machine.

"The original Tideway Foundation product lives on, with a great many additions, as BMC Helix Discovery. It is one of the largest and most important products in the BMC Helix portfolio, and underpins the whole AI Operations platform."

BMC Software has recently split into two companies, named BMC and BMC Helix. "I still work for the BMC Helix half, as the chief architect of BMC Helix Discovery," says Duncan. "The software has changed enormously over the years, of course, but many of the early designs and decisions, and even some of the code, from 20 years ago are still present, and still solving problems for our customers."

• The Department would like to thank Stephen Allott and all the members of the Hall of Fame Awards Panel over the last 20 years for their contributions to making the awards such a success.