Waymark, a bespoke software house based in Metro Riverside Park, Gateshead, has expanded into the North East Business and Innovation Centre (BIC).
Waymark’s Commercial Director Paul Lofthouse said the company had been looking at a move into Sunderland for a while:
“We’ve worked with a couple of clients from Sunderland already and have been keen to expand into the city for some time. It’s a major city and we’re confident there is plenty of business for us to go at in Sunderland.
“Our expansion has accelerated recently – we’ve taken on three people in the last month alone – so the time felt right to move into Wearside.
“We thought that if we were serious about moving into a new area, we needed a presence. We looked at various options on Wearside and felt the BIC was right for us,” Paul added.
Waymark was set up five years ago, and began developing software for utility services. It has since expanded into the education, health, logistics and commercial sectors, working with more than 30 clients, rapidly expanding its workforce in doing so.
Waymark IT have expanded onto the BIC’s 14 acre site
The team has doubled in size over the past two years and now has 15 developers and engineers working on software development for a range of clients.
One of those clients is New World Designs, based in Sunderland’s Software Centre.
New World Designs’ challenge to Waymark was to further develop and automate a filming effect called Bullet Time, made famous in the Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix. It is a means of slowing a film down and allowing the audience a 360-degree view of a chosen scene.
New World Designs are specialists in this area, one of only four companies worldwide with the experience and know-how to professionally exploit the possibilities. The company has created a specialist Instacam360 rig with up to 50 cameras which capture the action from a scene.
The company’s challenge was that once captured, the editing of the video to create the special effects could take up to three or four days.
In stepped Waymark who’s developers came up with a bespoke solution that has cut the process to minutes – if not seconds.
Waymark are currently working with New World Designs on another project.
One of the company’s other major current projects is developing a new service management system for Homeserve, the multi-national home emergency repairs business.
Jason Hylton-Jones, Software Development Director at Waymark, explained: “We developed a new service management system for Homeserve and they were so impressed that they have decided to roll it out to their franchisees internationally.
“The software will be deployed in stages and the first phase will be rolled out this autumn with potentially 40,000 new users in France, and then many thousands of users in both Spain and the USA.”
In order to support the software in France, Waymark’s latest recruit is Jean-Cristophe Groussin, who grew up in Paris and came to the north east to study English and decided to stay.
Paul added: “We’re delighted to have a presence in Sunderland and look forward to playing an active role in what we understand to be a supportive and vibrant business community.”
