UK company wins European ICT gong

A UK company has scooped a top European award for ICT innovation.

Transitive was one of three grand prize winners of the 2007 European ICT Prize for its QuickTransit product.

The QuickTransit hardware virtualisation technology allows applications that have been compiled for one operating system and processor to run on computers that use a different processor and operating system, without requiring any source code or binary changes.

Transitive won prize money of €200,000.

Twenty companies were selected as winners of the prize, while three were selected for the top gong. EU information commissioner Viviane Reding congratulated all of the winners at the awards ceremony at CeBIT in Hanover on Friday.

"The most promising innovations in the ICT field were selected, after a harsh selection process with peer review," Reding told ZDNet UK. "Winners can look forward to the promise of future development, and the real take-up of their inventions to be produced. Next CeBIT I would like to see them among the exhibitors."

Alasdair Rawsthorne, chief technology officer for Transitive, said: "It's a definite win for UK innovation." Ian Robinson, vice president of marketing for Transitive, also praised the Manchester University researchers, who began the QuickTransit project in 1995.

The other grand prize winners were Swedish company Telepo for its fixed-mobile convergence product, Telepo Business Communication, and Austrian company Treventus Mechatronics for ScanRobot, an automatic book-scanning machine.