This is a photograph of our Chief executive, Andy Beverley, when he was four and a half. “The manual he is studying”, explains his dad Steve, “is for the Technics cassette, radio and record player behind him on the shelf. He was standing on a kitchen stool, so he would have carried it through from the kitchen so that he could investigate this machine further. He always wanted to understand how everything worked- especially if it was electrical, and that stool got a lot of use”.
Andy with his trusty stool, continuing his investigations throughout the house and garden…
“His investigations started early. He took a plug apart when he was three” continues mum Sarah. He’d teamed up with my father who was an engineer and enjoyed knowing how things worked too, and the pair of them would investigate things for hours”.
Andy’s dad Steve worked in the IT Department of Coventry Council, which was a big inspiration for Andy. “He always wore smart clothes, and I loved going in to his work” he says. “The server room was huge with fans and lots of whirring, it felt very exciting to me”. Steve could see his son’s passion was for computers, and he would bring back a BBC Micro computer at the weekends. “Andy would do some programming on it – I didn’t show him how to do that by the way, but he learnt from somewhere”.
Andy with a BBC Micro computer (it was micro for 1984)
“Andy was the first of four boys” explains Sarah. “And at the time I didn’t know what other children were like. But later on I did think that he was a bit of a one-off when it came to his passion for technology”.
Andy had set up his own electronics company by the time he was eight, and gave out leaflets emblazoned with “Beverley Electronics”. He bought electronic kits from Maplin that he built to sell to friends and family, like an alarm when the bath water got too high, and a pocket torch. “He was always sending me off to Maplin with a shopping list of kits to buy, and extra bits and pieces” explains Steve.
Andy enjoying electric circuits and wires aged around 8, and with his grandad.
“He also invented all sorts of electronic things” explains Sarah. “When he was 11 he had a sensor pad in his doorway. If we stepped onto it to enter his bedroom, an alarm went off. He thought it was funny that he would know about any entrance. Which was quite ironic because I didn’t want to go in his room anyway. It was a tip!”
Inventing software as a teenager
Andy bought a Dictaphone from a jumble sale when he was 11, and used it to record music he’d play on the radio. He’d then play these tracks to friends in the school playground on his new gadget, and it wasn’t long before he was DJing, building his own lights and putting on discos in the church hall.
Andy (in a white T-shirt) hiring speakers for a disco
Andy went on to build software to manage his diary as a DJ. “I always loved the idea of technology as a way of bringing people together and socialising”, he says. “It was all about spending more time enjoying life really- chatting and dancing and that sort of thing”.
University and a precursor to Facebook
Andy did a degree in Computer and electronics in Salford in Manchester, which he finished with first-class honours. Whilst at university, he invented some software in 2001 that was like a precursor of Facebook- featuring photos of everyone on nights out. He borrowed one of the first digital cameras from a department and would take snaps at events, and then created his own website that was coded from scratch, uploading all the photos of nights out. People didn’t have cameras on phones back then, so photos of events were hard to come by.
Andy would upload the photos onto his website using a lead attached to his camera in those days. “I knew it was popular as people would ALWAYS look at the photos the next day, I could see the numbers of visits to the website. It was great fun looking at photos of all the people we’d been chatting to. And it was great fun inventing a software programme that people really enjoyed”.
The Royal Navy
After university, Andy spent the first decade of his career as an engineering officer in the Royal Navy. After 3 years, in 2007, he got the role he’d always wanted, as Head of the IT Department on HMS Illustrious, one of the Navy’s flagship aircraft carriers, and he held this role for 3 years.
HMS Illustrious was a huge 22,000 tonne floating airport, with between 600 and 1200 people on board. Aircraft would take off and land on the huge strip, and it sailed around the world.
On HMS Illustrious, Andy travelled to the United States, the Mediterranean, to the Baltic, and the Middle East. “Often you’d be in the middle of the ocean and you couldn’t see anything for miles- it was really quite something” says Andy.
But it wasn’t all relaxing and calm. As head of IT, there was often an important problem to solve. “It was a real challenge, there wasn’t one room for all the computers and servers- they were all over the ship- often bolted down too because otherwise they’d be sliding about when it got stormy. There were over 1000 rooms on board, it was a total maze. If you left a laptop somewhere a bit random you’d be unlikely to find it again. Solving problems often involved finding the relevant machine first, and we had maps to guide us”.
It was important work. HMS Illustrious needed its IT system to be performing at its best at all times. “If for any reason the internet went down you’d know about it. Once there was a problem with the server, and nobody could email on or off the ship for 5 days, so we worked around the clock to fix that” says Andy. “Satellites were not always 100% reliable too. Certainly people let us know when there was a problem, especially if they couldn’t email their families- they didn’t hold back, so we had to learn to manage stress!”
It was important to let off steam, and Andy and his fellow sailors would use the flight deck where helicopters landed to play hockey. They’d make pucks out of newspaper with tape wrapped around it. “It was good fun” said Andy. “But the pucks were always going off the side into the sea, so it wasn’t the best place to play hockey”
Andy found that when he took up the role, the IT requests were a bit chaotic, so he invented some software to deal with it- it was essentially a ticketing system for requests.
Post Navy and the birth of LinkSpace
Andy got a reputation in The Navy as someone who could solve tech problems that arose, and one of his superiors on HMS Illustrious called him when they’d left the Navy. The chap had an issue in the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and he wanted to know if Andy had a solution.
The MOD needed to keep a record of events going on all over the world that were non-operational, such as training events. They stored everything in a spreadsheet, but it was huge. Because it wasn’t very secure, only one man was allowed to input data, and he was emailed around the clock with everything going on worldwide. And because only he could look at it, people asked him questions constantly too- such as, “what is happening in Brazil this month?”
“This former boss of mine rang and asked if there was software that could work for this data - it needed to be able to have lots of people using it at the same time, and be very secure” explains Andy. “I spent a while investigating it- this was about 2014, but I couldn’t find anything that matched his specifications. So I spent time inventing something, and the outcome is LinkSpace. LinkSpace is essentially a case management system, it’s a useful tool for managing data when a spreadsheet isn’t sophisticated enough”.
Andy’s former boss was pleased with the outcome, and the MOD took the software on, along with a number of other government departments too. It’s used in the Ministry of Justice and the Foreign and Commonwealth office as well as the MOD.
In early summer 2024, Andy was shortlisted for a president’s award at Tech UK. “It’s nice that the work we do here at Ctrl O has been highlighted” says Andy. “We hear about these unicorns, these success stories of companies with billions of dollars and sharp growth. But sometimes I think it’s good to hear about a micro SME (small to medium enterprise) with steady growth, a good product and a happy team. That’s what I’m interested in”.
You can read more about what LinkSpace does here and get in touch with us here.
