• In The Beginning

    Like all good start-ups, our humble beginnings were at home. Just as Apple started in Steve Job’s bedroom in Silicon Valley, for us the top floor of a large Victorian semi in central Manchester was where all the magic happened. We had nothing but half a dozen old desks, two Sun servers, an ISDN line, a UPS, a bunch of PCs and some very bright, enthusiastic people.
  • Lean Start-up

    Like all good start-ups costs were kept low and one of Julian’s abiding memories was watching one of our new found friends from India programming in finger-less gloves! We delivered phase one of our first project and quickly gained an order for phase two – and a new customer. Things got hectic. At this time much of our energy and focus was being ploughed into strengthening links with India and figuring out how to create the ‘best of both worlds’ organisation that Arrk is today.
  • Dot.com Blues + A Proper Office

    The year 2001 was a bad year for all things web and digital, the bursting of the dot.com bubble. Arrk, like many other tech companies, broadened its outlook as we brought on more diverse Customers and technologies. By June 2002, Arrk got serious about ultra-distributed model by launching a second start-up, this time in Bombay. We even got a shiny new office to go with it.
  • What's The Meaning Of Life?

    By 2003 Arrk was involved in the corporate social responsibility movement and also in an early incarnation of the Institute for Collaborative Working which produced the draft standard eventually adopted by BSI as the standard for Collaborative Business Relationships (BS11000). In 2004 we defined our first ‘Stakeholder Charter’ and set up the Arrk Foundation .
  • Back To Our Roots

    The following years saw rapid growth and by 2006 it was time to evaluate the progress made and pause for thought. We had strayed from the twin challenges which we had started life in solving; how to successfully build a distributed team with a collaborative innovation culture and how to use this to design and build large-scale digital products that resulted in best-value outcomes.
  • The Future's Bright (And Purple)

    Today the global IT services industry has matured, there is ‘no such thing as a free lunch’ with the offshore model. As a result organisations are coming to us to learn about the best-value benefits of our hybrid, distributed model. Further, our deep knowledge and expertise in lean/agile and the delivery of digital products and services has served us well as the digital revolution has picked up speed, driving ever faster and wider social, political, economic, industrial and cultural change.