Zühlke receives award for coronavirus app

The innovation services provider Zühlke, based in Schlieren in the Greater Zurich Area, has received the UK IT Industry Award 2021 for its delivery of the COVID-19 app for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) in just twelve weeks. According to the press release on Facebook, Zühlke was named Development Team of the Year.

The NHS in England and Wales brought the new COVID-19 app into operation in September 2020. The UK subsidiary of Zühlke, Zühlke UK, was involved in the development, which was available to the public in just twelve weeks. Overall, 75 specialists at Zühlke were involved in the project, which forms part of the NHS Test and Trace service in England and the NHS Wales Test, Trace, Protect service.

Neil Moorcroft, the Managing Director who led the Zühlke team, highlighted the “global team of 75 of our best staff” according to the press release on the subject of the award. Moorcroft is further quoted as saying: “Designing and developing a feature-rich, medical-grade contact tracing app, that can scale to millions of users, be accurate, and ensure data privacy, in twelve weeks was a tremendous challenge.”

The UK IT Industry Award is supported by the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, and the specialist magazine it publishes called ‘Computing’. BCS operated under the name ‘British Computer Society’ until 2009. According to its own information, BCS has 60,000 members across 150 countries. The press release states that Zühlke won out of ten finalists.