IT support in Newark-on-Trent: logistics, agriculture and professional firms

Which Newark businesses does SetWeb work with?

Newark’s position on the A1 and A46 has made it a logistics and distribution town, and the industrial estates around Northern Road and Brunel Drive carry a good share of the county’s warehousing, engineering and trade supply businesses. Alongside that sits a substantial agricultural and rural business economy: machinery dealers, agricultural suppliers, land agents and the professional firms that serve them, which is a business type you find almost nowhere else in Nottinghamshire.

Those rural businesses have a distinct IT profile: sites that are physically spread out, connectivity that is not a given, staff who are rarely at a desk, and a strong dependence on a small number of specialist software packages. A great deal of what is useful there is remote and proactive rather than reactive, monitoring, patching, backups, and making sure the connection between a remote site and the main system holds up.

The town centre and the area around the Market Place and the castle carry the usual independent retail, hospitality and professional trade, boosted by tourism and by the Showground events calendar, which produces genuine seasonal peaks in a way most of our patch does not.

Newark Northgate puts London a little over an hour away on the East Coast Main Line, and that has brought a steady number of professionals who work partly for London or national employers and partly from home in and around the town. Their technology is a laptop that has to satisfy somebody else’s security standards, a home connection that has to cope with video calls all day, and very little patience for a weekend without email.

The Showground at Winthorpe runs a busy calendar, including the large antiques and collectors’ fairs, and the businesses that serve it, caterers, traders, event and hire firms, need technology that works in a field as well as an office: card terminals on mobile data, laptops on temporary connections, and stock systems that catch up cleanly once they are back in range.

Farming brings the sugar beet factory and the grain, feed and machinery dealers across the surrounding farmland, along with the land agents and accountants in town who act for farming clients. For those professional firms the pattern is a small office near the Market Place, clients spread across Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, large documents and maps, and a laptop that spends half the week in a vehicle and must never be the only copy of anything.

The town has grown a good deal to the south in recent years, with large new housing at Fernwood and around Balderton, and that has brought a wave of home-based businesses: consultants, bookkeepers, tradespeople and online sellers working from a new-build study. They usually have good broadband and very little else in place, and the useful starting point is simple: business email on their own domain, a laptop that is backed up and managed, and a plan for the day it is lost.

The Newark and Nottinghamshire county show and the agricultural events at the Showground are a reminder of how much of the local economy still runs on farming. For agricultural businesses the technology is increasingly specialist, farm management software, GPS and machinery data, and online trading for grain and livestock, and it often depends on a single farm office PC on a rural connection. Making sure that PC is backed up and that the data it holds is not the only copy is the first job.

For the full picture of what is covered day to day, see our full range of IT services, or the county-wide overview of IT support in Nottinghamshire.

Much of that work is with manufacturers, engineering firms and distribution businesses, where the equipment on the floor matters more than the machines on the desks. If that is your line of work, there is more on IT Support for Manufacturing.