The best companies to work for in IT

Company name:

Skyscanner

Number of employees: 279

Why is it a good place to work? The firm offers formal training sessions through its Skyscanner University. In addition, staff can access external training courses and have informal "brown bag' training sessions at lunchtimes.

What role does IT play here? IT is pivotal as Skyscanner is a flights, hotel and car hire search engine that enables users to check for options by location and price. Skyscanner offers free online tools to enable developers to download and integrate flight information into websites.

Interesting fact: The Edinburgh-based company was formed in 2001 after its founders became frustrated at how difficult it was to find cheap flights to ski resorts.

Other info: The website also features travel and flight industry news and travel tips.

Company name: Stripe

Number of employees: 100

Why is it a good place to work? Benefits include: open vacation policy (Stripe doesn't count the days) and annual "hacktrips" to get staff out of the office environment and work together.

What role does IT play here? Stripe is a web and mobile development tool. It provides businesses with instant access to a platform for online payments that enables new types of transactions to move online.

Interesting fact: Stripe, recently valued at $1.75 billion, was only launched in 2011 by two Irish brothers John Collison (23) and Patrick Collison (25). 

Other info: The company processes billions of dollars a year in transactions for some of the fastest growing companies on the web.

Company name: The Outside View

Number of employees: 10

Why is it a good place to work? The Outside View is a start-up working on big data and says it is free to embrace new technologies and conduct associated research.

What role does IT play here? IT plays a central role. "We are a predictive analytics company working on big data. Every facet of our work involves IT in one way or another. Whether we are deploying new algorithms on the cloud, or working on software locally," according to the firm.

Interesting fact: The firm builds itself as being data agnostic, assuming no prior knowledge on information provided from clients. It also develops on everything (devices) and using anything (programming languages).

Other info: The whole company is tracking, visualising and analysing three core aspects of our lives: health, wealth and happiness, to become elite performers. In the company's own words: "We're proving that there is a gap between what science knows and business does." Translating that to the real world, the firm says it wants to help organisations replace "I think" with "I know" using big data and associated analytics and tools to do so.