It’s an idyllic life, the cruising game. You board at misty Southampton and wake up the next day to the splash of the anchor running out in the calm waters of an exotic island in the stream. A stroll out onto the balcony of your cabin reveals Guernsey on the starboard bow. Not Antigua or Barbados perhaps but hey…

On this occasion the location is academic, a backdrop to the serious business of the IT Directors Forum on board the liner Aurora where I am giving some talks entitled “The State of the Internet” and chairing some debates on Consumerisation of the Workplace. More on these anon.

On the first evening we were treated to a panel session with Kelly Sotherton, Sally Gunnell, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, Daley Thompson and Steve Cram. Good entertainment with the Olympics coming up.

The one thing that really stuck in my mind concerned the degree of focus each of these athletes had to have in order to become the champions that they are. Daley Thompson in particular had seemed to inspire the others. His training regime for the Decathlon involved 5 hours a day, 350 days a year including Christmas Day. He would make 4,000 practice javelin throws (chucks?) every month! One would think he had a few in his quiver (?)and that he had someone to run and collect them all once thrown.

The point is that to become a champion he had to be totally concentrated on his objective. I mentioned this to one of the conference delegates and who replied that everyone on board almost certainly regularly worked 18 hour days on their way to C-Level status within their organisations. 4,000 throws a month though is serious focus.

It’s a lesson to us all and if it’s all we remember from the two days of hard conferencing then it will have been a very worthwhile use of the time.

PS Usual prize goes to whoever can guess the name of the person with me in the photo. Also header photo is a little indistinct on this occasion – call it art.

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I attended a Telindus sponsored Consumerisation of the Workplace workshop on Tuesday on my way down to the Convergence Summit. Jean Marie Stas of Belgacom gave a talk about tablet adoption – his experiences seem to exactly reflect my own – especially when it comes to the wife always asking if she can borrow your iPad.

The workshop came up with a few interesting snippets. Firstly Cisco has stopped buying mobile phones  and just give staff vouchers so they can go and buy their own. They are apparently looking to do the same thing with tablets and PCs. This seems very much to be the way forward.

Some of the service providers around the table were reporting that there was a significant interest from many areas in BYOD, notably in the Financial Services market. Workers in this industry are highly paid and typically want all the latest gadgets which is at odds with the need to maintain security and compliance.

This correlates quite nicely with Timico’s recent Mobile Workplace Report which found that 89% of IT Directors in this sector were worried about people bringing their own device to work (BYOD). There doesn’t seem to be the same degree of concern in all sectors – I learned that Bolton Council has gone and given all employees eligible for a “company” phone an iPhone. The Local Authority uses Apple’s own device management tools to manage these handsets.

The subject of the 2012 Olympic games came up. Apparently London Mayor Boris Johnson is really worried that the city’s mobile infrastructure will not cope with demand when the games are on. I think he is right to be concerned. I imagine that every single person watching the events will also be tweeting from their smart phones, checking results online and watching repeats on iPlayer – the Beeb is opening up 24 online channels especially for the Olympics.

Expect to hear more about technology relating to the Olympics as we get nearer the time. In the meantime if anyone in the London area is planning on data network related work in 2012 drop me a line.  There is doing to be significant disruption caused by a freeze on any work that might in turn disrupt the smooth running of traffic around the time of the games. This will mean no digs and no duct access in certain areas. More on this as I get more specific info.

Oh and by the way the workshop was held at the Williams F1 Conference centre – hence the admittedly somewhat cryptic post title. I didn’t have time to stay for the tour but don’t worry I have seen it before.

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Many years ago I worked at Marconi Electronic Devices in Lincoln. The purchasing manager there, a canny Scotsman,  had a certain approach when it came to the acquisition of software. His opening bid in a negotiation would be the cost of the physical tape required to carry the software to our premises.

These days software doesn’t come on a tape. In fact it often doesn’t come at all but resides somewhere remote and fluffy in “the cloud”. What’s more it can’t even be described as software – more a set of APIs and capabilities. When it comes to estimating a value for such an entity it has to be in terms of the benefit to your business.

It wasn’t so long ago that Timico was a small ISP. The company has been growing quickly to the point that had we continued without change the best efforts that kept customers happy and the wheels on the engine turning were no longer  going to be good enough.

Around a year ago we decided to invest in a Business Transformation programme that would create a world class service organisation with our customers at its heart. After all the only reason we are here is to provide service to this most important set of people.

Simplistically put this is a new system with which to run our business. Undergoing such an activity has taken up a huge amount of internal resource and not inconsiderable assistance from external experts.

The first delivery in the programme of work is a new help desk called ServiceNow.

ServiceNow helps us to enforce the ITIL disciplines for service management and reinforces our ethos for delivering exceptional customer service. Customer self service is in the pipeline and a nice touch is that we will be able to integrate this system with that of many of our customers which should add value to our proposition. 

Our business processes are all being reviewed and refined, so that we can operate more efficiently and eliminate the mistakes that we make. The breadth and increasing complexity of the services we provide for our customers mean that we need to raise the bar and operate to higher standards of quality and consistency.

Our systems will be more automated and integrated, so that any information can be entered once and re-used wherever required. And by aligning the new systems with the new processes, we will be able to scale the business up efficiently in line with our ambitious growth plans.

There we go. Sounds almost like a sales pitch but it isn’t really. It’s what a small company has to go through on the way to being a big company. I believe the investment, which when we have finished the initial phases of work is going to total in the £ millions, is going to be of significant value to the business. Another exciting development on the road to world dominance

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Having moved the Timico Network Operations Team to Newark this summer I am looking at upgrading our facilities to provide the business with a state of the art Operations Centre. With this in mind if anyone has any inputs on how we might approach this now is the time.

If anyone out there who are proud of their own facilities and wants to invite me to visit for a look see then I will gratefully accept the invitation.

I am also happy to be approached by vendors in this space if they have something that will add value here.  This could include monitoring equipment, posh screens, ergonomically optimised workstations, electronic whiteboards or even just nice plants etc, etc.

My contact details are available here.

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I attended Wireless 09 at Olympia today.  There were a number of talks I thought worth hearing including one by James McCarthy, Microsoft’s Head of Business Marketing. This one turned out to be a bit of a disappointment.  Probably my fault really as I was looking for details of Microsoft Mobile Applications and how they interact with the desktop.

Instead we were treated to a high level philosophical talk on removing barriers in business based on some research that Micrsoft had commissioned. Typical big company, big marketing budget stuff I thought.

I think most of the audience thought this too.  The chap next to me fell asleep and there were initially no questions.  When the questions did arrive they were on standard Microsoft products with no real link to what had been the subject of the talk.

Ah well.  James McCarthy incidentally, not to do him down, was a good speaker and was the spitting image of actor Hugh Grant.

The previous talk was by Jon S. von Tetzchner, Co-Founder and CEO of Opera Software.  Opera is an interesting company and I hadn’t realised the size that they have grown to- 675 people according to von Tetzchner.

Their browser business is based on the fact that all applications are moving into the cloud and every device needs to be able to access these apps. I doubt anyone would argue otherwise but he did put up some interesting statistics.

It was suggested that back in 1997 80% of all Applications were based on someone’s PC, with the 20% balance being web based. By 2007 he said that his had changed to only 15% being based on the PC and 85% on the web. Whilst adding a caveat that his was not a scientific survey it certainly does underline the trend.

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Following on from yesterday’s post re Telecity’s new capacity plans in Europe the company told me today that the first tranche in Powergate, its new West London datacentre, is 95% sold. That’s 95% of 4.5MW according to Telecity, and in less than a year!

With a total of 10MW potentially available there is still some way to go but it wouldn’t mind betting that they are already looking for a site for their next UK build.

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First day of LINX65 produced the usual interesting mix of talks. Today included IPv6 and VoIP QoS.

The sponsor’s talk at the end was given by Rob Coupland, COO of datacentre operator, Telecity. In Europe Telecity operates in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Milan and Frankfurt. A good footprint to have.

What was interesting was the statistic he floated that the company is doubling its datacentre power capacity over the next couple of years.

I counted 26.5MW in total! They plan to sell this over the next 3 – 4 years. This is a big bet that they appear to be confident of placing based on the uptake that they are already seeing. One of the big drivers they are (unsurprisingly) seeing is content provision.

I’m not making any comment re the effect on Global Warming here seeing as we at Timico are also in the business. I guess at the scale that we are talking about though cooling efficiencies will make a huge difference.

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Hot off the press is an alert from RIM saying their Blackberry service BIS/BES is experiencing difficulties.  According to RIM this means that

Customers may not receive new service books
Connect clients and BB enabled devices that require a new PIN may be unable to receive the pin
customers may experience delays in receiving messages and may get an ‘x’ when sending
customers may be unable to register their device i.e. Register Now
customers may not be able to roam in another location
customers may not be able to use internet browsing
Enterprise customers may be unable to connect to the BB network
customers may not be able to access their internet mailbox, integrate their account or view email attachments.

This is a fairly rare occurrence – unofficial poll around the office suggests once a year – but when it does happen it affects a lot of people. The alternative is to use your own push email but in my experience that is actually less reliable.

All I can say is that businesses need to work with providers that offer support at times like this.  There is nothing worse than having a service that doesn’t work and then being kept in the dark as to why this is happening.

For those who don’t already know BIS = Blackberry Internet Service, BES = Blackberry Enterprise Service.

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Oracle has been in the news recently with the acquisition of Sun. One of the prizes that comes with this purchase is Open Office. This probably would have fitted in very well with Oracle’s Network Computer play of ten or more years ago – I remember visiting Oracle at the time to try and design in some networking components.

Lack of cheap high speed connectivity is what brought Oracle’s efforts to a halt in the 1990s. Today the environment is completely different. Today, however, I don’t see Oracle playing in the space. Instead the spotlight is on Google and what can be seen under the bright lights, understandably, bears no resemblance to what was there in Oracle’s day.

All the components are there: cheap connectivity which is getting faster and cheaper all the time, a massive cloud computing infrastructure that would have been unimaginable ten years ago and a whole bundle of applications that are easy to use and can be accessed from multiple platforms.

Google is poised to be a massive player in the Unified Communications market, at least in the consumer space and downstream probably for small business as well.

There are already many reasons why people use Google’s online facilities. Google mail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Docs and Google Talk and of course Google the search engine.

When I log onto my iGoogle home page I can already access many features that would traditionally have been the domain of a business based Unified Communications service. From my Google Mail account I can send Instant Messages and have video conversations. I realise there are other services available where this can be done but none have the same potential for integration with other cloud based applications (Microsoft will probably disagree with me here).

Now add mobility. Despite being a clunky initial design, sales of the G1 phone have just hit the 1 million units mark and are forecast by British based analyst Informa Telecoms and Media to overtake the iPhone by 2012. And it is still early days for Android, the open sourced mobile operating system used by Google.

HTC has announced a new Android based smartphone that will support Google Mail, Google Talk, GoogleMaps, and synchronises with Google calendar and contact list. Word also has it that Samsung is also looking to introduce three models later this year. The initial clunkiness will soon be long forgotten.

All this points to more and more users using Google Unified Communications services. This doesn’t mean to say I am tolling the death knell of other UC services. I am not. Business has needs that go beyond what Google offers as a basic service.

Better office tools aka Microsoft Office, integration with other business services such as Customer Relationship Management tools operation behind secure company firewalls etc etc. These services are however becoming increasingly virtualized and hosted in the cloud, just like Google does and like Oracle wanted to do way back when I fitted into a smaller waist trousers.

As far as Unified Communications goes I can see clearly now and the future is in the cloud.

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It sounds a bit sci fi really doesn’t it?  “Oracle to buy Sun”.  This is today’s big news in the IT industry.  Big in that it involves $7.4 Billion in cash.  Also big in that it brings together two heavy hitting names  in a marriage that I believe will create a single company where the sum will indeed be greater than the parts. 

As someone who has been part of three successful company acquisitions in recent years, although not quite on the same scale as Oracle, I can identify with their CEO Larry Ellison

If you are in the IT industry you will understand the dynamics that the combination of the components of Oracle and Sun will bring to the party. Oracle will now own a complete stack, right up from physical hardware through operating systems, programming languages and applications. Its products will become more competitive as these components become optimised to work with each other.

Looking at it on a personal level Timico uses a range of products from both vendors. Oracle databases power our VoIP platform together with Sun hardware. Our storage product, KeVault, uses Sun’s Java language. Sun’s mysql database powers half the ISP industry (the other half uses postgresql).

Hopefully the acquisition will not constrain the feature development of products such as mysql. Certainly Oracle will see Java as a prize and I can’t imagine Larry Ellison would sideline “Open Office” considering his long standing “rivalry” with Bill Gates.  We do live in interesting times.

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