Tag: Timico

Video games killed the art of conversation – spot the game megaprize competition #TimicoDC

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 19 January, 2012
5 Comments on Video games killed the art of conversation – spot the game megaprize competition #TimicoDC

We had a hugely successful data centre opening event at Timico yesterday – 210 customers, prospective customers and business partners came along and, if I say so myself, had a great time (and were impressed 🙂 ). More on this as soon as I’ve assembled the photos etc – I’m on the move at the moment.

In the meantime I have a little prize competition for you. At the back of the lecture theatre (conf room, call it what you will – it had more than 200 odd people in it), just for fun, we had a range of “antique” video games, consoles and computers on show.

There’s a bottle of champagne¹ and a mug for the first person to correctly identify all the different systems shown in the video below (Timico staff not eligible here as they will have been able to view the kit yesterday). Note no apologies for the title of the post. It is partly true and the internet is now doing its best to finish the job.

¹ I saved it specially from yesterday’s celebrations 🙂

Tags console, datacentre, game, Timico, video

Cloud End User fun stuff

2 days til Santa comes yay

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 23 December, 2011
3 Comments on 2 days til Santa comes yay

This is undoubtedly one of my favourite times of the year. When you are a believer like me the run up to Christmas Eve is very exciting. I start going to bed early and being a good boy so that there can be no question in Santa’s mind that he should be making that important stop in Lincoln.

The mince pie, carrot and brandy get put out before I go to bed and it always amazes me how Santa can get down what must still be a red hot chimney after that fire has been going all evening. The next day he and the reindeer have always scoffed the lot. Every year, without fail.

The run up to the big days is always busy and this year has been no exception. This week has been a particularly good one with a trip to see Paul McCartney at the last night of his tour in the Liverpool Echo Arena.

We also had the annual Timico management bash, this time at Stapleford Park.

Stapleford, if you have never been, is a stunningly luxurious country house hotel in Leicestershire – former seat of some duke or other and surrounded by Capability Brown landscapes.

You know what it’s like, champagne, cocktails, port, brandy, that kind of stuff. We’d do it more often if it was up to me.

We were lucky enough to be entertained by top international harpist Eleanor Turner who lives locally. Brilliant stuff though the team needs to stick to managing a business because carol singing accompanied by a harp is not their strong point.

The pic on the right is of me wowing Eleanor with my witty and erudite after dinner conversation.

It’s been another great year in business and on the blog. In fact it’s been a great year all round. To all friends out there have a wonderful Christmas break and I look forward to engaging with you anew in a slightly toned down January – life can’t keep going at the same pace when you get to my age you know!

I will be working between Christmas and New year – data centres to launch, world records to smash etc – so keep your eye open for news. Your help is required. 🙂

Tags Christmas, Eleanor Turner, harpist, Lincoln, stapleford park, Timico, Waitrose

Archived Business Cloud

The 2011 Timico Network Operations Awards – what a great team

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 19 December, 2011
2 Comments on The 2011 Timico Network Operations Awards – what a great team

How do you thank a great team that has bust a gut for you all year to make your operation a success?

You have pizza and champagne for lunch at the Annual Timico Network Operations Awards.

This has been a special year because the team has had the new data centre project to contend with on top of having to deliver another record year of sales.

The data centre has been delivered on time and everyone is busing a gut to get the last few customer networks provisioned before the Christmas break, and as it happens our financial year end.

Hover your mouse over each photo to find out more about the person in it. The prizes are being handed out by Timico CEO Chris Tombs.

Group Ops Director Calum Malcolm stays discretely in the background but this is his team and a special thanks must go to him from the business for making it all happen.

The overall winner of Engineer of the Year is David Sears whose prize was accepted on his behalf by Penny Wilkinson. David, or Biscuit as he is known internally, happens to be on holiday. His prize is, wait for it, a holiday – choice as I recall of Paris, Brussels, Rome or Scunthorpe (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it). Well done guys – it’s great to work with you 🙂

Tags awards, NetOps, Timico

Business competitions

Santa visits the office to judge mince pie competition and I missed him

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 15 December, 2011
4 Comments on Santa visits the office to judge mince pie competition and I missed him

Today we had four entries for the Timico mince pie making competition.

You will note from the picture on the left that one of the entrants looks as if he only brought in one mince pie. That was Big Rich Wright.

He ate all the others (claims it was his workmates). I had intended to be one of the judges but whilst I was having my regular massage, Santa came in, rounded up a team of judges and cracked on with the competition.I totally missed him! I am pleased to announce that the winner of this year’s Timico mince

pie competition is Fiona Spear – seen here being congratulated by Santa. I have to say I thought they were all winners and would like to thank Faye Hemingway, Victoria Webster and Rich Wright for also entering.

The judges were Daryl, Danielle and Sophie – beautician students from Grantham College. I wish them well.

Tags mince pie, Santa, Timico

Cloud datacentre Engineer virtualisation

View from inside a Network Operations Centre #digitalbritain

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 14 December, 2011
3 Comments on View from inside a Network Operations Centre #digitalbritain

I’m excited to say that the new NOC is now up and running as the header photo shows. The screen content is evolving at the moment but is intended to serve as a useful visual monitor of what is going on in the Timico network.

The photo on the left shows the room being built. The photo on the right is the view from the “manage” meeting room which has a glass wall showcasing the facility.

The security levels applied to the NOC itself means access is restricted to NOC staff. No sales people, no customers but there is a great view from the meeting room.

The shift system currently means that some desks are unoccupied at times. However as the business grows the staff will operate a hot desk system with personal possessions kept in a movable tray.

The also use a PCoIP zero client desktop hosted on our VMware platform. When a shift worker logs off and a new person logs on from the same seat the PC instance is completely rebuilt using the new logon credentials.

The official opening of the Timico Newark datacentre and NOC is on Wednesday 18th January.

Tags datacentre, Newark, NOC, Timico

Business Cloud datacentre

Interactive network design the Newark way

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 7 December, 2011
6 Comments on Interactive network design the Newark way

I hope these guys really appreciate what we do for them at Timico. First we build them a brand new data centre. Then we put in a state of the art coffee machine closely followed by a kennel. And now they get an interactive white board to play with!!!

I’m beginning to feel like a second class citizen. I only have a kettle, a normal old fashioned whiteboard and no kennel. Wossthatallabout?

For those of you who are interested in these things, ok most of you, Ben is modelling the latest Acer Aspire R3700 interactive whiteboard. It comes with an overhead projector (ceiling) and a shiny black box (inset). I can hear those oo’s from where I am sat.

On a slightly serious note this is all about productivity. On a slightly less serious note, where do they get these part names from? The Aspire R3700!

What would a world without decimal numbers be like? The Acer Aspire RMMMDCC. There you go. Sorted. Have a good one.

PS I have sneaked in the first photo of the new videowall in action – click on the header pic to see more. It was either this or Sky Sports and the boys chose the former 🙂

Tags Acer, Aspire R3700, datacentre, Newark, NOC, Timico

Business mobile connectivity

I have seen the future… (mystic waily voice) #4G #digitalbritain #O2 #iPlayer

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 6 December, 2011
11 Comments on I have seen the future… (mystic waily voice) #4G #digitalbritain #O2 #iPlayer

As I gaze into my crystal ball the mists are swirling, swirling. Now they are disappearing. Ah, it is all clear. I can see blue skies. I can see people dancing, holding aloft their smartphones and tablets. Waving. Everyone is happy. Where is this mythical land where the rivers flow with champagne/beer/cappucino (delete as appropriate)?

It is here, where you and I live. In Blighty. Home.

I have just come back from O2’s offices in Slough where I had a play with 4G on a laptop. The jpg in the header photo shows the download and upload performance. The speed varies but does go as high as 80 – 85Megs down.

The laptop I was using only needed 7Megs worth of bandwidth for its day to day activities – email, streaming HD etc so there is plenty of headroom when considering personal use. It is easy however to imagine this service being used as a replacement for fixed line bandwidth where a family would certainly use up all the bandwidth available. Also who knows what bandwidth hungry applications are round the corner. They will come.

The demo is impressive. The photo inset was taken from my Samsung Galaxy 2 so isn’t a screenshot and the quality could be better. It doesn’t matter. I watched Frozen Planet streaming in HD on iPlayer – no buffering, perfect quality.

O2 has recently announced 4G trials in an area of London between Kings Cross and the City. I am taking part. Watch this space for up to the minute information on 4G.

I have seen the future. The future is 4G.

Tags 4g, BBC, Frozen Planet, iplayer, O2, Timico, trial

Cloud datacentre Engineer

Chchrrrshshsh whooosh – nuff said

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 2 December, 2011
4 Comments on Chchrrrshshsh whooosh – nuff said

For those who have problem with flash.

Tags datacentre, latte, Newark, Timico

Business events

The glamour and glitz of the ISP world

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 1 December, 2011
3 Comments on The glamour and glitz of the ISP world

This post is up just so that you can see the lineup on stage as we collected our Newark Business Awards Business of the Year prize (holiday in Necker Island, Upper Class flights, Rolls Royce etc – the plaque is just for display in reception back at the office). It may be clearly seen that good looks are one of the qualifications for working at Timico¹.

To my right are Saira Khan of “The Apprentice” fame and Joanna Parlby of the Newark Advertiser. From Timico are Scott Wroe, Suzie Hodges, Nadine Edmondson, Katie Nicholas, Sandra Hine, Andrew Fox, Dawn Spear and Jo Barker.

Just for reference Suzie is the one with the Brazilian headdress. She has a collection which is watered daily. We have very ~~progressive~~ ~~advanced~~ refined tastes in fashion at Timico.

¹ no clever comments please – just appreciation 🙂

Tags Business of the Year 2011, Newark Business Awards, photo, Timico, Trefor Davies

Cloud datacentre Engineer

A peek inside the boardroom

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 1 December, 2011
7 Comments on A peek inside the boardroom

Ever wondered what goes on inside a board room? Important decisions? Tea or coffee? Cappucino, Americano, latte? One sugar or two?

All of the above 🙂 Obviously a lot more gets discussed as well and I am pleased to be able to show you our new accommodation. I haven’t yet decided where to sit – another of those decisions that will work itself out as we settle in.

The photo on the left is of the Network Operations Centre being populated with furniture. You can see it starting to take shape in front of the video wall.

The pic on the right is part of the development engineering office. This is where all the serious service platform development will happen. Visible is Group Ops Director Calum Malcolm’s office with meeting room. To the right of that is a breakout area which will have sofas etc conducive to creative thinking (and having a nap 🙂 ! )

Read it first on trefor.net !

Tags boardroom, NOC, Timico

Cloud datacentre Engineer virtualisation

We are in! – new Timico datacentre

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 28 November, 2011
7 Comments on We are in! – new Timico datacentre

At 10am this morning, 28th November 2011 we officially took delivery
of a datacentre. Not quite the same impact as the ceremony that ended the first world war (10th hour of the 28th day doesn’t sound quite the same as 11th hour of the 11th day) but hey…

I’m not even sure there was a physical ceremony. If there was I wasn’t there but the new build is certainly buzzing with engineers doing their stuff.

Progress is going to be rapid now with the official launch/opening ceremony due on Wednesday 18th January. The box on the right is one of the EMC SANs I showed being delivered on Friday.

The initial environment will have Juniper in the core network with VMware running over Cisco Nexus and EMC. I’ll post more detail on this as we get nearer launch though if you urgently want to know more drop me a line at [email protected].

Tags Cisco, data centre, EMC, juniper, Newark, Timico

competitions Engineer

Is Your Aging Terminal Emulator Putting Your Applications at Risk? #catchymailshotheadlines #anotherwinatimicomugcompetition

There isn’t much to this post other than I like the title. It came from one of the many junk emails I get daily – 12 today in that category. I must stop leaving my business cards at trade shows – I never win the iPad anyway.

This particular title isn’t very catchy which is why it stood out. Usually it’s all about “deploying this”, “helping staff with that” and sometimes it has to do with “the other” though the spam filter usually catches that kind of email. In fact they are very rarely catchy titles.

I am gradually unsubscribing from these mailing lists though it’s probably a battle I will never win.

Anyway I figured it would be a good idea to run a competition for the least catchy junk email competition – real or imaginary. Sometimes I get a huge response to these competitions and sometimes nothing. Doesn’t stop me coming back for m0re though 🙂

As usual please leave your entries as comments. Kudos but no mug to anyone guessing the name of the sender of the email in the post title.

Tags junk, mail, Timico

Business charitable

Meet Andrew North – modern man and all round good egg #childreninneed

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 18 November, 2011
1 Comment on Meet Andrew North – modern man and all round good egg #childreninneed

Meet Andrew, a butch kinda guy. He likes shooting and has been known to jump out of planes “just for fun”.

Andrew is clearly a happy go lucky bloke and nothing excites him more than getting ready for a night out at the weekend. This weekend is a big one. It’s Children in Need.

Andrew really likes to sit in front of the TV watching all the celebrities doing their bit to empty your pockets and raise cash for a worthy cause.

Andrew though is no couch potato and today has got off his butt to raise some cash himself. In fact as you can see from the pics he has gone more than the extra mile.

Andrew has gone and had his nails done.

It took a whip round to do it. It’s funny how the whole company responded to the ~~challenge~~ opportunity. The £145.18 was raised in no time at all.

As you might imagine it took Andrew some getting used to, especially the drying bit. There was some serious wrist action going as you can see from the photos and no small amount of puff.

Anyway he got there in the end and has been strutting round the office proudly showing off his nails to everyone generous enough to have donated.

The lad has promised to keep the varnish on for the whole weekend so that his mates down the Rose and Crown on Saturday night can take a butchers. Perhaps they will buy him a pint – he deserves it. They should at least add to the donations already made.

The last photo is in stark contrast with that of the header where he is trying to look tough.

In it he is obviously a happy chappy and has already worked out the best position to hold his arm to display his nails to best effect.

Well done Andrew, proud to be your workmate.

Well done also to Kirsty Watt, the ingenious instigator behind the important fund raising initiative. She is evidently a talented artist 🙂

Meet Andrew North – modern man and all round good egg.

Tags Andrew North, Children In NEed, Timico

Cloud datacentre Engineer

Where there is technology there is art

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 16 November, 2011
5 Comments on Where there is technology there is art

I am often asked for updates on the progess of the new Timico data centre in Newark. This is most easily done in pictorial fashion.

It’s nearly done. We are moving kit in. No desks yet but there is now a steady stream of engineers popping over, doing stuff.

We have a reception desk. More like Tardis console without the bit in the middle going up and down. Obviously the reception area is still work in progress but first impressions are important and it aint looking bad.

Some of these photos have been chosen exclusively for their artistic qualities. The patch panel below for example is worthy of the Tate Modern though quality of the photography probably leaves a little to be desired – I’m not a trained photographer you know. The photo of the cold aisle is a development on the last one I did which didn’t have the enclosures and attracted comments about inefficiency. This one shows the door at one end and you can just about make out the fact that the aisle has a roof on it.

Two more pics to go. This first one is a bit of the coffee machine in the first floor kitchen. It reminds me of the Graham Green novel “Our Man in Havana” who was supposed to be sending back photos of secret Cuban missile parts (or simlar) but which in reality were components of a vacuum cleaner. If you look at it from the right angle it could be a missile part (or a vacuum cleaner) 🙂 .

I will say the NOC engineers are going to have to look out for caffeine overdoses because this dispenses the real mcoy in volumes and free of charge. There is also a tap for boiling water – no more frustrating queues in the kitchen waiting for the kettle.

And finally a picture of me holding a bunch of cables. I’m not going to give you any clues about the cables because are goingto be plugged into something uber impressive and you will have to wait for that.

Oh and there is one more I forgot – no data centre is complete without it’s Dyson blade dryers and here they are in high speed action 🙂

There you go – a data centre update 🙂

Tags datacenter, datacentre, Newark, Timico

Business Cloud datacentre

Hey presto – we have a car park

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 2 November, 2011
11 Comments on Hey presto – we have a car park

Funny how we get excited by little things. The other day I came into the office in the afternoon and they had started putting down the Tarmac for the carpark. Like lightning I whipped out my trusty phone Galaxy S2 and took a photo.

Today I got up from our fortnightly management meeting and hey presto, someone had painted white lines on the Tarmac. It’s very odd but somehow this makes it all look real. Note no executive parking spots. The early engineer gets the space nearest the door:)

To my knowledge this is also the first UK data centre to provide a kennel for the guard dogs. I am happy to be corrected here. This key piece of infrastructure arrives on 28th November and I’m sure there will be a photo shoot. Get down Shep!

Tags data centre, Newark, Timico

broadband Business

The Timico Chilli Eating Champion Lays Down His Asbestos Gauntlet or What has a Chilli Got to Do with FTTC?

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 2 November, 2011
6 Comments on The Timico Chilli Eating Champion Lays Down His Asbestos Gauntlet or What has a Chilli Got to Do with FTTC?

We breed ’em hard at Timico. Inset is a photo of Timico engineer Gareth Bryan¹ who during long weeks out on the road doing customer installs developed a penchant for hot food. Rather than sit in his room at the Marriot/Holiday Inn/Thistle Travelodge he would seek out the nearest curry house and experiment with his passion for Indian food. After months of this he has built up an immunity to your everyday vindaloo.

Now promoted to third line tech support and in the office a lot more he no longer has the same opportunities to indulge during the evenings and been driven to experiment with home cooking.

Gareth, who today passed his CCNA exam with flying colours (well done mate), is holding a small packet of Dried Naga Bhut Jolokia chillies grown in India and supposedly 4,000 times hotter than Tabasco sauce. In other words absolutely lethal. So lethal in fact that Diane our Health And Safety person has made him sign them into the Timico dangerous deliveries and noxious substances book².

They smell disgusting – using asbestos protected nostrils I

Tags Dried Naga Bhut Jolokia chillies, FTTC, Tabasco, Timico

Cloud datacentre Engineer

Data centre finishing touches featuring Tim and Neil

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 27 October, 2011
3 Comments on Data centre finishing touches featuring Tim and Neil

It won’t be long now before we actually move in to the new data centre and start kitting it out. The racks are going in as I write and the header photo shows Marketing Director Neil Armstrong working his way through a full sample buffet in preparation for the big opening night in January. His attention to detail means that he has to taste every dish. Hollow legs that man and not an inch of excess weight on him!

Pictured below is Timico chairman Tim Radford trying to find his way out of the maze of racks.

Tags centre, data, Neil Armstrong, Newark, Tim Radford, Timico

competitions End User

Caption competition – demise of the Bb Trumpet

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 26 October, 2011
30 Comments on Caption competition – demise of the Bb Trumpet

As we approach the final days of the Timico data centre build the lads are putting down the tarmac in the car park. This is quite convenient as I happened to be in need of a steam roller – assuming that’s what they still call them despite the absence of steam. If you can’t get the video below to work then there’s a link here to the original YouTube location.

Here are a few other photos mapping the before and after. There’s a prize of the best caption for the “after” shot – entries left as comments please 🙂

Site manager Nigel has a word with the driver of the roller. In case you were wondering my 14 year old plays the trumpet. He found this in a skip at his school and decided it would go well on his bedroom wall in a slightly altered state

Just to finish off an artistic view of the air conditioning fans outside the data centre:)

Tags Bb trumpet, data centre, flattened, Newark, tarmac, Timico

Business Cloud datacentre

Timico data centre update

Not long to go before we start kitting the new data centre out as a data centre so I’ve chosen some artistic and tasteful photos for your delight. Of course they might not be to everyone’s taste but there is beauty in the modern day industrial infrastructure of the country – just as we now admire the steam engines and rows of red brick mills that were once associated with satanic darkness.

This time around the jobs created will be highly skilled and professional at a time when we could do with some good news in the local economy.

We are in the process of hiring for the extended shifts that will be necessitated by the 24×7 operational nature of the expanded Network Operations Centre.

Last week we ok’d the purchase of a wall of monitor screens for the operations room itself. I’m quite excited about this as it will have a high visibility impact on the place – all controlled by an iPad or similar (I asked what they would be using for a remote control for all those TVs – more on this in due course). As I said not long now.

It will also be worth talking about our expanded sales structure as we move in to 2012 and I will do this as some important new hires come on board.

Bye for now.

Tags data centre, Timico

Business Cloud datacentre

We Want #ITIL Service…And We Want It Now!

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 27 September, 2011
10 Comments on We Want #ITIL Service…And We Want It Now!

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

Tags ITIL, ServiceNow, Timico

End User fun stuff

Me and Sir Viv Richards go way back

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 23 September, 2011
9 Comments on Me and Sir Viv Richards go way back

One of my massive cricketing heroes is Sir Viv Richards and I was privileged to sit at the same table with him at lunch in the City yesterday. Click on the header for a bigger shot – the guy on the left is my friend Umar Bajwa who is IT Director at the Murphy Oil Company (Murco).

We were treated to four hours or so of entertainment that included very interesting anecdotes from Sir Viv and also from Australian Fast bowler Rodney Hogg (41 wickets at 12.85 during the ’78-79 Ashes series for those who like to know these things).

This being a Friday I have another competition for you. Who is the black guy to the right of Viv Richards in the small inset photo? I had not heard of him myself but I’m sure that many will have seen him in action. Again click on the photo for a bigger image. Usual prize is up for grabs (while stocks last). He is also in a couple of the photos below.

The final photo is of the auction of a signed print of a photo of Rod Hogg taking the wicket of Sir Geoffrey Boycott. There was not much love lost between both speakers and the bold Sir Geoff. The photo was signed by Rod not Geoff.

I have to sit on my hands on these occasions otherwise I end up coming away with auction prizes as a “surprise” for my wife.

At a Lincoln rugby club charity dinner I was once used as a stalking horse by an auctioneer trying to drive the price up. Having made the initial bid for a signed photo of the Red Arrows I firmly sat on my hands. The whole room, however, thought I had bought the photo and imagine my wife’s surprise when, after picking the kids up from school the next day, she was asked if she liked her new photo. Funnily enough she could think of better things to do with a couple of hundred quid 🙂

By the way if you are wondering about the title of this post what I really mean is that I went to see Viv Richards play at Trent Bridge in 1984. He had just scored a massive 189 in the game at Old Trafford and received a standing ovation from the crowd as he walked out to the the crease. Despite being England fans we were there to see the great Viv Richards score a big one. You have to imagine the stunned and disappointed silence of the crowd when he was out caught behind for two runs. Ah well at least I saw him play and have now had lunch with him 🙂

PS Nobody won last weeks competition but I did get two comments so if you can let me have your address there will be a mug in the post for you.

Tags cricket, Sir Viv Richards, Timico, West Indies

Apps competitions End User

My camera keeps ringing – massive prize competition

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 16 September, 2011
2 Comments on My camera keeps ringing – massive prize competition

I had a full day of meetings in London on Wednesday. At 2.30pm I finished one and I needed to be in Westminster for the next one at 3.15. It was a beautiful sunny day so I decided to walk and made my way down through St James’ Park to Horseguards Parade.

We do have an impressive capital city and I happened to be there as they were changing the horseguards. With a few minutes to spare before the meeting I joined the tourists and got my Galaxy S2 camera out. As I was taking a photo the camera rang! Annoying huh? They will add phone functionality to useful personal gadgets.

That particular photo was lost but

Tags competition, Galaxy S2, horseguards, Timico

Business Cloud mobile connectivity security

Mobile Working Report — CoIT and BYOD Trends

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 15 September, 2011
No Comments on Mobile Working Report — CoIT and BYOD Trends

The mobile communications market has for years been characterised as a commodity space. Selling mobile services was largely a matter of who offers the best price. The rise of the smart phone and the pursuant growth in mobile data is changing this.

Price is still important but these devices are so expensive that the amount of hard cash people (consumers) are willing to spend on their mobile contract has grown considerably. I know this from first hand experience having a 19 year old student son who spends not an insubstantial amount of his monthly budget on an iPhone4 contract.

This in turn is a source of angst for businesses who have not traditionally provided the bulk of their staff with top of the range handsets. Unless you have been in a media vacuum over the last six months you will know that this has led to a phenomenon known as Consumerisation of IT and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) revolution.

I have written about this before. As a provider of mobile services

Tags Bring, BYOD, CoIT, Consumersiation, Device, IT, mobile connectivity, Own, report, Timico, working, Your

Business Cloud datacentre

The Cloud — Now is the Time to Invest

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 14 September, 2011
4 Comments on The Cloud — Now is the Time to Invest

I attended a “Cloud Computing – security, market development and prospects for the G Cloud” forum in Whitehall yesterday morning. It’s a big topic and there were lots of messages to take away.

The G Cloud programme is the government’s effort to move away from an expensive and silo’d server centric estate that in 2009 comprised 90,000 components in central government alone. We, the UK, are after cost savings and an agility that will allow us the flexibility to take advantage of market and technological developments whilst creating a secure platform that will facilitate new and productive uses of data held by our masters on our behalf. Bit of a mouthful. My words really but also my interpretation of what I’m sure is an elongated brief.

Transport for London’s API that allows train locations to be published on Google maps is a good example of the use of public data made available through an API.

Tags Cloud, datacenter, GCloud, investment, Newark, Timico

End User phones

Importance of good web design – effect on a sales campaign

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 12 September, 2011
4 Comments on Importance of good web design – effect on a sales campaign

Interesting to see the importance of good web design in action. We have been running a campaign to sell BlackBerry Technical support. Despite not being trendy anymore many businesses out there use BlackBerry and we sell support.

Initially we were seeing quite a bit of interest but not seeing page views convert to new business. The old landing page was too much like a brochure with not enough “call to action”.

This was changed and we have immediately seen a substantial increase in business taken via the web. Over time we are going to systematically evolve our whole web strategy taking on board lessons learnt.

Tags Blackberry, support, technical, Timico, UK

Archived Business

Timico named by Telegraph as one of Britain’s Brightest Businesses

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 12 September, 2011
4 Comments on Timico named by Telegraph as one of Britain’s Brightest Businesses

Timico, as the post title says, has been named by The Telegraph as one of Britain’s Brightest Businesses. That is good to hear.

The research was compiled with the help of NESTA and Dunn & Bradstreet together with inputs from more than a dozen membership organisations and is intended to highlight medium sized companies that the Telegraph thinks will be the backbone of economic recovery in the UK.

Timico has in recent years regularly featured in league tables such as the Deloitte Technology 50 and the Sunday Times/Microsoft Techtrack100 fastest growing private technology companies. These tables don’t necessarily mean much but as far as I am concerned every bit of positive promotion helps when it comes to growing the business. It’s a tough old world out there.

It’s also worth noting another article in the Telegraph that says “Impatient entrepreneurs are not the answer“. You should read the article but a well written headline gives away the plot and in this case it’s all about growing at a pace that ensures ultimate success.

Having been been part of a start up in 2004 one always wants things to happen faster. However at Timico we have always taken the long view. We want a business that provides value to our customers and we work hard on that in the belief that this is ultimately what will create value for our investors (me included).

Watch this space 🙂

Tags Brightest, Britain's, Business, Telegraph, Timico

Cloud Engineer virtualisation

It’s All About Storage – datadomain #VMware

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 2 September, 2011
7 Comments on It’s All About Storage – datadomain #VMware

Nice bit of lab kit we have just installed downstairs. This is a datadomain DD630 backup storage device. You can see that it has 12 x 1TeraByte hard drives – that’s quite a chunk of storage compared to your laptop or desktop PC. The box above it is running test servers using VMware (click on the header photo to see it all).

This is all lab work being done in preparation for the new data centre when it opens in January. The twelve 1TB drives result in around 9TB of useful space once RAID, hot spare and storage of the OS are taken into consideration.

The beauty of this though is that we are likely to be able to store far more than 9TB of real data once it has been “deduped” – for example identical copies of operating systems removed. In our trials we are backing up some VMs and are seeing 2TB of data being compressed and deduplicated down to only 140GB on the datadomain. We won’t necessarily get the same savings when the system scales up but it is easy to see that it is an attractive piece of kit.

One of the nice features is that if you lose your primary VM server then the system allows you to boot from this backup whilst it rebuilds the original server in the background. This can save a couple of hours of work – very valuable in a problem situation.

As we start building out the virtualisation platform I’ll do some more update posts. The inset photo is the same kit with the front cover on.

Tags data center, datadomain, Timico

broadband Business Cloud virtualisation

EFM Growing at 53% Year-on-Year Driven By Need to Access Cloud

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 31 August, 2011
No Comments on EFM Growing at 53% Year-on-Year Driven By Need to Access Cloud

These days I back up all my family photos on both an external hard drive and online on Google+ (it’s free and so far I haven’t hit a limit).

In August I had two holidays. From surfing on the Gower I brought back 2GBytes of photos (not including those I took on the Galaxy S2 which automatically upload when in range of a wifi and most of which had done so before I got home). Wild camping on the Isle of Mull generated 2.4Gigs of media including video.

That’s not only a lot of storage for one month’s activity but it is also a lot of bandwidth used to upload the photos to Google+. Assuming my home ADSL does 1Mbps upload speed, which it doesn’t, and assuming no packet headers, which there will be, it would take me around 10 hours to upload that lot.

In the office I have a 100Mbps connection and the whole of August can be uploaded in the the background in a fairly short time. The bottleneck is probably the Google+ server at the other end though I am not familiar with Google’s i/o speeds for a given account if they have any.

With cloud services the upload speed, long ignored as secondary by the ISP community, is becoming a critical factor. At Timico our ADSL sales into the business sector are still increasing but at nowhere near the rate of Ethernet. Although an Ethernet circuit is of much higher value than an ADSL (or FTTC) line the number of lines is growing nicely.

The first 8 months of this year have seen an increase in Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) activity levels of 53% over the same period in 2010.

This is happening for a number of reasons. Firstly EFM is more reliable than ADSL and carries a Service Level Agreement. Secondly is the symmetrical performance – EFM can have up to 10Mbps upload as well as download. This combination is important because companies are increasingly using resources in the cloud as part of the day to day running of their business and many of these online resources, such as VoIP, are mission critical.

Large businesses have been using Ethernet for years – they were traditionally the only ones that could afford the cost. They also have the distributed systems and resources that requires the reliability and speed. Now SMBs are moving into the cloud – 48% of those in the UK according to VMware.

This means that there are going to be a lot more customers out there looking for higher upload speeds. At 10Mbps FTTC does bring faster upload but the FTTC footprint is still under construction. In the meantime there are over 2,000 EFM POPs out there (BT and TalkTalk) which probably cover a fairly high proportion of UK businesses.

Coming back to the photos the average size of jpg from my Canon Powershot is roughly 3MBytes – some more some less. This is for a 12Megapixel camera. Looking back 5 years I had a 4 Megapixel camera that produced 1MB jpgs. This suggests to me that in 2016 I will be taking 36Megapixel photos using 9 or 10MB of storage. My 4.4GB August family photo album would be more like 14GB which would still take 3 1/2 hours to upload even if I had a 10Mbps uplink speed.

It is easy to imagine that in 5 years time 10Mbps upload won’t be good enough for home use let alone business and that everyone will be looking for the next level up. It is also easy to imagine that people will find it hard to remember what the world was like before they lived in the cloud.

Tags EFM, Timico

Business Cloud competitions

Announcing the Timico fairy cake champion

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 21 July, 2011
No Comments on Announcing the Timico fairy cake champion

At Timico we now have a champion fairy cake maker to add to the long list of other cake making honours within the company.

This time the winner is engineer Stephen Burdock who spends his days sorting out customer problems and clearly must spend some of his evenings practising his baking skills.

As usual the standard of entries was top notch and the produce is available to purchase at £1 each – all moneys to charity.

Thanks to the judges, including Powernet’s marketing manager John Heritage and to all the other entrants who put so much effort into the competition.

The picture on the right is a cross section of the winning cake before being demolished by the judges. It’s nice to see blokes winning these competitions:)

Tags competition, fairy cake, Timico, winner