Innovation is in the blood of every engineer at Timico . 

When I told the netops team that one day Timico will be a global organisation and the Network Operations Centre will have to operate a “follow the sun” timetable they went away to think about it. 

Turns out they were all very happy working in the UK and the prospect of moving to new Timico NOCs in California, Hawaii and the Maldives held no attraction.

The outcome was the intelligent ceiling tile. This (pat pending) idea allows engineers to replicate conditions in these sunny locations by chosing the weather for display on the ceiling above their desks. They normally chose a sunny cloudless day, in line with the follow the sun support policy.

Sometimes clouds get added, just for a bit of variation, with the occasional hot air balloon floating gently by. You can even have seagulls, without of course the droppings which can be a problem in the outside world.

Turns out this has benefits not anticipated in advance. Because the ceiling is always sunny, staff don’t notice when the heating has been switched off – even in the middle of winter. This has saved Timico thousands in heating bills.

The Timico NOC now also has the most highly qualified set of engineers of any company in the world. As well as the weather the ceiling tiles can display text such as crib notes for professional development courses.

After only one week at the NOC a graduate engineer is guaranteed to pass a Cisco CCNA exam. The CCIE only takes 6 weeks. The developer, Ian Christian, received his PhD during during the pre-rollout testing phase of the project.

All good reasons to work for Timico 🙂 .