Now, have a think about your website. What does your website do for your business? Is it a brochure website where your customers can have a look to see what you do and then contact you? Is it an e-commerce site through which you sell your products to visitors? Or is it used to blog to promote your services and generate social media interest in your business? Or, like ours, is it all three?

Imagine losing all of that. By taking shared web hosting you can have a pretty good, functional site up and running in no time but you can’t be sure that the actions of another user on that platform won’t interfere with your service. Shared hosting exposes your website to contention. As a service provider, we can do all we can to put policies in place to try and prevent loss of service but sometimes degradation of service on a shared platform is unpreventable and therefore should never be a long term option if your business relies on your website.

If you are worried about what the loss of your site would mean to your business, moving to a dedicated server is the logical upgrade path. For example, if you have dedicated servers hosted by Timico, you get exactly that – a server, or servers, solely used for hosting your website and nobody else’s. Buying a server outright and finding a place to house it in your office where it has sufficient power and is kept cool to optimise its lifespan is tricky and expensive. With a dedicated server, you simply rent the equipment which will be housed in a purpose built Data Centre, an environment that is specifically designed to host IT equipment.

We choose only the very best servers to host on. Our servers are fully tested and comprise of Enterprise grade hard disks and processors. We will never fit sub-standard components in your server.

You may want to choose a managed service option for your server. Many customers like to concentrate on running their business and keeping their website up to date with all the latest news. They don’t want to worry about managing operating system updates or installing Apache to create a web server from the bottom up. This can all be managed for you.

The next time you experience server issues with your shared, just take a minute to have a think about how having your website hosted on a dedicated server would benefit your business.

So, I’ve put together a list of the words that I get asked about most often…

ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) – is a system that automatically routes incoming calls to a specific group of users/agents, usually where the caller does not need to speak to a particular person but needs to be directed to anyone available to answer a certain type query. How the calls will be delivered to those user/agents is dependent on the configuration of the ACD – for example this could be sequential, simultaneous, or percentage based distribution.

Auto-Attendant / IVR (Interactive Voice Response) – is typically set to answer incoming calls automatically, presenting the caller with a spoken menu of various different options (rather than the call going through to a receptionist and them having to ask the caller). On deciding which option best fits the callers requirements, a chosen key press then routes their call to the right place. The term IVR is often used here too, but actually an IVR can be more complex in the routing capabilities.

Hosted System / Hosted PBX / Hosted VoIP – are terms that are often used to describe a system that is ‘off-site’, and not directly located at a business premise. These types of systems could be telephone systems that are owned by a business, but for varying reasons they have chosen to locate it in a central data centre rather than in their office. Or, a ‘hosted’ solution can also be referring to a system that is not directly owned by the business, but instead users connect to the system of a service provider/third party and just renting a proportion of it, rather than investing in their own.

ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) – is a type of circuit which delivers Voice and Data communications via digital signals over the PSTN. ISDN circuits can handle multiple telephone calls depending on the capacity configured (this is known as the number of channels).

Mobile Client – is becoming a more popular term as VoIP providers are not only developing PC software to allow voice calls to be made from the desktop, but are also now building applications for smartphones. Mobile clients like this enable users to make calls from their smartphone via the Internet, rather than using the mobile network.

PBX / IP PBX (Private Branch Exchange) – is a telephone exchange that serves specific businesses/offices. The PBX switches calls between internal users and external lines. It handles how calls are routed out to external telephones over the PSTN and how calls are routed internally between users and extensions. An IP PBX is a development from the traditional PBX systems, allowing calls to be made over the IP network as well.

Presence – is a feature of many VoIP solutions which allows a user to see the real-time availability of their colleagues. Users can visually see whether the person they are about to call is available or whether they are already on the phone.

PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) – is the network of the world’s telephone lines all connected together, ensuring any telephone in the world can communicate to another. Originally a network of fixed-line analogue telephone systems, the PSTN is now almost entirely digital and includes mobile as well as fixed telephones. It is sometimes referred to as the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS).

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) – is the language/signalling message that allows voice calls and similar communications to be made over the Internet. The terms SIP and VoIP can often be confusing to differentiate between the two, however SIP is just one method of Voice over IP and there are other protocols that can be used to provide a similar service. The advantage of SIP is that is uses open standards and so can be used with a variety of different vendor equipment and software, whereas manufacturers of some systems in the past have had their own proprietary signalling methods.

Softphone – is the term used for software which allows calls to be made straight from the desktop of a PC, over the Internet, rather than using a physical telephone. A softphone is usually used with a headset plugged into the computer, but can also be used via the computers own speakers/microphones or sometimes can be linked with a physical handset. Because a softphone is software based they often can include additional multimedia features such as Presence and Instant Messaging.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) – is the generic term for the delivery of Voice and Multimedia communications over IP networks (such as the Internet), rather than over the public switched telephone network (PSTN) as Voice has traditionally been delivered. There are many different protocols which enable a VoIP service to be delivered – SIP being the most common.

With these explanations in my mind, we can then start to look into the various telephony solutions in more detail…

So when launching a brand new product you have to make a few judgement calls based partly on what the manuals tell you, partly by watching your competitors and a fair bit of gut instinct. So as we prepare to get ‘out on the road’ I thought it would be worth reflecting back on a few of those decisions that have shaped the product as it stands on launch day

Not using the “C” word

Cloud is such an emotive word in our industry and it’s dogged by arguments over what is and what isn’t a cloud service. Now VDC certainly meets many of the criteria for cloud but I wouldn’t say it’s like a utility - a generic, commodity product like gas or electricity. Some people say that that’s what Infrastructure as a Service (which is effectively what VDC is) should be like to be considered true cloud computing. Well that’s not really the type of proposition we want to offer to our customers. Our focus has to be on providing solutions that help customers solve problems, save money or be more efficient and to that end the term cloud doesn’t really help us and so I’ve deliberately avoided using it to describe VDC.

Choosing VMware

There are a number of service provider platforms out their now that we could have used to build a Virtual Data Centre service - we chose VMware. They’re certainly not the cheapest, but they have one great asset – customers trust their software. In the world of Enterprise virtualisation they are the clear leader and their vSphere platform is running countless production IT systems all over the world. VDC is built on top of the same software and can be connected to the customer’s vSphere environment, so they can move server workloads seamlessly to it. This familiarity, compatibility and trusted reputation helps the full or partial transition to an outsourced IT solution seem like less of a risk.

PAYG is not the main priority

One of the hardest bits of launching any new product is being able to give the customer an accurate bill every month and, if I’m being honest, this is one of the reasons that the PAYG option didn’t make the cut for launch day. More importantly, though, a lot of fuss is made about services like VDC offering on demand, per hour billing capability. The idea is that service providers can accommodate sudden large bursts in computing resource requirements that might last for just a few days or hours and the customer only ever pays for what they use. In my experience of the SME market, which Timico chiefly serves, the use cases for this kind of massive flexibility are comparatively rare. Most customers have predictable IT requirements that tend to stay broadly the same or, at the very least, grow and contract slowly over time. So our VDC service is based on buying resource pools where the customer specifies upfront the amount of CPU, RAM and storage that is assigned to them. This seemed more in line with what our customers had been asking us for so far and so it was an easy decision to hold back on the PAYG option. We will still launch this option in a few months’ time (once the billing is working right of course) and it will be interesting to see what the customer take up is and what the typical use cases are.

In part two of the post I’ll cover off some of the other decisions we made when building this product and the reasoning behind them, including why we are different to some of our competitors.

For now though it’s time to remove the “L” plates and get out there, talking to real customers about VDC, which is where the next phase of learning begins.

Unlike broadband services, dedicated connectivity provides guaranteed, uncontended bandwidth so you are not sharing it with other users on the network, giving you the reliability you need. It also comes with a business grade SLA offering a 5 hour fault resolution for Ethernet Fibre and 7 hours for EFM, unlike broadband which is just on a best endeavours basis. If your connection is critical to the day to day running of your business, if there ever was a problem with your connection you have these guaranteed SLA’s to give you peace of mind it will be restored as quickly as possible.

There’s never been a better time to upgrade your connectivity to Ethernet Fibre or EFM with some massive price reductions. Reduced rental prices and free connections means you can now benefit from high quality Ethernet services at a lower cost, not only making it better value for money but it makes it the perfect time to switch.  Without the high upfront costs that often make it difficult to upgrade to dedicated connectivity, it couldn’t make Ethernet more accessible.  Ethernet products provide dedicated connectivity and offer high bandwidth, high performance connections for business critical voice, data and internet traffic. 

20CN is BT’s first generation, old broadband network which provides standard copper broadband service of speeds up to 7Mbps. This has been taken over by the 21^st Century Next Generation Network (21CN) which is now available to around 90% of UK homes and businesses. Next generation broadband provides broadband over both copper and fibre-optic cables. 21CN provides faster, higher capacity broadband services including and fibre broadband which enables you to run a range of telephony and IP services on one connection. Perfect for high quality VoIP and Video communications.

21CN offers faster ADSL speeds of up to 16Mbps in some areas and up to 76Mbps upload speeds if you upgrade to FTTC. Our fibre broadband has been specifically designed to help business meet the ever growing requirements of bandwidth hungry applications. All you need to do it call us today to discuss your options and see if you can upgrade.

The retirement programme is starting in October this year and due to run to March 2014. BT Wholesale has already started not accepting new orders on 20CN at over 1200 exchanges. Once the programme is underway it will be around 400 exchanges being retired each month so it’s going quickly. So far in total it’s looking at around 2549 exchanges that will be retired.

If you aren’t in a 21CN enabled area, don’t worry, exchanges are only being retired where 21CN is available so you’re service will remain as it is. However, if you are in an area where 21CN is available you will soon be able to, if you aren’t already, make good use of the next generation network. Including other services provided by 21CN such as Fibre broadband.  Don’t get your hopes up too much though as your speeds will still depend on your line length and quality.

Service providers like Timico are in the process of migrating customers onto the 21^st century network where it is available. Migrations have been on-going for some time and are being managed through on a monthly basis with our suppliers to make sure they are as seamless as possible and that there is no disruption to your service.

Services that are not being migrated or replaced by the 21CN network is SDSL services, these are due to be completely retired by March next year. If you have one of these connections it’s not a problem we will be in touch over the coming months to discuss alternative connection options with you. However, if you would like to discuss sooner please give us a call.

In my last post, I wrote about the benefits of using a hybrid backup environment to manage your backups, which gives you the flexibility to manage your data using a combination of on premise tape backup, or an alternative on premise method, and off-site cloud backup through a trusted partner like Timico.

This decision can be daunting and this post aims to break down why you should choose Timico and what information we need from you once you have chosen to use Data Vault to make the transition from on-premise to hybrid smooth and hassle-free.

Firstly, why should you choose Timico Data Vault?

My top 3 reasons are:

1. Environment – Our Vault is securely stored within our Tier 3+ Data Centre that has been purpose built to provide the highest possible levels of physical security, cooling and power to ensure that your data is protected from fire, theft or damage due to physical risks
2. Technology – EVault technology is designed to transmit your data as securely and efficiently as possible. The highest levels of encryption are applied to your data all the way along the journey from your server to the Vault. Each backup is seen as a full backup but only the incremental changes within blocks of files are stored following the first seed, reducing your storage footprint but ensuring rapid recovery
3. Cost Effectiveness – Unlike many other backup providers, we only measure the amount of data that you have stored on our Vault. This is read after compression has been applied which usually shrinks your data footprint by 50% and we therefore charge you for what you actually use rather than what we think you will use.

 All of these reasons combine to make Timico the right partner to choose for your hybrid backup environment.

Once you have chosen to use Timico Data Vault, all you need to do is to give us a call and we’ll work with you to design the best strategy to combine Data Vault with on premise solutions to design a hybrid solution that is completely tailored to suit you.

All you will need to know is how many servers you would like to backup using Data Vault and an idea of the type of information that is stored on each server (Exchange, SQL, jpg files). This information will help us calculate how far your data can compress and the rate at which your data changes.

We recommend using the Grandfather Father Son (GFS) methodology to ensure that you have all the copies of your data that you need but you may have a different preference. We can discuss how many copies of data you are looking to keep on the Vault to ensure that we can provide the right quote and assistance.

Finally, we need to know what the upload speed is like for your broadband or Ethernet connectivity. This information will allow us to evaluate the length of time that it will take for your backups to complete each evening.

Working collaboratively with you will allow us to ensure that your off-site backup solution perfectly complements the use of on-premise methods to store older or non-critical data to create the ideal hybrid environment.

In a worldwide survey of IT professionals,  EVault asked them to think about their backup methods and 53% of those surveyed reported to have experienced data loss in 2012. This figure was up 22% from the year before. Many businesses continue to use on premise backup, such as tape backup or SAN to SAN replication. Much of the reason for this is that there is scepticism over how the cloud can help them manage costs but also whether they can trust cloud backup. It may be that a hybrid solution, using traditional on-site methods combined with a cloud backup solution suits the majority of IT managers rather than taking the plunge and putting everything in the cloud.

The benefits of doing this are incalculable. The top three reasons listed by IT professionals (EVault, 2013) for hybrid backup environments are flexibility, security and protection – with flexibility coming out on top.

At Timico we have launched a cloud based backup product that you can trust. Using EVault technology, Data Vault securely transmits your data from your servers into our Vault which is located in out Tier 3+ data centre where it is stored as encrypted, de-duplicated and compressed information. You can manage your backup policies using the intuitive, policy based web portal.

Data that is required to keep your business running in the event of disaster is critical. By having your critical data stored in the Timico Vault, business continuity will resume in the event of such a disaster as you can quickly restore exactly what you need without the need to run through tapes.

Non-critical or older data can be siphoned off and cheaply stored on site to comply with any regulations that you need to adhere to or simply just to give you peace of mind that you still have a copy.

According to EVault, 30% of companies are already using hybrid backup techniques with a further 60% of companies not employing one yet but thinking of doing so. It is clear that deploying a backup strategy is becoming more complex than simply dumping all of your information onto a tape and forgetting about it until disaster strikes. But it needn’t give you a headache.

My next post will go into detail about how easy it is to deploy a hybrid environment using Timico Data Vault as your chosen partner for off-site backup so that next year there is no chance of becoming the April fool that was caught unaware!

1. Should the system be onsite or hosted? There are various different solutions on the market, some which rely on making a capital investment in a piece of hardware, or others which are based on renting part of a shared platform. Even when deciding to go down the ‘owned hardware’ route, it could then be an option as to whether the phone system should be kept on your own site, or co-located in a data centre for added resiliency. There are both pros and cons for each method in terms of costs, flexibility and also from a disaster recovery view, which we can cover later.

2. Should the system use VoIP technology or traditional ISDN? As we’ve discussed before, there are lots of benefits to using VoIP, but as we also know, that is reliant on having strong connectivity in place to support it. There are systems available that are capable of handling both SIP and ISDN, allowing either the ISDN to be used as a back-up for added assurance, or as the main route for Voice calls until better connectivity is available.

 3. Does the system need to work across multiple sites? If your business has offices in other locations, how do they need to communicate with each other? Using IP based telephony solutions all of these sites could be linked together to provide a single system to all, ensuring that every user can benefit from the same features no matter which office they are at. In the past, offices may have all had different systems at each site meaning that every time they call another office, they have to dial the full area code and telephone number – wouldn’t it be so much easier if they were all on the same system and could just dial an extension code? The other possibility is that you could benefit from free calls between all of these sites too!

4. What functionality is required? Different solutions provide different levels of features and functionality. It’s important to think about what functions the system needs to perform in order for your users to work most efficiently. For example, call recording may be needed for legal reasons or for training purposes depending on the type of business.  Some areas of the business may operate a call centre or help desk service in which they may need to be able to monitor the number of callers waiting in a queue, or view statistics on how long their agents take to deal with customers. Different types of businesses and even different users within a business may all need something different from the phone system; therefore it’s important to understand exactly how it needs to work for everyone.

5. How does the system affect caller experience? Following on from the features that a system can provide for internal users, we’d also need to look at how calls are delivered in, out and around the business. Do you have a main incoming number or do all of your users have their own direct telephone number? Then what happens when a call comes into the business - is it handled by a receptionist, delivered to a group of users or does it go to an automated messaging system? Choosing how calls are routed doesn’t just affect how internal users work, but it also affects the customer service experience.

6. What the businesses future plans? It’s important to think about how long you expect any new system to last. Going down a hosted option often gives the flexibility of being able to rent a service on a monthly basis, easily adding and removing users and services, whereas investing a substantial amount in your own system may mean you would expect to use it for a number of years. Therefore the system you choose should be capable of fulfilling not only your requirements now, but also how they might change in the future – both in terms of the numbers of users it needs to support, the number of calls that you are likely to be making/receiving and in terms of the functionality it needs to deliver.

As you can see there is lots to consider when deciding to implement a new telephony system, and above is just an overview! In my next blogs I’ll aim to look into some of these considerations in more detail.

Normal fibre broadband services are contended, which means that they share bandwidth with other ADSL and FTTC users nearby and share BT’s core network with the millions of other broadband users across the UK. Broadband services are also ‘best efforts’ services, which mean there are no guarantees on service availability or throughput.

So what if your office needs guaranteed bandwidth for VoIP for example? You could look at EFM or dedicated Ethernet Fibre, but the costs of these can sometimes be too high for smaller offices.

Enter Timico’s new Ethernet over FTTC service. It offers businesses all the benefits of dedicated fibre connectivity with high speeds and business-class SLAs, but with lower setup costs compared to EFM and Fibre Ethernet. 

Ethernet over FTTC uses the existing copper infrastructure that is used to carry fibre broadband products in the last mile and provides an uncontended Ethernet bandwidth on top. 

Uncontended bandwidth, unlike ADSL or FTTC broadband means you don’t have to share your bandwidth with other internet users.  Normally with broadband at peak times of the day you would see your speeds drop as more people are using the internet but with Ethernet over FTTC the bandwidth is all yours to use, all of the time.

By using the existing infrastructure it means it is considerably quicker to install compared to similar Ethernet products. Ethernet over FTTC only takes 13 working days to install compared to 25 working days for EFM and 35 working days for Ethernet Fibre. It also means the need to get permission from you landlord, way-leave agreements or high excess construction charges are less likely, taking the headache away from upgrading to a dedicated circuit. Ethernet over FTTC is already available at hundreds of exchanges across the UK, with a further rollout to considerably more this year.

Ethernet over FTTC is more commonly known in the industry as GEA –FTTC (Generic Ethernet Access over Fibre to the Cabinet).  With Etherway-type access capability, it can just be used to provide super-fast internet access or be incorporated into a PWAN.

So if you need guaranteed bandwidth with availability guarantees get in touch with us today.

Here goes,

1.       20CN (Twentieth Century Network) – The 20^th century network is BT’s old broadband network which 21CN is set to replace in the next couple of years. 20CN is being withdrawn from exchanges where 21CN is available, with the retirement programme due to complete in March 2014.

2.       21CN (Twenty First Century Network) – The 21^st century network is BT’s broadband network which provides faster, higher capacity broadband services compared to 20CN. It provides a robust and reliable infrastructure for important business functions.

3.       ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber) – broadband product provided using the 20CN network which is a way of sending data at high speeds over copper telephone lines. This product is due to be removed from exchanges were ADSL2+ (21CN) is enabled.

4.       ADSL2+ (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber) – newer version of ADSL provided using the 21CN network which offers double the speeds compared to standard ADSL.

5.       SDSL (Symmetric Digital Subscriber) – Provided using digital transfer technology offering equal down and upstream speeds running over copper lines. This is being retired as part of the 20CN retirement programme so new orders are no longer accepted for this product.

6.       FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) – FTTC is a broadband product that uses fibre optic cable between the local exchange and the street cabinet reducing the amount of copper line required which enables super-fast speeds compared to normal ADSL connections. The last part from the cabinet to your home is then provided by broadband DSL (or VDSL) technology over the existing copper network.

7.       FTTP (Fibre to the Premise) – Uses fibre optic cable all the way to your premises which means you could benefit from even faster speeds than FTTC. FTTP is an alternative to FTTC and will be provided at exchanges that aren’t currently FTTC enabled.

8.       GEA-FTTC (Generic Ethernet Access over Fibre to the Cabinet) - Dedicated connectivity product that uses the existing fibre broadband infrastructure to reach the customer’s premises and provides an uncontended Ethernet bandwidth on top. This means you’re not sharing your bandwidth with other internet users. Ethernet over FTTC can provide the same upload and download speeds unlike fibre broadband.

9.       EFM (Ethernet in the First Mile) - Another Ethernet product which is delivered over multiple bonded copper lines. This means that if one line failures the service would continue running on the remaining lines making is a highly resilient service. EFM provides a fully symmetrical service and uncontended bandwidth similar to Ethernet over FTTC.

10.   IP Address (Internet Protocol) – Uniquely identifies each device connected to the internet so they can communicate with each other.

11.   Double twisted AFL in the first mile – Only joking!!

If you come across others that you would like demystifying, leave them in the comments and I will get back to you…

We wanted to evolve the typical data centre tour that most providers have on their site and to do this we enlisted the help of Optima Design, a Lincoln based web design company.  

Our first step was to understand what the key things customers were interested in when they enquire about or get shown around the data centre, so we asked the engineers and sales teams and started developing the content.

After a number of meetings, passing ideas and requirements back and forth both internally and with the agency, we decided on developing a page that takes the visitor on a journey to each of the four key message sections.

Believing that video would be the best way of presenting the assets of the facility and incorporating the ‘tour’ element, we worked with video production company VpointTV.  As well as showing off the key features of the data centre, we also wanted to capture the bustle of the support teams that are on hand to assist our customers.  Despite our focus on developing our online offering, at the heart of the Timico service offering, is that we are a people company and we wanted that message to come over.

The finished product allows the visitor to take a look at the resource we have on offer and should they desire, easily click through into the site and find out more about the data centre services we offer.  Simple and effective.

So, here it is www.timico.co.uk/datacentre.  We hope you enjoy it and please feel free to let us know what you think.

Tell us a bit about yourself

I have been involved in IT for as long as I can remember. I’m passionate about technology and business, but more than that I’m about actually using technology.
Having worked in large IT organisations with their natural conservatism, I found my niche at Murco in the mid 90’s. My time at Murco has confirmed for me the value of small teams, good long term supplier relationships and the vision of Senior Management to put IT on a long leash. The flexibility this approach gives allows IT Departments to focus on delivering improvements to the business, taking advantage quickly when new opportunities arise.
I am married with two young children that keep me well occupied and if that was not enough I am one year into a three year program to study and obtain an MBA with the Open University.

Tell us a bit about Murco

Murco is wholly owned subsidiary of USA based Murphy Oil Corporation that operates in the UK and manufactures, supplies and retails petroleum products. There is an oil refinery, three rail-fed inland oil terminals and a network of almost 500 filling stations.
The refinery mainly processes North Sea crude oil and supplies products mainly to inland UK markets. Other markets include Western Europe and East Coast USA. Products include Unleaded, Super-Unleaded, Diesel, Jet fuel and Kerosene.
Our inland terminals supply our own retail network and wholesale to other customers including haulage companies and fleet and bus operators.
We provide a large non-fuel convenience offering with our fuel and valet services at our filling stations.

How did you come to do business with Timico?

Murco did business with a predecessor of Timico, Project Telecom. When our mobile contract came up for grabs, Timcio made a compelling offer. At the same time we also took Timico's new PWAN offering which coincided with a project that we were implementing. The introduction of a secure network to support the first on-line retail application we introduced to our retail filling stations. The year was 2004.

What are your business plans for 2013?

We have the usual technology refreshes, the largest of which will be an upgrade to our ERP system.

What is your biggest technology headache?

End to End Encryption! My context is from the point of entry of a customer’s payment card to our system to it being processed, transmitted and arrived at the acquiring bank. It is a solution that I have wanted for several years and we are only this year now arriving at a solution coming together. A lot of stakeholders are involved and getting them all to agree is my biggest headache.

What’s your favourite piece of software?

Google Drive, only service I am willing to pay for. All my life from recent times is on it. I back it up to a local drive regularly (honest, sort of!)

What are your technology predictions for this year?

I am interested in Google's project glass. I now have to wear glasses to read things, I am sure this is because I am using my phone with its small screen far more often than I should. Now if I am putting on glasses to read anyway, if I could just put on a pair of glasses that can adjust for my long sightedness and present comfortable what I need to look at, now that would be something.

Otherwise Apple's influence will dull, the cloud will die (when everyone realises it’s just a term for what we have been doing anyway), people will start to realise they have to be more guarded with their personal information.

How has the economy in recent years affected your IT strategy?

Do more for less. Extend technology refresh cycles.

What is your top IT tip for growing businesses?

Ensure you have a secure, robust and expandable network and minimise the number of technology platforms required to grow the business.

Which will be bigger, Windows Phone 8 or BlackBerry 10?

It will be about cost. Functionally all phones should provide the same experience. Do I care? Not really. They will be slugging it out for the bottom of the table anyway. It's all about Apple and Samsung. 

Elisabeth Hallam, part of the Timico HR team based in our London subsidiary Redwood, tells the story of how we got involved with the ITP:

“We were emailed information in January of a new Telecoms Apprenticeship scheme by the Institute of Telecommunications Professionals (ITP). We expressed our interest based on our venture with the National Apprenticeship organisation in 2010, taking on a school leaver as a Business Administration apprentice.  This was a huge success for both Redwood and the apprentice. We have now signed up to the ITP programme and have been invited to attend the official launch on the 13th March at the BT Tower in London. 

The ITP is the only organisation that provides a telecoms framework apprenticeship scheme working with the likes of BT, Virgin Media and Cable & Wireless.  Having had the opportunity to study their in-depth framework we decided that that there would be many benefits for the telecoms industry and Timico in particular.

Not only would we be adding to our own resource but taking on the responsibility and commitment for the development and future career prospects of someone just starting out in the world of IT and telecoms.

The prospective individual, who is expected to join us in March, will start their apprenticeship as part of our Customer Service Centre (CSC) team.  They will be working towards a Technical Certificate within the framework to include Telecommunication Principles, Communication Technologies, Telecommunication Systems, Telephony Voice Systems Operations.  However, our training will also provide exposure to customer and supplier interaction, fault logging, troubleshooting, product knowledge and more besides.

We owe it to the future generation to offer them the opportunity to fulfil their own aspirations by providing them with the means to recognise and develop their own skills.  Let us not forget, ‘the children of today are the leaders of tomorrow’.”

If you are a recent school or college leaver interested in a fast-moving career in IT and telecoms and you are interested in joining the Timico London office, please contact Elisabeth at ehallam@redwoodtele.com

We have loads of other new jobs on offer at Timico in London, Milton Keynes and Newark so if you are looking for a sales, account management, technical support, data analyst, software developer, business analyst or web developer please have a look at our careers page. 

Our new web hosting platform uses host blade servers in a Cisco Unified Computing System and storage built by industry leading IT company, EMC to create a resilient and secure hosting environment. Having this platform has allowed us to migrate our web hosting servers from physical machines that we had spread across various Data Centre locations to virtual machines hosted within in a truly trusted and reputable virtual environment, using VMware technology that leverages virtualisation features such as quick deployment of new servers, reduction of downtime through planned maintenance and high availability. These features bring valuable benefits to your website as we no longer place all our trust in single server hardware.

It’s not all about the virtual infrastructure though as the environment is housed within a Tier 3+ Data Centre using high speed Internet access over resilient links, giving our customers peace of mind about where their website is. This pitches us above many of our competitors, who often choose to build their web hosting platforms on mid-tier rack servers housed in questionable facilities. At Timico you can trust that there is no single point of failure to your web hosting service. Backup power, cooling and network connectivity make our services unrivalled in reliability.

Windows or Linux web hosting is available and all of our servers are backed up daily to our Data Domain storage device, which is kept at a separate site, using Veeam backup technology. Veaam is specifically designed to optimise backups of virtual machines, such as our web hosting servers, and allows us to recover data at file level if required in the event of a fault.

All of the above has been teamed with competitive pricing and generous usage allowances to ensure that we cater for all of your hosting needs. 

This is affecting hundreds of organisations from the largest like the NHS, M&S and Vodafone to smaller corporates and medium sized businesses. 2e2’s joint venture with O2 has also been impacted and as a result O2 stepped in at the end of last week to secure the Managed Services division and some of the staff there.

Businesses who use 2e2’s data centre services in Newcastle, Gateshead and Reading were asked to stump up £4,000 a week to keep services running, with the threat of immediate switch-off if they didn’t agree. With reports that it could take four months before the administrators resolve all the data transfer issues.

So those businesses affected will be very keen to move, but will have to consider some complex migrations issues and will be very cautious when it comes to choosing a new hosting provider – once bitten, twice shy.

Whether you are looking for simple colocation or a private VMware IaaS cloud, we can accommodate your needs in our brand new Tier 3+ Newark data centre or in Fareham, London or Milton Keynes.

We have immediately available space and power with engineering expertise ready to rapidly assist in your data migration. We can also give your business the confidence you need owing to our stable shareholder base, profitable growing business and low debt position.

We’re also unified communications experts and can help you transition your business away from 2e2 whether you have a Hosted VoIP environment, on-site or hosted PBX with SIP trunks or a Contact Centre solution.

So if your business is in a fix because of 2e2’s collapse and you need some independent experts who can help you rapidly react, please get in contact online or ask for Andrew Fox on 0844 871 8100 or email andrew.fox@timico.co.uk.

We shouldn’t forget the plight of 2e2 staff, 627 of who were sadly laid off last week. Hopefully all of those will find work elsewhere in this growing sector. We’re growing and hiring, so are keen to speak to Data Centre operations, technical pre-sales, development or sales staff looking for new opportunities. Take a look at our careers page if you are affected as we’re recruiting in London, Milton Keynes and Newark.

Tell us a bit about yourself

I’m Paul Hardy - Director of IT Service Management for the Informa Group, adviser to group CIO, regional IT leadership teams and business executives at the highest level for IT Service Management. I’m responsible for implementing successful service delivery methodologies and processes utilising the regional IT shared service centre resources and assigned service and support teams. I’m submerged in Service Delivery, Social IT, Vendor & Contracts Management and Communication & Collaboration.  

Tell us a bit about Informa

Informa provides academics, businesses and individuals with unparalleled knowledge, up-to-the minute information and highly specialist skills and services. With around 8,000 employees working in some 150 offices in over 40 countries, our global reach and breadth of offer is unique.

What are your business plans for 2013?

A big focus for this year is around IT Asset Management and driving out unnecessary cost through Vendor and Contract Management.

What is your biggest technology headache?

I don't have technology headaches in my role, thankfully!

What’s your favourite gadget?

Sonos - wireless multi-zone digital music system, if you love music this is a must have gadget.

What’s your favourite piece of software?

ServiceNow, although I'd have to say it’s more of a platform than software. It helps us define the strategy, implementation, governance and compliance of service transition and service operations processes and procedures across the Informa Group. (Editor’s note – Timico chose ServiceNow for our Service Management platform, partly on Paul’s recommendation.)

What are your favourite websites?

www.urbandictionary.com
www.twitter.com

How did you come to do business with Timico?

Informa’s relationship with Timico started some seven years ago after we had a requirement to consolidate around 40 home worker ADSL home connections onto a single provider. Over the years we have seen the capabilities around their service portfolio and relationship management grow from strength to strength, into what we class now as a preferred partner.

What are your technology predictions for this year?

I think companies will reduce complexity, aiming to simplify and standardise in 2013. They will leverage more cloud and hosted technologies and services. More businesses will secure and support the increasing number of company and personally owned mobile devices.

How has the economy in recent years affected your IT strategy?

We have taken the opportunity to review and focus on our IT Governance. This is an integral part of enterprise governance and consists of the leadership and organisational structures and processes that ensure that the organisation’s IT sustains and extends the organisation’s strategies and objectives.

What are your top IT tips for dealing with acquisitions and mergers?

I know it sounds obvious but good due diligence is often overlooked. 

Which will be bigger, Windows Phone 8 or BlackBerry 10?

I think BlackBerry will retain a place in the enterprise and dependant on the success of BlackBerry 10, might just claw back some of the market share it lost during 2012. But let’s face it if Microsoft spends the reported $1billion on marketing Windows 8 and it leans on the high expectations for its Surface tablet, then I’m pretty sure Windows Phone 8 will end up the winner in this one.

Anything else you’d like the world to know?

Bit of personal statement….Our future success is about learning to ride the business wave of change, and having the ability and strength to rebalance and recover quickly when we fall off. You can contact me @paulhardyuk 

Well for me, it wasn’t such a dilemma… I have my laptop to send and receive emails, I can remotely connect into the Timico network to get to the Intranet and all the documents that I need, but I can also rest assured that I’m not going to miss an important call and I can use the company phone system in the exact same way as if I were in the office.

Due to the nature of VoIP, before having my Timico VoIP for iPhone app, I could have used the softphone on my laptop or I could have even plugged my IP phone straight into my home router (of course that is only if I’d have thought about bringing my phone home with me on Friday or at least picked up a USB headset). Failing that, I’d still have been able to log onto my management portal and divert all of my incoming calls to my mobile to make sure I’m contactable.

But this morning, I didn’t need to think about any of that – I don’t need to activate any diverts, or plug in any extra hardware, one click onto my VoIP app and I’m logged straight into the office phone system.

Not only will I still be able to take all of my calls, but I can also see the name of the colleague that’s calling me, I have full access to the company address book, I can access my voicemails at the click of a button, I can transfer calls, and start conference calls easily - none of which I would have been able to do just with a divert to my mobile. With some of the multimedia features that you get with VoIP, I can also see the availability of my colleagues straight from my iPhone and I have the ability to Instant Message them if they are unavailable. Thanks to features like these, some people would never know that I’m working from home! As far as anyone else is concerned, it’s business as usual, they can just contact me in the normal way on my normal number and have access to all the same functionality.

This way of working doesn’t just only benefit me either, it also helps control company costs. On days like today with lots of people probably working from their mobiles, businesses may see an increase in mobile charges due to long sales calls and conference calls. Using VoIP from home won’t have any effect on the cost to the company – chairing a conference call and speaking with colleagues back at the office will all be free.

Timico VoIP for iPhone allows Hosted VoIP users to extend their VoIP solution to their mobile and use their iPhone as a Hosted VoIP device, in addition to the IP handsets and the PC Client previously available.

Timico VoIP for iPhone allows users to benefit from all of the features that they use in the office, but from their mobile. For example, making calls from Timico VoIP will mean that users can transfer calls, put calls on hold, hold ad-hoc conferences, as well as search their Global Address Book, view their Friends List, view presence information, instant message and video call utilising the features of their office telephony system from wherever they are (provided they have compatible Wi-Fi connectivity).

The app is available to download from the Apple App Store to new and existing Timico VoIP customers. Or for more information visit the Hosted VoIP pages on our website.

In truth I have some sympathy with his position – after all the term ‘cloud’ has become over used and is at risk of losing any real meaning. The term ‘cloud washing’ is even used now to describe the practice of taking any old Internet based service and rebranding it with word cloud. Of course it’s not just the hardened IT veterans that are annoyed by all of this; it’s also the cloud enthusiasts that support a more clearly defined vision of what the term really means. In order to call something a cloud service, they would argue, it should:

• Use virtualised infrastructure
• Use multi-tenant architecture
• Offer pay-per-use billing
• Offer user self-provisioning
• Offer linear scalability
• Offer open API’s for integration into other cloud services

That definition seems to work pretty well for the kinds of public clouds operated by Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com but what about the private clouds?  A private cloud is one used by a single organisation so surely cannot be multi-tenanted and would, presumably, have little need for pay-per-use billing or user self-provisioning (that’s what the IT department are there for after all?).  When you build a private cloud you still have to specify all the physical resources you need like servers, storage and networking which, frankly, sounds very much like the old pre-cloud world of IT. Some might say that a private cloud isn’t really a cloud at all since it doesn’t meet the above requirements.  Presumably that means that Timico was also wrong to recently launch a product called Enterprise Private Cloud?

 In fact IT departments are increasingly seeing themselves as service providers within their own organisation and so all the key attributes of the public cloud are also attractive within the Enterprise, just at a much smaller scale. Multi-tenant architecture is useful for providing separate pools of resources to different departments or teams who have diverse requirements. Pay-per-use billing is ideal for charging back the cost of running IT services to different cost centres. User self-provisioning empowers technical teams like developers and engineers to manage their own resources without being dependant on IT.

Just like any service provider, though, they need a physical infrastructure on which to build their service that is fit for purpose but also meets the security and regulatory requirements of their businesses. So they absolutely need to know how many CPU’s, how much RAM, how many VLANs and so on are available to them. They must also be able to manage the platform themselves so they are fully empowered to server their internal customer. The key choice then becomes whether to build this infrastructure themselves or outsource the problem to a service provider like Timico.

So to my mind ‘cloud’ can be useful and meaningful term if we have some discipline in the way we apply it and don’t let people get away with using it interchangeably with ‘Internet’. Furthermore the term can be equally applied to a service being offered openly for anyone or to one available only to a closed community of end users. So when Timico talks about offering Private Cloud it’s not about providing anything directly to IT end users, it’s about giving IT departments a platform on which to create their own private clouds and become virtual service providers within their own Enterprises.

So cloud needn’t be a four letter word (especially since it has five letters) and if you do happen to attend a presentation from Timico where we use the term – please don’t beat us up for it. After all we had to call the product something and Enterprise Private Thingamajig didn’t quite have the same ring to it.

January started with Tref’s attempt to break the world record for the most number of comments on a blog post in 24 hours. Although it wasn’t successful in the end more than 5,400 comments were received and a load of cash was raised for the RNLI.

At the end of January to much fanfare, Timico cut the ribbon on our new Tier 3+ data centre in Newark. With 144 racks, resilient 10Gbps connectivity and bags of power. It’s now supplying service to hundreds of businesses across the country.

In February we welcomed some new colleagues from Redwood into the Timico Technology Group family. Redwood have been established in London for more than 20 years and have built up an enviable reputation for delivering unified comms solutions to blue-chip clients in the City and beyond. Their credentials with Avaya and Mitel really strengthen our ability to utilise the best technology partners.

Murco Petroleum is a long-standing customer and in March we upgraded their ADSL private network with 3G secure back-up services using our award-winning Mobile Access Management Solution. The service paid for itself and then some. When just two weeks after commissioning they suffered a break in service due to a copper theft. Other businesses were offline for two weeks but their Timico MAM service meant they only lost seconds.

During April our CTO Tref got quite a few column inches coverage in various national publications writing about his experiences using the forthcoming O2 4G service. It’s fair to say we’re very excited about what wide-scale 4G adoption will mean in the UK – faster speeds and lower latency opening the door to rich mobile communications.

As spring gave way to Summer we revamped our Business products website making it easier for prospective customers to see our services and understanding pricing and options. We followed this up with the launch of the Timico blog in June.

July was a busy month with two new partnerships for Timico. The first with eVault enabled us to launch our new Data Vault service designed to make it easy to back up on-site or hosted servers to our secure storage. The benefits of this were covered in our Grandfather, Father, Son blog. Later in July we announced our expanded partnership with O2 Wholesale which means we can now offer ADSL broadband and Ethernet services as well as voice and data mobile services via the O2 network.

Who could forget the amazing summer of sport we witnessed in August. The Olympics was much hyped as a reason why the internet would melt, transport would be chaos and network faults would take weeks to resolve. We were cautious adding additional bandwidth, stocking extra spares and locating engineers in London – but in the end the Timico network, and the UK internet more generally coped extremely well.

September was all guns blazing with the launch of our new Enterprise Private Cloud service, which utilises the Cisco, EMC and VMware infrastructure we have invested in to provide hosted primary or secondary virtualised compute and storage platforms to our larger customers. If you haven’t heard of Jevon’s paradox then find out how it relates to cloud computing here!

In October and November we were busy developing and testing some exciting enhancements to our Genband-powered hosted VoIP platform. Gemma wrote several blogs about the progress such as 'What if I could make VoIP calls from my mobile' and 'A day in the life of a VoIP user'... Look out for more in January.

We also started our Meet the Customer feature where we introduce some of our customers to find out more about their IT challenges. Matt Russell kicked off for us followed by Chris Swaine.

As Christmas approaches, December has been about planning for a successful 2013. The increasing convergence between unified comms and hosted infrastructure means businesses will get more for their money and BlackBerry are betting everything BlackBerry 10 and BES10. So far, we’re impressed!

Have a great Christmas break; we’ll see you in the New Year. If you need us in the meantime our operational teams are working over the holiday period to keep our customers online. Visit our Support Site if you need help.  

All the best,

Neil Armstrong

@TimicoUK

Customers recognised this opportunity for equipment and operational savings, but some IP-PBX manufacturers initially resisted this trend. Mitel notably did not and their Communications Director platform has been available as a VMware certified UC solution since 2010 and they continue to hold a leadership position.

But now Avaya, one of the leading vendors in unified communications, has teamed up with VMware to launch the Avaya Aura Virtualised Environment (VE) which is not only fully endorsed as ‘VMware ready’ but also integrates the vCentre Server tools for diagnostics, provisioning and traffic management. Read more about this at ZDnet.

Clients adopting virtualisation deployment models for critical business software applications can now deploy their Avaya Aura IP Telephony, Unified Communications and Contact Centre applications in the same way using their own vSphere platform or rent capacity from a service provider, like Timico, that offers VMware powered infrastructure. As well as the obvious savings on equipment and operational costs for maintenance, there is a bigger win to be had – resilience and disaster recovery options.

A virtual PBX can be migrated in near-real time using vMotion to alternative resources in the event of a hardware failure or even replicated onto a secondary stand-by site very quickly using Site Recovery Manager. Building in that kind of resilience and flexibility would be extremely costly and time consuming using dedicated hardware.

So there’s another problem for the traditional PBX reseller – they now need VMware skills and access to high quality data centre space in order to support their enterprise customers. This could be very difficult for businesses used to simply shipping hardware and taking a margin. Businesses increasingly expect a managed service relationship, not a hardware vendor.

We’re expecting pricing to be released by Avaya shortly. Existing customers already using Aura can upgrade their software to benefit from this new capability. Support for IP Office will follow in 2013. CS1000 and BCM customers may upgrade to Aura or IP Office at the substantially discounted rates currently being offered by Avaya. See more from Avaya here.

We’re excited about this next phase in Avaya’s roadmap, as it complements our investment in Data Centre and Virtualisation services, SIP trunking and our long standing commitment as an Avaya Business Partner since 1995.

Do you think Virtualisation is a good fit for your business communication platforms? Do Mitel, Avaya or Cisco have the best offering in this space? Tell us what you think with a comment on this blog or tweet us @TimicoUK.

David Hamer, Redwood.

The biggest region, in terms of number of ASNs, as you might reasonably imagine is the USA, but there are one or two surprises. A few surprises I’d say. I leave you to decide which ones:

• United States – 21,510
• Russian Federation – 4,688
• Ukraine – 2,103
• UK – 1,913
• Brazil – 1,884
• Poland – 1,770
• Germany – 1,698
• Canada – 1,557
• Romania – 1,555
• Australia – 1,419

With the fourth most ASNs in the world, the UK is an important place to be on the internet and this is reflected in the size of the membership of the London Internet Exchange (LINX). LINX is one of the main places in the UK where ASNs are interconnected at peering points. We are currently present at LINX Juniper and LINX Extreme (two independent LINX networks), and LONAP, and spend a fairly significant amount of engineering time each month managing our peering.

The reason why this is important is in maintaining good links to other ASNs so we can provide our customers with day-to-day speed and responsiveness in reaching their data, wherever it is in the world. It is also important in the event of network problems – the more routes (and peers) you have, the more likely you can keep carrying network traffic when others might fail. We’re planning to add more peering outside of London during 2013 to protect ourselves, and our customers, from a London-based network disaster!

Hurricane Electric are a major connectivity partner for Timico and they have just released a list of the most connected peers, ranked by the number of adjacencies. Network nodes are considered adjacent if they can reach each other with a single hop across a link layer. A high number of adjacencies means that accessing resources (servers/websites) on those networks is usually very fast so the more adjacencies you have to your own network the better. The high number of adjacencies is achieved by peering. This is the process whereby companies agree to share each other’s traffic free of charge on the basis that it is cheaper than paying a commercial network to carry the data (a service/process known as internet “transit”). The connectivity infrastructure for peering still has to be paid for and this is what is provided by LINX.

Timico comes in at 10th in the UK for IPv4 and ninth for IPv6 (but IPv6 still has a far smaller presence on the internet). So that means we, and our customers, are pretty damn well connected to the rest of the internet. At Timico we use a tool called as-stats to give a view of our top peers by bandwidth, which clearly shows if traffic is over peering networks or via transit provider, and target to have peering with as many of the high up peers as possible.  We have also aimed to peer with as many networks with open peering policies as possible as having this attitude benefits the community of network operators, adding a level of competition to transit providers to keep them from driving costs up.

Most of our peers are content providers, or other network providers of similar magnitude of size, where it's mutually beneficial to peer between our networks to reduce cost of global backbone transit connectivity. Organisations with large global backbones will tend to be lower in the list of 'most connected' peers as they will usually be more restrictive (than completely open), and only peer with other operators who pass comparatively large amounts of traffic.

So being adjacent is all about being close. And that’s a nice thing to be at this time of year.

To find out more about our network please leave a comment on this blog or tweet us @TimicoUK.

It turns out we’re not the only ones getting excited. Following a big dip in market share (particularly in the IS and Europe) BlackBerry has been given a very rough ride in the press and on the stock market. But the tide of opinion seems to be turning with several recent early reviews of the BlackBerry 10 interface.

Crackberry recently said of the new ‘Flow’ feature, "With flow on BB10 you can easily switch between apps with little effort and never lose the task at hand."

The Register was equally positive about the prospects for BB10 in the business market, "BB10 is by some distance the most brutally efficient multi-touch interface I have used so far. It makes the others look like hard work."

Despite the proliferation of Android and iOS devices in businesses, BlackBerry still has a stronghold. This is partly due to business users loving the BlackBerry email experience, but a big reason is the BES server and its place in the Corporate IT environment. BlackBerry recognises this and in BES10 we’re going to see a very powerful set of tools and policies to secure and enable corporate-issued devices using the BlackBerry Device Service. But most importantly, and this could be crucial to holding market share is the new Universal Device Service which will secure and enable Android and iOS devices. The BlackBerry Balance features will deliver a containerised approach to Mobile Device Management which will seamlessly enable Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).

The first devices will be touch-screen L-Series handsets launched at the end of January. Following that, the N-Series will appear with the all-important keyboard in April. The predictive text functionality where you ‘flick’ words up to the screen is very different to Android or iOS and looks great. The ability to recognise faces, capture multiple images and then live-edit photos to get everyone smiling with their eyes open at the same time, looks simply stunning. This is a jaw-droppingly good feature and is likely to be used in their TV adverts.

We’re expecting to get out hands on some pre-release devices shortly, so if you’re interested in getting your hands on one to test for us, please add a comment to this blog or tweet us @TimicoUK

For more teasers about the new OS and devices visit the official BlackBerry site.

Do you think BlackBerry 10 will be RIM’s saviour? How will it square up to Windows Phone 8?

Tell us a bit about yourself

I am the ICT Manager for Baggaley Construction. My primary roles are to oversee the entire ICT infrastructure of the company, and develop a strategy for its progression.

I started at Baggaley nearly 10 years ago as a Trainee Technician, and have dedicated myself since then to adding value to the business. As such I have developed through the ranks and now take an active part in the management of the company. I suppose I am living proof that "the system works".

As a registered PRINCE2 project manager I am focused on implementing change that adds value and try to ensure that the benefits of my projects are realised.

Tell us a bit about Baggaley Construction

Baggaley Construction is a leading building contractor delivering innovative solutions to our clients' property needs throughout the Midlands and Yorkshire. Our clients benefit from our full range of services, our commitment to providing exceptional customer service and our long standing reputation for quality and value for money.

We have three distinct business divisions, each with specialist and expert management. We manage and resource our projects utilising exceptionally talented people, ensuring stability and consistency of resource for our clients. This has been recognised by the company winning a number of industry awards over the past few years, more details of which can be seen on our new website (www.baggaley.co.uk)

From an ICT standpoint this brings a diverse range of challenges having to meet the needs of different operations team while remaining unified at heart. It certainly makes sure every day is a challenge.

What is your biggest technology headache?

It has to be deploying varying access technologies to our remote construction sites with short lead times. To this day dealing with BT to have new lines installed is still a bureaucratic nightmare (something Timico now helps us with). The different mobile operators have patchy data networks in the sometimes remote locations we find ourselves in. As such even the smallest job requires a site survey to establish what form of access technology is to be implemented, and then to deal with implementation lead times, all with a lead-in of a week or two.

What’s your favourite gadget?

Personally it has to be my iPad. It sounds cliché but there literally is an app for that, no matter what I find myself doing. It may be reviewing meeting packs, making notes on white papers, taking notes in meetings and at seminars. From a business point of view there is no end to the ways it has improved my efficiency as an individual.

What’s your favourite piece of software?

As an individual it’s a close run thing between Dropbox and Evernote. However Evernote just pips it at the post. I get ideas at the strangest times, in fact most often while I’m out of the office and by having the client deployed on ALL my devices I can capture them before they are lost. Then I can pick them up and run with them once I actually get 10 minutes to sit down at my desk!

From a business point of view, an odd one but good old fashioned Windows Server. With every release they pack in yet more out of the box functionality (VDI this time) that provides a gateway for smaller companies to the "big boy" technologies.

How did you come to do business with Timico?

Around 3 years ago we were looking for a technology partner who could help us connect up our remote sites in a "better" way then ADSL and IPsec VPN's. Timico was brought to our attention and with their office being situated fairly close to ours we had them in for a chat. I was instantly struck by their enthusiasm for what they do and the pride they take in out-performing their competitors. We selected them as our PWAN and Leased Line provider and since then our relationship has grown and grown.

What’s your technology prediction for 2013?

I believe that the next couple of years are going to be a real tipping point in the corporate IT world. Historically business has been the driving factor in ICT innovation. People got their first Mobile Phones in business, their first Laptops, Desktops, Smart phones, the list goes on. In the past it's always been Business leading the technology market and then being delivered to the consumer later. This is about to change in a big, big way. No longer can corporate IT rest on its laurels when our end users have better devices at home than they do at work.

This provides a huge set of challenges as we try to accommodate and tailor consumer devices for use within the workplace. Many will just bury their head in the sand with a "don’t ask, don’t tell" ethos but this is an issue which needs to be addressed head on. Your users are accustomed to getting their services and applications on demand to help them do an ad-hoc task in their personal lives and most organisations can't yet offer this in the business world. Our users are becoming empowered and want to better their use of I.T. to make them more productive and we have to be very careful of stifling this drive. Instead we need to put the processes and technologies in place to ensure our businesses can capitalise on this culture in order to unlock hidden value that the users themselves possess.

To do this I feel companies are going to be looking at providing true on-demand cloud services to their users, whether this is public, private or a hybrid. It really is the time of user power.

How has the economy in recent years affected your IT strategy?

In today's economic climate everyone’s appetite for risk has reduced and pressures are being put on all sides to make cuts and reduce costs. All while still providing the same level of service. Companies are looking at opex projects with quick wins, or adding value to their existing systems. Both options require little capex investment and so are easier to justify in today’s world. As such my focus has been on adding value to our existing systems through the use of our in-house skill sets.

What’s your top tech tip for growing businesses?

Don’t invest in technology. This may seem like an odd one but with the plethora of hosted and cloud based systems out there these days a new or growing business would have to have a very good reason to implement on-premises solutions. The scalability of the cloud means you can keep your cash flow tight but still have the capacity to grow your infrastructure with your organisation.

Which will be bigger, Windows Phone 8 or BlackBerry 10?

It’s an interesting time in the handset OS arena this year. Apple has yet to prove that it can innovate in a "post-Jobs" world. RIM has made the headlines several times this year, but for all the wrong reasons. Microsoft has a bad history with Mobile OSs which it will struggle to shake off (IT Professionals have a long memory), and Android has the challenge of some poor user experiences due to device dilution. Each one of these has a major challenge to overcome over the next 12 – 24 months, and I can see no clear winner at this stage.

09:00am – I get into work and fire up my laptop which is connected to the Internet via my IP Phone. As my laptop comes to life, my PC Client automatically logs in on my desktop and synchronises with my phone. I make and receive calls from my desk, using my PC Client to control the calls but my phone for the voice.

09:45am – I go to a meeting in our other building across the road, and take a call on my iPhone – as I’m connected to the Wi-Fi automatically when I swap buildings, my iPhone re-connects to the Internet and calls are automatically received on the iPhone app.

10:00am - In a meeting and showing a presentation on my laptop – someone calls me so my laptop starts ringing and my PC Client jumps to the front of the screen, blocking the presentation slides I’m talking about – ooops I’d forgot I’m still logged in! I put my PC Client on ‘Do Not Disturb’ and carry on with my training session.

11:30am - When I’ve finished the training, I shut down my presentation and notice that I have 5 missed calls and a Voicemail on my PC Client – some of them from internal colleagues (I could have put a note on my status to let them all know I was in a meeting – oh well, I’ll remember that next time!)

12:00pm – While I’m wandering back across the road, I listen to the Voicemail that had just been left – even though I’m out of range for the office Wi-Fi, I can still dial into my Voicemail over 3G.

12:30pm – Back at my desk I call back the people who had tried ringing me earlier. While I’m on one of the calls, my desk phone flashes, showing someone else is calling me. I quickly send them an Instant Message to let them know that I’m on a call and will call them back later. When I finish the call I go to ring them back, but notice from their status that they are now on the phone – IM “Free to talk when you are”

2:00pm – After lunch I read an email from a supplier that needs an urgent reply. I right click on the suppliers email and find that my VoIP system has picked up an office telephone number and a mobile number from his email signature I click to call his mobile as I know he’s more likely to answer that – the lazy person in me finds this so much quicker than manually dialling the telephone number!

2:05pm – While on the phone with my supplier I soon realise it’s getting into too much of a technical conversation for me to handle, so I ask if can bring in one of our engineers onto the call. Using my PC Client, I search the company directory and call the engineer while leaving my supplier on hold. After a quick plea for his help I join the two calls together.

3:00pm – Later in the afternoon, I’m waiting for my supplier to call me back with some important detail, but I really need to go and have a chat with one of the sales team upstairs. Realised that now with the app on my iPhone, I’m not stuck to my desk anymore – if he rings I’ll still be able to answer it, wherever I am!

5:30pm – Home time, and even better I’m on holiday on tomorrow!!

6:30pm – Got home and realised that although I did remember to set the out of office on my email (which I always usually forget to do), I am still logged into the phone on my desk. So that my phone doesn’t annoy everyone while I’m away, I log onto my Personal Agent from my home PC, and remotely log out of my desk phone – that way all calls will go straight to my Voicemail instead.

This month we have been talking to Matt Russell, CEO for WebHostingBuzz and Vice President, Hosting at Namecheap.com.

Tell us a bit about yourself..

I’m 27 years old. I’ve been in the hosting industry for over 11 years now. It was my first business ‘love’ and to this day, I eat, sleep and breathe hosting and related services. I started young, building websites and trying to sell them as a teenager but quickly realised I was not blessed with the creative skills to build beautiful websites. I can’t recall the exact leap I took that from web design to hosting but decided to learn more about the industry and decided that it was for me. I started building my first hosting business at just 16, and ended up dropping out of University in Manchester to focus my efforts on hosting aged 18. I initially focussed on the North American market because at the time, it was a much bigger yet more mature market. To date, the US is still our primary market but we’re making a concerted effort in the UK with WebHostingBuzz.co.uk. Timico’s datacentre infrastructure is a key part of our formula to deliver our award winning hosting services to the SOHO market in the UK.

Tell us a bit about WebHostingBuzz

WebHostingBuzz is a 10 year old web hosting company that started life as a client of one of my original hosting companies. An opportunity to become involved in WebHostingBuzz arose in 2004/2005 and I took that opportunity. I currently serve as WebHostingBuzz’s CEO and work with a great team, spread across 3 offices in the US, the UK and the Ukraine.

We’re a diverse company with clients from over 150 countries around the world.  Our business is built on customer service and word of mouth is a major contributor to our growth. The hosting market is hugely competitive and it is impossible to compete on price alone. Competitors will undercut each other – sometimes to the level of going out of business – but we have remained focussed on customer satisfaction and customer service while charging a fair price for our services. In a recent poll, 93% of our customers rated our service as excellent, very good or good – a feat we’re very proud of.

What are your business plans for 2013?

2013 is going to be an exciting year for us. We’re launching a new website towards the end of 2012 which refreshes our brand and paves the way for a number of new service launches. These include UK dedicated servers and a UK cloud, both of which will be offered from our suite within the Timico datacentre. While some may say we’re late to the cloud game, I respond that we’ve played it safe. While others have rushed unreliable cloud products to the market, we’ve invested heavily in R&D to ensure that our cloud product is the most reliable, resilient around. How many of the big name cloud players have suffered an outage in the last 6 months?

What is your biggest technology headache?

We don’t face headaches, per se. What we do see are challenges but we thrive on facing up to these challenges and building a better, stronger business as the result of a challenge we’ve faced.

What’s your favourite gadget?

My latest camera – my Sony NEX-7. I’m still learning how to fully use it.

What’s your favourite piece of software?

Of late, I’ve been a big fan of Google Drive. I’ve always liked Dropbox but Google Drive is proving easier to use with a better web interface. I’m also a big fan of Evernote.

What’s your favourite website?

There are several I read each day. These include www.theregister.co.uk, www.marketingland.com, www.searchmarketingland.com and (disclaimer – this is my website!) www.londoncolocation.com. I have a small team of technology writers that submit articles directly to the website, so I do the actual reading of these articles on the site itself. The site covers a range of hosting, colocation and datacentre issues and it always interests me to see where the industry is heading.

How did you come to do business with Timico?

This is a good one! I read about Timico’s new datacentre on TheRegister. I searched for Timico people on LinkedIn and came across no other than Tref Davies, the Timico CTO, as one of the top results. It transpired, after a quick chat, that we have similar interests in technology, hosting, Indian food and more. This resulted in a data centre tour followed by a delicious curry and the deal was done.

What’s your technology prediction for 2013?

They’re buzzwords… but cloud and mobile. We’ll continue to see the cloud mature and become more resilient, while more and more businesses look to take advantage of it. Smartphone and tablet growth is phenomenal – driven by increasingly powerful hardware and good software, and we’ll see more people doing more on their phones and tablets on the move.

What’s your top tech tip for start-up businesses?

Learn, learn and learn some more. There’s a plethora of excellent websites and books on a range of business topics. These are written by true experts in their field and offer avid readers an almost unlimited amount of learning potential. Learning is important – we should always make time for self-development.

At Timico we use our own Hosted VoIP platform as the main telephony system so this isn’t that much problem for us as there are various ways that the system can handle remote working.

Currently, Timico give us company mobiles, so I can easily make calls wherever I am anyway, and receiving calls isn’t really a problem either because our online company directory lists our mobile numbers too, so colleagues can just try that number instead if they can’t reach me. However, if they don’t know I’m out of the office, it may take them several attempts before they try my mobile, and for customers or suppliers trying to contact me, then they aren’t always aware of my mobile number so I am likely to miss their call too.

Using the VoIP system stops this confusion of having various different contact numbers depending on where you’re working. What I do instead is set up my VoIP account to re-route any calls to my office number to my mobile, when I’m out of the office or just away from my desk.

So, problem solved – I never miss any calls as they all diverted to my company mobile when I’m not there, and I can make calls from it at any time I need to– so how can making VoIP calls from my mobile be any better?

Well, over the past few months I have been trialling a new VoIP iPhone application, and in the time I’ve been using it, I’ve found that it has lots of benefits:

• The app has meant that I can work away from the office, and make voice calls over a Wi-Fi connection, whether that be working from home, from another office or from a service station while out on the road! That means that the incoming calls that normally get diverted to my company mobile are not costing the business a mobile divert charge, and the calls that I make are not being charged at mobile rates, but at our VoIP rates. Calling other colleagues back at the office who are also using the VoIP system is now free from my iPhone!
• Rather than having to take my company mobile and my personal iPhone everywhere with me, I’ve been able to carry one mobile knowing that my personal contacts could call me normally, and my work contacts would still be able to call me through the app – without having to give them multiple telephone numbers to try me on! That gives me more room in my handbag
• For some reason, the mobile signal is not great at home and I would normally struggle to work from there as I couldn’t guarantee connectivity for the whole day. Because the app uses my home Wi-Fi, even if the mobile signal is limited I’m still able to make and receive calls.
• In the office I’ve gotten used to using the multimedia features of our VoIP system – mainly to check whether the person I’m going to call will be available to answer. If I was working away and using my mobile, I wouldn’t be able to do this. Using my VoIP app I can. I can check the status of the person I’m calling, and if there not available I can instant message them instead, saving lots of wasted time keep calling someone who’s already on the phone.
• Normally, if I was out of the office and I needed to take part in a conference call from my mobile, I would have to dial an external number to access the conference bridge – therefore getting charged mobile call rates for the whole conference duration. While testing the VoIP app I have been able to dial the internal conference bridge number as though I was sat in the office, resulting in a free conference call.

So, overall my experience of using VoIP on my mobile has been a positive one so far. I wouldn’t say it has changed the way I work dramatically – but it has made things easier, and I’m sure that for a regular remote worker, the cost savings would be significant. 

This is the perfect time to start the migration to the Cloud.

One way to take the helm is to use online backup services. In his blog, ‘Escape from the Planet of the Tapes’, Andrew Massing highlights the overbearing burden of managing backups on tape and the flakiness of this incumbent technology. But this isn’t the only reason why you should consider online backup.

 Why should Timico’s Data Vault service be first to spring to mind when you hear the words ‘online backup’?

1. Compliance
   Security is key and the first question when considering online backup is, ‘How can I be sure that my data is going to be safe?’
   
   Data Vault software makes it easy to comply with regulations for confidentiality, accessibility, and secure storage. An easy to use interface lets you configure data retentions flexibly to satisfy your security and retention policies. Data is encrypted before and during over-the-wire transmission, and remains encrypted in storage. During restores, decryption occurs only when the key holder enters the correct pass code.
2. UK Based Storage
   
   Many providers own or use third party Data Centres that are outside of the UK, often in the US.  At the very least, this can cause nervousness as you’re not entirely sure where your business critical data is, which isn’t a great position to be in! With Data Vault, your storage travels no further than to the East Midlands and is stored within our purpose built, privately owned, Tier 3 facility.
3. Simple Charges
   We have a range of cost effective packages suitable for your needs. You can easily scale up if your requirements change and more importantly, experts at Timico will help you calculate how much storage space you will need before you commit to a package.
   
   Unlike other backup solutions, this data volume is calculated after the benefits of compression and de-duplication have been applied, meaning that we charge you only for the space you use on our Vault.
4. Trusting your Connectivity
   Making sure that your Internet connectivity will allow you to perform backups over the wire is often tricky.
   
   We already optimize our network to ensure that you can confidently run applications over our connectivity.  Data Vault is also specifically designed to minimize bandwidth requirements by de-duplicating your data and only performing incremental backups after the initial seed.
5. Extensive Platform Support
   You can use Data Vault in nearly any combination of platforms and applications meaning that a single solution unifies data protection across your entire enterprise. It doesn’t matter how rare your operating system is, it is likely that Data Vault will be compatible!

Today we have BlackBerry Smartphones typically running BlackBerry OS 4, 5, 6 or 7.  There are a number of ways that these devices can work.  Firstly there is the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), offering full security and lock down of devices for large enterprises.  Then we have the BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express (BESX), a free server which is a trimmed down version of the full BES aimed at the small to medium sized business.  Finally, we have the consumer offering which requires no server and you simply setup via your mobile carrier and use your phone on the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS).

So what changes with BlackBerry 10? 

Well to start with the devices.  BlackBerry 10 devices will be much more powerful than the current range of BlackBerry devices and will be running a completely new operating system.  This isn’t the same as upgrading from OS 6 to OS 7, it is entirely and fundamentally new. 

Now to manage a BlackBerry 10 device you will need a different server as the current BES and BESX systems won’t be compatible.  The server itself will be called the BlackBerry Device Service (BDS) and the management console of BDS is another server called BlackBerry Fusion.

So what is Fusion?

 Fusion is a web server that allows you to manage your BDS server, however if you have a BES and/or a BESX server you will be able to manage all servers from within the Fusion console without having to log into each server individually.  But there is also another part new service called Universal Device Service (UDS), this allows you to manage both iOS and Android based devices.  Again you administer the UDS server from within the Fusion console.

The best way to think of Fusion is a single console overlaid across your other BlackBerry servers that allows you to carry out your day-to-day functionality from one location.

So how many servers will I need then?

For companies who already have BES or BESX you’ll still need these servers running to support existing BlackBerry devices up to OS 7, that is unless you want to wholesale upgrade to BlackBerry 10 devices straight away. You’ll then need another server to support your BlackBerry 10 based devices, Playbooks and if you want to manage iOS and Android devices. So that’s 2 potential servers for your mobile devices? Well almost, because you also need to install the Fusion web server, but the good news is that this can be installed either on the same server as the BDS and UDS components.

What about licensing for all these servers?

Today you will have purchased your BlackBerry BES Cals or have your BESX licensing free.  However the bad news is that you have to start again, you cannot carry unused BES licenses to BDS or UDS.  You have to purchase Cals for either BDS or UDS (and they aren’t interchangeable).  But the good news is that BlackBerry has introduced a new subscription based model for licensing, so you subscribe for a specific period and as long as you are subscribing you receive any available upgrades.  However, subscriptions aren’t for everyone so you can still purchase a perpetual license but that’s around double the cost upfront compared to the annual cost of a subscription and you don’t get upgrades.

Summary

So if you managed to follow all of that the short answer is that to use BlackBerry 10 devices you’ll need new servers and new licenses, to maintain existing BlackBerry devices you’ll also need to keep the current servers running.

The expansion and investment into Ethernet coverage over recent years allows your business to benefit from future-proof, scalable bandwidth.

The addition of Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) offers an affordable, copper based dedicated solution for those that are located in an EFM enabled exchange.

Broadband services have been used extensively over the past couple of decades to provide Internet access over copper lines and are the backbone to many company networks.

The popularity of broadband initially rocketed and remains high because it is remarkably cost effective and now reaches most buildings in the UK, making it a widely used connectivity service. Due to its rich feature set, it is suitable for specific users and remains tremendously valuable to these users, such as home workers and small remote offices.

In society today, small and medium businesses want to ensure that their Internet access is secure, reliable and scalable. As broadband has its bandwidth limitations and is not as robust as dedicated connectivity due to it being a best efforts service, businesses are now moving away from it and instead investing in dedicated connectivity to meet their demands for high bandwidth and reliable access.

What should you consider when choosing the right solution to your business?

• Bandwidth – Adverts for broadband lead with impressive claims of ‘up to’ speeds that often do not reflect the true speed that you will receive. As the actual speed that you receive is dependent on many factors, including the distance of your line from the exchange, you may struggle to receive the bandwidth that you require. Dedicated connectivity offers guaranteed dedicated bandwidth assuring that you have the bandwidth for optimum performance.
• Contention – Broadband services are contended which results in sharing your bandwidth with other users on the network. However, dedicated connectivity offers an uncontended service ensuring that you have the bandwidth available to you at all times and benefit from an assured service.
• Number of users – Broadband lines are typically suitable for up to 20 users. If your office is larger then you are likely to benefit from dedicated connectivity that can serve the whole office and ensure that your fleet of staff can get ‘online’ at all times.
• Flexibility – Broadband offers no flexibility to the bandwidth that you will receive. The only way to increase your bandwidth is to wait for new technologies to come along, such as FTTC. FTTC offers additional bandwidth but, as with broadband, it is a best endeavours product by its nature. By choosing Timico dedicated connectivity services, you can flex your bandwidth speeds within the capacity of your bearer as and when you require and be confident that this is the speed you will receive.
• Usage - Broadband packages usually come with defined usage limits or fair usage policies (FUP).  Dedicated connectivity services offer no limits or caps, allowing you to use the connection as much as your business needs.
• Upload – Broadband typically offers upload speeds of around 1Mb. This limits your ability to send large files.  Ethernet and EFM services offer symmetrical bandwidth, providing your business with abundant upload capabilities.

Timico offer highly reliable and secure Ethernet services across the UK. As your service provider our expert staff will assist you with the exciting move from ADSL broadband services to dedicated connectivity. If any of the above factors are causing you pain at the moment, it may well be worth taking the plunge now.

At this point you might be wondering what the relevance is to cloud computing but actually we can start to see here a clear example of what Jevons was talking about and I’m far from the first to point it out. Consider that behind cloud computing sits a bunch of technology innovations that are designed to make computing, storage and networking more efficient to buy and use. The initial response to this from the world of Enterprise IT was to see it as a cost saving exercise. They can now slash the amount of hardware, space, power and service they need to buy and, even better, they can outsource the infrastructure to a hosting company who will just sell them exactly how much capacity they need in a given month. All this is bound to save a fortune compared to the old way of doing things? Well maybe but this is exactly where Jevons paradox can come into play.

Some business who have already adopted cloud computing platforms have found that it’s so much cheaper and easier to create a new server that they can now afford to embark on many more new IT projects than would have previously been possible. They are finding new ways to use computing to improve their businesses now that the old barriers of cost and complexity are falling away. Over time this means that any initial cost saving in IT budgets will be eroded and eventually increased further by a continual growth in demand. Of course this effect will not necessarily apply to every individual business and will certainly vary by industry sector but we anticipate that this will be the overall trend – hence why Timico and many others are investing to become providers in this space.

Now before I make you too gloomy about the prospect of spending more on IT, just take a moment to consider the transformative effect that efficient steam power had on our economy in the 19th century. Yes the demand for energy continued to rise and rise but look at what was achieved with it (of course we may now be paying the price with global warming but let’s not ruin an otherwise perfectly good analogy). Now consider the possibilities that cheap, efficient, reliable and resilient computing, storage and networking might be able to offer your businesses.  Think of all the projects you could crack on with if you didn’t have to worry about the infrastructure needed to support it. Automating manual processes, eliminating downtime, enabling people to work on the move, meeting regulatory requirements – it’s all about freeing you up to concentrate on what matters to your business not constrained by how much hardware you can afford to buy this year.

So whilst some have chosen to use Jevons paradox as a reason against the adoption of cloud computing I would argue that this is short sighted. The challenge to business IT leaders is to adapt to this new consumption model and understand how to get the best out of it without allowing over provisioning to push the costs out of control. Jevons doesn’t give us a reason to ignore progress just the insight to go into it with our eyes opened to the risks….not bad for 150 year old book about coal.

Being a 3 year old server, I knew I was in the prime of my life. Some younger models started to appear but I knew I was attractive enough to keep most IT professionals more than happy. I remember my first days when installed in the old server cabinet, I got a fair few pings let me tell you!! I certainly raised some eyebrows (and smiles) with how quickly I could get going and soon became a firm favourite amongst the boys.

Soon I was given the responsibilities that come with any relationship and we had our first Application together. We decided to name our first born “Exch-01” which then kicked started a boom of new arrivals! (including the twins Data & Log Files)

I was briefly joined on some occasions by some foreign updates that were always interesting but never seemed to stay for long and were often replaced or even had the previous one back when their performance left me less than impressed.

Those days seem such a long time ago now, soon I was joined by similar servers to me, and I became less of a favourite. I struggled with the apps left all to myself and with the support. Like any single parent I sometimes had failures that brought me the more painful and abusive responses from my users, on my darkest days I felt down for hours and even for a couple of days once. I even heard them talking about upgrading me or swapping me out! What had I done wrong??

Eventually I was placed in a ménage à trois with a couple of other servers, it was all about improving the experience and making us more reliable apparently. That then became the mundane normality that was set to be all that was there for me until I went to 0x9’s availability.

Then I had my first encounter with “Mr Cloud”.

It started just like any other day, but I happened to notice his presence. A few inquisitive pings I sent his way, and was amazed I got his attention. He was big and powerful, it felt like he had more capability than any other piece of technology I had ever paired with before. I felt impelled to respond to his enquiries, he had been set up to securely access my ports so I had no worries of needing to practice anything safely, I was guaranteed to stay virus free! After we exchanged a few pleasantries it became clear that he knew how to handle me and almost made me feel overpowered yet safe all at the same time.

I never realised it was going to be a long distance relationship however, I never knew he wasn’t in my cabinet, but instead lived in a positive mansion of a datacentre, apparently he was a new Private Virtual Platform and was an enterprise Blade and SAN setup underneath. I was always hearing how unachievable this kind of technology would be for a normal business infrastructure like mine, but here I was and he was interested in me! Soon I could resist no longer and the inevitable happened.

Our relationship never progressed to being hardwired, but he was always there if needed and he always delivered. Soon I was repurposed to monitor our current systems and I had the pleasure of being a cache for his use whenever he wanted to protect against network speed shortages.

Pairing with Mr Cloud always brought something new and exciting, many times giving me experiences that I wouldn’t have dared to be involved with being an individual piece of hardware. He showed me once how he could perform updates upon himself and even change his underlying tech to make him bigger and stronger than ever, all without the downtime I was normally used to.

I know that one day my time will come when I am no longer going to be with him, but for now he has shown me that I can still use my assets and I can be an attractive server that still should get the attention I deserve. I heard rumours that the whole point of Mr Cloud was to get rid of the likes of me, but I know the truth, he is there to help and can make my life better and more exciting. He takes away the pressures and worries faced by many like me and lets me have the freedom to make the most of my experience going forward.

I know two things, no matter how much things progress there will always be a need for servers like me, and that Mr Cloud will always offer the sense of excitement, freedom and levels of flexibility that I could never have dreamed of!

-Note- no use of RAM/Hard Drive/Floppy drives etc were required to create this beautiful love story--

Is it really that simple though?

The recent outages were from well known providers who have traditionally done something else for a living. When a search engine provider suddenly becomes a hosting provider, or an online retailer offers web services, where is the pedigree? This is not a pointed attack but a genuine question. Can a business using these services really be in a position to complain when an outage occurs?

Ok let’s be realistic, the services on offer may be very competitively priced compared to other hosting providers, are very accessible, and for the majority of business processes may be perfectly adequate. But just because a huge global business can throw a huge amount of money at something to create theses platforms, does it mean they are any good? Simple question, how sure are you that you won’t need access to an application when they have some downtime? A bit hard to answer that one isn’t it?

The problem is that the term “Cloud” is broadly used and whilst we play in a very different market to this type of provider, so wouldn’t consider them competitors, these outages may be perceived as proof of the unreliability and risk associated with buying these services from us. They potentially damage the reputation of enterprise, well run infrastructure, founded upon years of delivering complex solutions, not just for us but ALL service providers who deliver the best technology and services they can.

We provide business grade communication, voice, mobile and data centre services, that’s what we do, it’s our business and arguably it would take a newcomer a long time to gain the expertise and technical excellence across all aspects of the wider team to ensure not only a great platform and infrastructure but also the best customer experience and support.

We work 24/7/365 to ensure all our services are robust, secure and most importantly – available.

Cost, some flexibility and definitely pay per second are ideal for certain things, but please, if you don’t want to have these problems on your key line of business applications, spend a bit more money and buy something truly “business grade” rather than something that just wears the badge and most of all, do not judge all service providers on the performance of some. 

• Why small businesses should use data centres – Presented by our very own Andrew Massing (Head of Product Development)
• Future online landscape and how that will impact small businesses – Presented by Rob Wilmot of BCS Agency
• Social media for small businesses – Presented by Paul McIntyre of Search High

The key message we wanted to impart was around the importance of managing business servers, as they are central to the running of your business and how using a data centre can realise the following benefits:

• Reduce power and connectivity commitments to your premises
• Increased life expectancy of your server equipment
• Ensure that your equipment is in a secure location
• Technical engineering expertise to be your 'remote hands'

Post event attendees took part in a tour of our state-of-the-art data centre facility which offers the perfect infrastructure for businesses to host or co-locate their server equipment in a fully secure facility.

What was interesting was the reaction from the keen audience around how they can take advantage of the new (and some not so new), online technologies to grow their businesses. As Rob pointed out, these are not expensive routes to market and can yield some serious business benefit. Having a business grade platform for taking advantage of this ever evolving change in the online landscape is essential.

The meeting ended with a presentation from Nicola McCoy-Brown from Nottinghamshire County Council, who asked attendees to participate in a pledge to ensure investment is made in high speed broadband in Notts. If you wish to support this, click here and pledge your support.

Do you occasionally forget to change the backup tape? Come on now, be honest, you’re amongst friends here. You’re only human after all and sometimes when work gets really busy you forget to do it.

What about when you’re off sick or on holiday? Dave from accounts is meant to take over the job but do you think he always remembers? There’s no getting around it – some days the data just isn’t getting backed up.

Assuming that last night’s backup took place, where do you keep the tape? Raise your hand if it’s one of the following:

• Your desk drawer
• The boot or glove box in your car
• Your laptop bag
• A pile on top of the tape drive along with all the other tapes from this week
• The bookcase in accounts next to Dave’s desk – you know the one that partially blocks the fire escape.

Ideally a courier would arrive daily (or weekly at least) and whisk the tape off to a military grade secure facility – the kind of place Tom Cruise might attempt to break into during a Mission Impossible movie. You did explain this to the management and at the time they all nodded in agreement but once the quotes came in it was quickly dropped in an effort to contain overheads. In any case that secure facility would probably turn out to be a very ordinary warehouse on an industrial estate in Bedford – Tom Cruise wouldn’t even give it a second glance.

When was the last time anyone tested the tapes to see if the data can actually be recovered successfully? Unfortunately backing up is pretty pointless unless you can also recover the data and it might not be until there is a real crisis that you discover that there’s a problem. After all tapes have moving parts and they wear out after too many uses.

You know that you should schedule regular tests for data recovery – it was meant to be part of the DR plan. Perhaps you could start doing it next month once you’ve sorted out the dodgy mail server and upgraded the wireless network….and don’t forget Dave keeps complaining about the old printer in accounts….but you should definitely have time after that….

Did you implement the tape backup kit yourself or did you inherit it from you’re predecessor with no real explanation about what data is being backed up and why? If you did set it all up yourself when was the last time you checked back with all the other departments and made sure that you are still backing up the right files? Maybe accounts have started storing data in a new folder that didn’t exist when the backup was last configured and Dave forgot to mention it to you (frankly, that’d be typical of him).

Don’t forget that the actual amount of data that you need to backup tends to grow steadily over time but the capacity of the tapes and the length of overnight backup window stay the same - so once you’ve added all the new data to the backup job then may find that you’re out of space or time.

Sorry for bombarding you with all these questions – I know you’re just trying to do your best under the weight of mounting expectations and shrinking budgets. The point of this is really to say that there is a better way of doing things by using a remote server backup service which, conveniently, we have recently launched at Timico. The benefits to you could be pretty compelling – just consider the following…

• You wouldn’t have to change any tapes – you just tell the software how many daily, weekly and monthly copies of the data you want to keep and for how long.
• You wouldn’t have to worry about sending backups off-site. All the data is automatically kept off-site in our tier 3+ data centre
• You could test data recovery quickly and easily via the software’s web interface. You can just pick individual files and folders rather than waiting hours for the complete contents of a tape to be restored.
• The software makes it easy to see what’s being backed up but if there is something that’s been forgotten you can quickly create a new job. You could even give Dave from accounts the responsibility to manage his own backups.

So if you’re planning your escape from the planet of the tapes then have a chat to us – we might be able to offer you an easy way out.

Let us know which events your think you are most likely to watch online and we will compare your feedback with the network stats and report on the findings.

With the joys of parenthood and the milestones and surprises they bring on a daily basis, it’s still always a shock when they hit you from the blindside with a question that makes you really have to think hard about the answer. To bring this back into a more relevant blog, a couple of months ago I was blindsided by my six year old son.

“Do I save this to the Cloud Daddy?” Erm, excuse me, what did he say? In fact he was readying himself for his weekly allowance of Xbox time (they have to see actual sunshine as well I am told) and it had asked him where he would like to save his games, locally to the Xbox or Cloud storage. “Just to the Xbox will do” was my attempt at diverting the inevitable.

“What is Cloud storage Daddy?” Well thank you very much Mr Gates, as if the birds and bees weren’t enough to contend with!

Then it occurred to me, if I couldn’t clearly and concisely explain Cloud in basic terms to a six year old how could I ever expect to do the same to the non technical audience I often find myself addressing.

So there I was, looking into his expectant eyes (Daddy knows EVERYTHING of course) and I decided to just talk him through it as honestly as possible.

By the time I finished he did have the look of someone who wished they had never asked, but he seemed to understand in that boyish way they do, clicked Cloud storage and said “that’s going to be in a big building full of computers (data centre) and I can get it back wherever I am in the world now, can’t I?”

That’s close enough! “That’s right, well done” I said. I know that’s just one aspect of Cloud but was in danger of overheating his brain!

This isn’t the end of this tale quite yet, as now he has told everyone he knows that I work with Clouds, and I am constantly harassed by children and their parents alike for explanations, and they then seem pretty miffed I am nothing to do with the weather.

The truth is though, as much as this is a light hearted yet true tale, the kids are asking about Clouds, they see it when they play games, they see it on adverts on TV, they get it and accept it – they are our future. Is the Cloud a seed sown now to bloom with the next generation or something we need to make sure we understand ourselves now?

I am reminded of being 15 or so and having to always programme the video recorder for my mother, I really don’t want to have to ask my kids to sort Clouds out for me!

Take the blog challenge and try to explain Cloud to your children and see how you get on!

Therefore, you must ask yourself, what do you put in place to prevent downtime? Every business should have a comprehensive plan for disaster recovery. Email is not the only business critical application to be affected by server downtime - the considerations must spread to your website, databases and any CRM systems that you may access through your own server.

Many businesses do not put a disaster recovery plan into place until the disaster has been experienced. To ensure that you do not have to go through this pain, think about the safety, security and location of your servers. Do you have a comms room or are they simply in a cabinet behind reception? Are they exposed to the risk of a break in, a leaky air conditioning unit, overheating on a warm day?

The first and arguably most important step to take in implementing your disaster recovery plan should be to ensure that your equipment is housed in the right location.

This is where the Data Centre comes in.

We appreciate how difficult it is to make the decision to put your trust in somebody else to look after your mission critical hardware and keep your servers colocated off site, where you can’t see them.

It is therefore key to choose the right colocation provider with a Data Centre that you can rely on. At Timico we have made every effort to ensure that our new Newark Data Centre utilises the newest technology to harness the safety and security that you require for peace of mind.

With your servers housed in our Data Centre you no longer have to worry about your equipment being damaged by break in, or other incidents that may cause it to be tampered with, such as an inexperienced member of staff handling it. Our biometric access controls and comprehensive CCTV system will look after that.

The cost of keeping the equipment cooled, powered and connected to your network are also no longer a worry. We have invested in cold aisle containment technology, have a dedicated 1.3MVA substation and diversely routed 10Gbps dedicated links to our core network that ensure the optimum performance of your colocated equipment.

However, we believe the biggest piece of the puzzle that will guarantee your peace of mind is our staff. We have a highly experienced customer services team located on site in our 24/7 network operations centre. No matter what your concern or query is, it will be handled with the utmost attention and we ensure that you are regularly updated on the progress of any incident ensuring a close relationship between customer and provider.

So, ultimately, the question has to be, what is your disaster recovery plan?

So to put it simply, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) uses IP networks (essentially the same technology that the Internet is built on) to place and receive voice calls, as opposed to using traditional fixed telephone lines. Provided the data connection is good enough, analogue/ISDN lines can be replaced to allow voice calls to use the same connectivity as the data communications.

Why is this beneficial? Well, reducing the number of fixed telephone lines into a business can significantly reduce costs, as well as by making calls to other users on the same system free of charge. Beyond this, though, IP telephony is increasingly able to offer customers a range of features and benefits that traditional telephone lines are simply unable to offer.

One key advantage is that IP networks are not physically tied to a single location and hence neither is the VoIP service. Moving offices doesn’t require a telephone number change or new line install, as the service can just be connected back to the network in the new location. In the same way, for disaster recovery purposes, relocating and receiving calls elsewhere is much easier to get up and running quickly.

There are a number of ways businesses can take advantage of VoIP, either with an on-site phone system, or by renting the use of a hosted platform.

The specific features available will depend on the chosen method, but generally the VoIP solution  will still have all of the basic telephony features you would expect from a traditional phone system (call waiting, call hold, call transfer, call logging, caller ID), plus a variety of multimedia options.

Just thinking about the multimedia features alone, they can allow for a much more efficient way of working. Many VoIP users can have a softphone to make and receive calls straight from a laptop, meaning that working away from the office becomes much more feasible. Instant messaging and seeing a colleague’s availability means that time can be used more productively, rather than continually leaving each other missed calls and voicemails.

As you can see although the term VoIP seems to just be about voice calls, it can also enable many more business benefits which can help reduce costs and improve the way that we work.

So if your business is being held back by the limitations of a traditional phone system or if it’s simply costing you too much then a VoIP solution could be the answer... just don't let the technical jargon scare you off!

But who are O2 wholesale and why are we working with them? Well, O2 wholesale started out as an independent broadband network provider called BE Unlimited. BE launched into the UK broadband market in 2004, installing its own LLU broadband network equipment in BT’s exchanges in London, Manchester and Birmingham. It quickly established a reputation for fast access speeds, network reliability and high quality technical support which resulted in them winning plenty of awards. Telefonica/O2 acquired BE in 2006 as part of their strategic expansion into fixed line telephony and broadband.

Since then O2 has been developing the business into a wholesale broadband and Ethernet provider, which it rebranded to O2 wholesale in March of this year.  O2 wholesale offer arguably the fastest and best performing network in the UK and now Timico will be able to utilise that network for our business customers.

Up until now we've always used BT Wholesale for ADSL broadband access, but during the summer we’ll be adding O2 wholesale broadband lines into our customer base as well. The advantage for us as an independent managed service provider is we can always offer the best technical and commercial option for our customers' needs if we have a choice of wholesale suppliers. O2 wholesale also has some diagnostic tools which can help resolve customer faults more quickly than BT wholesale connections. We’ll be migrating some of our existing customers to the O2 wholesale network during the summer and will begin adding new services later in the year.

We strongly believe that fixed and mobile broadband is converging - that is to say, it is increasingly important for businesses to be able to access their applications seamlessly whether they are in the office, at home or on the move. So working with a strategic partner who can offer us mobile and fixed broadband services will be an advantage we can pass on to our customers.

We already offer a unique Mobile Access Management solution which uses the O2 network to offer secure mobile broadband services which can be fully integrated to company private networks. In the future with the introduction of fourth generation mobile services (LTE) we expect mobile broadband will become an even more important part of the business IT and communications infrastructure.

We'll tell you more later in the year about the services we have planned, but in the meantime if you have ideas of how your business could use converged fixed broadband and 4G mobile broadband, why not add a comment below or tweet us @TimicoUK

There are two certainties in this life. The first is that broadband speeds will get faster and faster. We don’t have to look back far to see that this is true.

Way back in the Y2K our first broadband lines had a pathetic 512kbps speed. I say pathetic but actually the alternative before then was dial up (finger tappingteamakingbakealoaforgooutforawalkwhilethepageloaded slow) so 512K was probably fast for the time.

We waited until 2004 for a blistering 2Mbps and then the technology introduction milestones started to come along a bit faster. In 2008 ADSLMax gave us 8Mbps (up to), in 2008 we got 24Mbps (up to) with ADSL2+ and then in 2010 we saw the first Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) installations with download speeds of 40Mbps (up to) and upload of 10Mbps.

Note the recurring "up to"s. Few people actually get the advertised headline technology but the average speeds are getting better the nearer the fibre gets to your premises. The holy grail is indeed Fibre To The Premises or FTTP. FTTP currently gives you 110Mbps with no "up to" - you get the full shebang, if you can get it though it isn’t available in many areas yet.
FTTC is though. FTTC, which is now available at 80Mbps down and 20Mbps up, has recently passed 10million homes and BT is planning, with some government help (ie cash), to make it available to 90% of the population by 2015.

Both FTTC and FTTP use BT’s 21CN network. This network first entered production in 2008 with the aforementioned  ADSL2+ service. 21CN represented a massive change to the BT infrastructure in the UK and was designed to lower costs and have the ability to carry much more data. The result is highly visible in the faster broadband seen above but also in the widespread availability of economically priced high speed Ethernet connections which will be the subject of a future blog post.

It isn’t common knowledge but the BT 21CN network already carries much of the mobile traffic in the UK - something you don’t hear about perhaps from the mobile operators themselves. 21CN is a far more efficient way of carrying this traffic than the older technologies used by these networks.

All interesting stuff but so what? What does it mean for me do I hear you say? Well it means a lot for you. You live in a competitive world. Your business needs an edge and that edge comes from using new technologies and tools that allow you to do things faster, cheaper and better. These technologies live in what is often termed "the cloud" and to be able to make use of the cloud you need to be able to get to it.

Enter FTTC, FTTP, fibre broadband - whatever the marketing departments of this world want to call it. Whatever it’s called if you can get it you need to and you can get it from Timico. If you want to know what the other certainty is its whenever you buy a posh new mobile phone someone will bring out an even better one before you have finished working out how to get the best out of the one you just bought.

With mobile devices becoming increasingly capable of carrying out many of the day-to-day functions that used to require you to be sat at desk with a PC or laptop, so comes the increased headache for the IT department.

Firstly, just what functions should be allowed on smartphones and/or tablets?  Email, contacts and calendar are all common place but what about CRM and access to your company intranet systems?  Secondly, by allowing such access, how do you secure both the data and the device?

Many companies will simply provide a VPN from the device back into their systems. Whilst this ensures the user is checked it does create a number of issues and misses a number of security concerns.

To begin with, as anyone who has used a VPN over a cellular data network will testify, the VPN itself creates an overhead which slows the connection down. When you couple this with a dropped mobile internet connection which requires the VPN to reconnect (manually or automatically) the user experience quickly becomes very painful and most will give up or pull out the laptop.

The other problem area is when a device is connected to your corporate WAN you have most likely set up security policies, such as restricting certain firewall ports or filtering for the kinds of web content they can view.  Whilst this also applies when connected to a VPN there is typically no consideration given to the mobile device when the VPN is not connected.  In short, companies are providing their users with a mobile connection that sits outside the usual IT infrastructure and hence outside the company internet usage policies and security measures.

Historically there have been few options to address this because the simple fact of the problem is that today's mobile internet offerings have been built for the consumer and not for businesses.

So how can this be addressed? The first option is that you can speak to your mobile network provider and purchase your own Access Point Name (APN), this can cost tens of thousands of pounds to set up and also on-going every year thereafter. In today's economic climate for many companies this isn't a very attractive option.

The alternative is Timico's Mobile Access Management (MAM) solution. This in effect allows you to utilise capacity on Timico's APN for a nominal per user per month fee. This is much more affordable and provides the same secure solution.

So why use an APN, how does it work and why will it be a benefit?

To begin with the typical route for mobile traffic is from the device back through the network’s public APN and ultimately back into your network via the carriers own Internet connectivity. Timico provides a direct connection from our APN into our MPLS infrastructure then directly to your network. This allows you to encompass your mobile devices into your existing WAN without touching the Internet. With control set at the SIM card level you now have a regulated connection for that mobile device that can only connect to the internet via your existing firewall.

Now that we have secured the connection, there is no requirement for a VPN. This in turn frees up further bandwidth and improves the user experience. For example on my iPad I can simply connect to the company intranet system by opening the browser, I have no need for a VPN and therefore get a much better experience.

The best backup schemes try to strike the right balance between the requirement to retain and restore data, the cost of the media and the complexity of managing it and the most popular one by far is GFS or grandfather-father-son.

There are many subtle variations on GFS but a typical scheme requires 7 daily (sons), 5 weekly (fathers) and 12 monthly (grandfathers) backups to be maintained on a rolling basis with, at very least, the monthly tapes being taken off site for secure storage. That’s the idea, at least, but for every company that pays for a man-in-a-van to take the tapes somewhere safe, there are another ten where the tapes end up in the IT manager’s car boot (you know who you are!).

So why am I talking about tape rotation methods on the Timico blog you might, not unreasonably, be thinking. Well other than my general geeky interest in this sort of thing it’s largely because I’ve spent the last few months preparing to launch our new server backup solution.

Now it’s worth saying straight off that ours is essentially a remote, disk-to-disk backup solution - quite different from a tape drive. It uses a central vault held in our data centre to manage and store the backups and just needs a light-weight software agent to sit on each server to trigger the scheduled backup jobs.

These days our type of solution is typically called ‘cloud backup’ which is a term we have consciously avoided. This is largely because ‘cloud’ has become a rather abused and misused term, seemingly applied to almost any service that can be accessed over the Internet. Plus we want to avoid the association with the huge number of online backup providers that has sprung up over the last few years claiming to offer a business grade service.

What we tend to see with so many of these new generation services is they just don’t offer the flexibility to build the kind of backup schedule and retention policy that has been standard practice with a tape drive. Now you might argue that the move away from physical media to disk based storage means that this kind of thinking is out dated and irrelevant. Whilst I can agree that we should happily do away with chore of changing tapes and taking them off-site, businesses still need a thorough, methodical approach to backup even if the tapes are now virtual.

So when it came to choosing EVault as our technology partner for backup it was very much with the GFS tape rotation scheme in mind. Yes their technology allows us to leverage all the advantages of modern online, disk based backup but it still accommodates an approach that customers have grown accustomed to relying on over many years.

So perhaps it’s time to talk to us about retiring your tape drive for a remote backup solution but rest assured that you won’t need to abandon your grandfather, father or son.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I was part of “the next big thing” planning committee, it was an event where the various factions (or vendors) were talking about their take on what was largely called utility at the time. Cloud was dismissed at this event as being marketing spiel (to be fair we weren’t the right audience to have given a fair viewpoint) but afterwards started to make sense as something new and interesting to talk about.

That was six long years ago and since then my whole career has developed into delivering some or all aspects of a “Cloud” solution.

The interesting point in this is that my skill sets have changed in one drastic way, I transformed from the technical salesman (I did used to install as well!) building complex virtual/physical multi site environments.

Instead I became a teacher.

The problem with using a word like cloud (which doesn’t truly represent the solution it represents) is that it can offer a lot of opportunity for unclear direction, or even misdirection to suit a particular message.

I made a point of firstly asking what the customer’s perception of Cloud was, I then simply explained it broken into three elements (Network/Infrastructure/Application) and how each part could be consumed and then asked how they would like to consume their IT. This has of course now evolved into IaaS and SaaS. Interestingly as more jumping on the band wagon occurred, the network bit (The Cloud itself) started to be left out of the conversation largely because the vendors couldn’t deliver it themselves.

Why I ask myself, after six years are the majority of businesses still a little (or a lot if they admitted it) unsure of the nature of cloud solutions? Is it risky? Is it safe? Will it work? What actually is it? (I always prefer to deal with people who honestly say they haven’t got a clue and find the whole thing annoying)

Quite simply when we take even the smallest amount of time to educate or reiterate what cloud is, and remember the importance of establishing the relevance to the customer requirements, we gain more business.

When a business understands what is available and how it could work for them in their circumstance they can recognise the best benefits.

Relationship maths:

Supplier/Vendor educates customers

                +

Customer now empowered to make best decisions based on intelligent choices and recommendations

                =

Solid business relationship and successful project delivery

Remember….

Those who can….Teach!

But with the advent of 4G are we about to embark on a new revolution?  With mobile data speeds set to be much more inline with what we have come to expect in the office and at home coupled with much wider network coverage, the way we consume data is about to change.

No longer will we have to wait an age for that download, watching a film won't result in buffering every few seconds. 

So if we're going to change how we use data and at the same time increase our data use, how will mobile operators change the service and tariffs they provide?

With usage changing from megabytes to gigabytes is there still a place to charge users by the megabyte?  Should overages be paid by the gigabyte and of course how will this be reflected in the tariffs themselves?  Will 500MB or 1GB be enough?

Of course it is easy to forget that it isn’t just direct use but also indirect use of data, as applications update in the background.  In the past ten days my device has used 1.5GB – 110MB on the mobile network and the rest on WiFi.

The final thought though is around cost.  As consumers of data in a digital environment just how much do we expect to pay and how much are we prepared to pay?  Will charges be for volume or for the content consumed?

We are already seeing tariffs emerging for the latest smartphone devices which are classified in multiples of gigabytes rather than megabytes and we’re seeing much more of a move to include unlimited WiFi usage as well.

But whilst many of the major networks only provide ‘off-the-shelf’ packages, what is becoming increasingly clear is that there isn’t a ‘one-size-fits-all’ tariff.  This is where specialist service providers such as Timico are able to help.  Timico is able to create bespoke, flexible options that are designed and priced to meet specific requirements, whether this is just mobile or for your wider infrastructure requirements.

In addition to this Timico also specialises in integrating your core network systems into your mobile solutions through a variety of options.

To discuss how Timico can provide bespoke tariff options to meet your requirements please contact us today.

Whoa there - come back, don’t worry. I was talking worst case here. You never know though. It isn’t beyond the realms of possibility and worth thinking about.

Most IT directors will work in partnership with the FD. The IT department carries the key that can unlock the cost savings and the productivity boosts that the accounts department craves. To be fair it is in everyone’s interest to do this.

The problem is that technology moves on so quickly. Whatever skills you or your team learnt at that last vendor course, they will soon no longer be assets on your CV. It isn’t just about your important applications or your “cloud” strategy or your network. In today’s IT world all these elements of your service blend together into one service. It is difficult to see the join.

This is where partnering with the right people comes in. Partnering with the right people allows you to deliver more with less money and fewer members of staff.

There are serious cost saving and productivity gains to be had. These are quite often only achievable by working at the right scale. We are quite fortunate at Timico in having been able to build scale in the eight years since we began operations.

Our first ADSL backhaul connection was 34Mbps. We now manage multiple Gigabit backhauls and our core network is a multiple 10Gbps ring. Whereas our first network operations team comprised two people who didn’t sleep much we now run a classic tiered 24x7 operation with separate operations and development teams.

Not only is scale and resilience built in everywhere but the scope of what we can achieve has changed. I don’t like the term “cloud” but we are talking that kind of expertise. We are talking people who understand resilient networks and resilient virtual services. Actually we are even talking resilient virtual networks – these networks often employ resilient virtual nodes “floating” on high performance switching infrastructure.

It’s not just investment in infrastructure and services for customers. It’s about our own internal infrastructure and about our approach to quality. By being up to date with our process we make things cheaper for our customers. Our systems can also integrate with those of our corporate clients - ticketing and incident management for example and “helpdesk to helpdesk” support.

Timico brings a lot to the party. Not only do we invest heavily so that our customers can benefit but by having reached a certain scale ourselves we are able to keep at the forefront of the development of technologies and services provided by our network partners. For example we are always early trialists in new services from BT – fibre broadband and Ethernet in the First Mile spring easily to mind.

We also have market leading mobile data services and have been the only O2 Service Provider to participate in the 4G/LTE trials in London – an activity that has given us significant market exposure.

So when your next budgeting process comes inevitably along you need to have a partner in mind to help you through the hurdles set for you by your old friend the Finance Director. Him again. Making the right choice of partner will help you to help your company move forward through an ever changing world.

However even with all this technology at our disposal, in our personal and professional lives I believe you can’t beat a bit of human interaction to form and develop a relationship.

I have just returned from spending eight hours in the car with my Chief Technical Architect. We were attending a meeting with a prospective customer. The meeting lasted no more than an hour. In it we used iPads to look at network diagrams and we talked about MPLS networks and SIP services. A very interesting meeting with a reasonable level of technical content but in truth nothing that couldn’t have been covered on the phone, over Webex (other collaboration tools are available!) or by email. Speaking to a former colleague this evening (now a big corporate machine chap) his view was "you are nuts, that is a waste of eight hours being in the car for an hour long meeting" but I believe the contrary is true. A one hour conference call or Webex trying to extol the virtue of customer/suppler partnerships and the value we place on customer relationships would have been a waste of an hour as the message would have been shallow at best and lost at worst. Conference calls (and even video conferences at times) also seem to just stick to the content of the task at hand and you lose so much of the other valuable insight information offered up as part of a face to face meeting.

We live in a world where auditory and visual connections are often preferred to face to face meetings in the interest of time saving and increasing efficiency. On a weekly basis I am invited to Webex after Webex from people I have never met and organisations I have never worked with, nearly all of which I politely ignore. Yes, I would agree that at times, for tactical discussions and when something needs to be discussed quickly these are good options but they should be an elevation of a simple phone call, not a devaluation of a meeting where possible. It is a multi-sensory world and nothing quite says I am serious about this relationship than the kinaesthetic connection of a handshake, a few anecdotes and small talk shared over the coffee machine before a meeting and some parting words about having a safe journey and thank you for taking the time out to come and see me today, much appreciated!

Maybe I am old school and maybe one day I too will be replaced by an ecommerce website or even the corporate equivalent of Max Headroom, but until that time comes, I will take a face to face customer meeting and the eye to eye combat of a good old fashioned negotiation followed by a handshake in preference to a machine telling me "you are about to enter the conference, followed by an awkward collision of clumsy introductions"!

These days the internet connection is a mission critical tool for most businesses so what do you do if the line goes down? You can have more than one line provided by different providers or have a mobile 3G backup though that is probably not going to be fast enough for your needs.

What you can do is keep your important server or servers off site at a data centre. This has some quite major benefits.

Firstly the server is going to be kept in a secure environment that is prepared for the eventuality of power cuts. A data centre will have huge banks of batteries and generators that will keep the electricity flowing indefinitely whilst the power outage is fixed.

Secondly data centres are secure. They will typically be manned 24 hours a day 7 days a week and be physically very difficult to break in to.

Then there is the issue of connectivity. The data centre will have multiple high bandwidth and geographically diverse fibre connections to the internet. When we say geographically diverse we mean from different network providers and physically coming from different directions eg one from the North side of the building and one from the South – if a digger breaks one the other is still going to be ok.

You can add ideal air-conditioned environment (your server doesn’t overheat in warm weather) and availability of system backup resources (the data on your server can be safely and easily backed up) to the list of benefits that come from hosting your sever at a data centre.

This is all well and good but what practical effect will it all have on your business. Well this server could be your email server or it could store all your customer records. It could even be your phone system, or it could be hosting your website.

If this server is kept at your premises and you get a power cut or your broadband goes down your business can grind to a halt. If this is stored at a data centre then not only are these faults less likely to happen but if they do happen in your office you can just send everyone home to work and your business will still function because they will be able to access the same services from their home broadband – or even from Starbucks if it comes to the crunch.

If this is true it marks a major escalation in the global telecoms arms race. Since the turn of the century there has been major consolidation in the internet and telecommunications industry. O2 acquired BE to gain a broadband network, Sky bought Easynet for the same reason and now Vodafone are in the process of buying Cable & Wireless. On a smaller scale, Timico has completed a number of recent acquisitions too.

One of the key reasons for this consolidation is the belief that customers increasingly want to deal with one company for all their communications needs. This applies equally well to businesses as residential consumers. A core business principle at Timico is that increasingly converging technology (e.g. fixed-mobile convergence, hosted telephony and cloud services) blurs the boundaries between legacy telecoms, mobile, data and hosting services. That makes it harder for in-house IT departments to invest in and maintain the solutions themselves, so IT managers look to external trusted service providers.

One can imagine the shareholders of Everything Everywhere and Virgin might be very excited about the idea of providing combined Ethernet networks, hosted VoIP and mobile services to consumers and businesses. The on-going telecoms arms race will mean more mergers and more consolidation. But is bigger always better? Will a goliath of a company like that find it a challenge to deliver business-strength service? Only time will tell.

But in the meantime, there are already service providers in the market with genuine capability and credibility to deliver converged services to businesses. We like to think we’re one of them.

With thanks to ISPreview for bringing this to our attention.

A subject that grabbed everyone’s attention was 3D printing.

In addition to the role this amazing technology will most certainly play in the industrial revolution underway, ‘Additive Manufacturing’ will be a great enabler for letting our personal creativity loose, allowing any of us to turn complex, original ideas into immediate, affordable reality.

Simple versions of these printers now start at £1000 and the price will keep dropping.  Higher and higher broadband speeds will underpin their proliferation and diversity. In the not too distant future we’ll upload our designs to specialist machines that will print a car part for you, send a personalised present to relatives in America, or maybe build a custom smartphone case that goes perfectly with those Jimmy Choos you decided to wear tonight.

We all came away from the event with a keen sense of how quickly things are changing and the need for agility in a rapidly evolving, ultra-competitive global market.  Collaboration and peer-to-peer working practices enabled through unified communication solutions are become increasingly important factors for businesses that want to compete and grow.

Across the Timico Technology Group we’ve implemented a formal QMS for many years. We have recently been working with ISOQAR, one of the UK’s leading QMS auditors, who have confirmed our ISO9001:2008 certification. In ISOQARs own words:

“ISO 9001 certification by an accredited certification body shows commitment to quality, customers, and a willingness to work towards improving efficiency.” www.isoqar.co.uk

It is increasingly important in buying decisions that businesses can prove their credentials. Decent people, leading technology and an excellent reputation must be matched with the right internationally recognised professional endorsements, such as ISO9001.

Timico has a full-time Compliance Manager who is responsible for ensuring we maintain our quality standard and also deliver continuous improvement in our processes and procedures. The outcome of which is a better service for customers.

Following the construction of our first Newark Data Centre we’ll be extending our existing ISO27001 certification at Newnet to the rest of the Timico Technology Group during the remainder of 2012.

If you’d like to know more about our QMS please get in touch.

Even here at Timico we did the same. As a service provider our customer service function is mission critical. When we started our SIP ran over bonded ADSL so we had SIP trunks and ISDN. The funny thing was whenever there was a problem it was with the ISDN line. It was the SIP that always came to the rescue.

This might have been a case specific to us. ADSL is known to not be a totally stable product – every line will lose connection and reconnect over a period of weeks and if it is wet weather the number of faults increases. What I am saying is that there will be some circumstances where it is the ADSL and therefore the SIP line that is the unstable one.

Most of the time both ISDN and ADSL are fine.

There are two factors that are turning SIP into people’s primary means of communication and leading them to drop the cost of ISDN altogether.

Firstly is the growing acceptance of SIP - It’s been with us for a long time now. Timico has been going 8 years and we have been using it most of that time.

Then there is the rise of low cost Ethernet connectivity. Ethernet is a far more stable connectivity solution than ADSL, can carry far more data and has seen its costs plummet over the past couple of years. As a result more and more businesses are switching to Ethernet and relegating ADSL or even FTTC to the role of a backup line.

Now they aren’t doing this for cost reasons. In the main their data/internet usage is rocketing so they are having to install bigger and better IP connections to service this. The side effect is that they now have stable and reliable connections that can also be used to carry SIP traffic.

The cost savings that can then be made by ditching ISDN completely are enormous. For example Honda in the UK saved 45% of their phone bill by moving to SIP running over their Ethernet network.

So there you have it. SIP. Finally becoming the communications mode of choice for fixed line minutes.

Times are tough for companies throughout the UK and the rest of Europe and there are considerable business advantages, both financial and operational to be leveraged from internet and mobile technologies.

Our aim is to provide material on the most topical, technology-led industry developments and solutions that will support you in meeting the myriad of business challenges you may be facing.

Sharing ways in which these challenges can be overcome within the constraints of the IT budget and resource limitations placed on many of us will be of positive benefit to us all, so feel free to get involved and send us your views.

Over the coming months, Timico will be sharing blog posts addressing:

• Key industry developments from high speed fibre connectivity to virtualisation
• Current market conditions and their impact on companies’ communications objectives
• Hints and tips on successfully adopting new forms of technology solve business issues

The more feedback and input we get from our readers, the more meaningful we can make the blog for everyone. Feel free to make suggestions on areas you’d like us to cover. We’ve got a team of expert writers lined up to contribute, from technical architects and network engineers to product experts and marketing gurus, so we look forward to hearing from you!