Piers Daniell

Along with our recent move to a new office in London we also this year opened a dedicated Network Operations Centre (NOC) in Hemel Hempstead. With a growing client base it was important we kept service levels the same and had staff within a few feet of client’s hosted equipment. With our four datacentres in the city predominantly used for connectivity, most customers have taken space in the Hemel site, Centro. The site went live last year and is cutting edge, offering high levels of power perfect for virtual environments.

With part of the site unable to take racks due to loads on the floor it was deemed perfect for a new support team who will operate on a 24/7 rota. With the rest of the site already manned 24/7 it also helps with Health & Safety regulations on lone workers.

But what has proved most successful in my mind is the technology we deployed to link the two offices together. With Fluidata’s current support team based in London it was important the two teams could communicate effectively with each other. Therefore when designing the offices we implemented HD video conferencing which sits permanently at the end of each team to allow them a ‘window’ to the other. By running it continuously it means that very quickly the technology is forgotten about and the relationship between the staff could flourish.

It doesn’t mean there isn’t any on site contact, but it does mean it can be reduced, and both offices are able to work more as one. Visitors have been impressed by the quality and its effectiveness. You just walk up to the screen (or for the support teams sit at your desk) and talk to each other. I think the perception is one that video should be the thing sitting in the boardroom collecting dust, rather than an integral part of the office environment. There are, of course, other benefits such as green credentials and ROI (in terms of reduced transport) but for me the main driver is the collaboration it drives within the business.

Never before has the internet played such a key role in bringing public events to the masses. First it was the election, then football, Wimbledon, cricket and even the budget brought to the desktop of thousands of office workers previously unable to partake in such events during office hours. With the advent of BBC’s excellent IPlayer the events are only a click away from anyone’s desktop.

As a business specialising in bringing connectivity to corporate customers, rather than consumers, we get to see the difference between a standard day in the office and one with a major event. Most of you will be familiar with 9/11 when the internet literally ground to a halt in the UK as we watched America come under attack. Back then there was very little video streaming and websites would crash under the demand for information.

Today it is a different story, and while England playing football by no means compares to the interest generated back in 2001, it does put the internet under enormous strain. And today we have video streaming which soaks up bandwidth putting demand on connections. For us, ie Fluidata, the game was an interesting test of the network which normally runs well below capacity as we focus on selling low contention, high bandwidth services.

As you can see from the graph from the monitoring on one of our networks we do literally nothing on the weekend (as most businesses are closed) and little traffic during the evening. However as the game started at 3 pm today (end of the graph) you can see traffic nearly doubled as people closed down outlook and logged onto the BBC…

I have written before about the virtues of a good work/life balance, well last week saw the introduction of a new toy to our London office. The question was what to do with space put aside for future expansion. Should we invest in another sofa that never gets sat on or go for something a bit more team focused. Something that could settle arguments, bring teams together and make important business decisions over.

The foosball table was a favourite but with a Fluidata five a side team already established it was felt something more inclusive should be considered. Table tennis would have been nice and so would have been a pool table, both of which however required a lot of space. Difficult to justify when paying London rates in the centre of the city, however we finally came up with a solution, Air Hockey!

We moved into our new offices at the beginning of the month and last week held our launch party. It was attended by key suppliers, customers and investors and gave us a chance to outline the business plans over the coming year. Top of which is carrying out some acquisitions to help the business move into new markets and even into other countries.

I think everyone was suitably impressed with our new office, right on the Thames between Tower Bridge and London Bridge, right next to City Hall. So not only do we have an enviable view of the river but can also keep an eye on our Mayor as he goes about his daily duties. With over 30,000 people a day walking through the site (called More London) and regular festivals taking place it is a great place from which to base a business. I feel like you get the benefits of being close to the city but also more space and a stone’s throw from the Isle of Dogs.

The new office will allow for further expansion, which we are currently focused on, and also demonstrating products and services to new potential clients. Exciting times.

I am overdue to do a piece on our new office; however with our launch party tomorrow I thought it best to give a little bit of a surprise. In the meantime I will use the opportunity to show off the view from my office this morning as a large passenger ship edged out of London (I know backwards).

It has to be one of the best views in the city and one that has had all our visitors excited about. Hopefully the view wont be too much of a distraction from our technology…

I have been a bit busy over the past few weeks with our office move (more to follow on that) but with polling day upon us I thought it necessary acknowledge it. I am just hoping for a record turnout this time because I feel with such a low turnout and voter apathy we never seem to get a true picture of how Britain wants to be run.

People are obviously quick to slate the government on this or that, but as far as I am concerned by not voting they can’t have an opinion. I was really surprised at how many people didn’t vote at the last general election. At least with the TV debates it has made the topic far more appealing if a little like the TV program, Big Brother. Hopefully tonight people will look at the parties rather than the leaders and vote on the policies and not the catchy sound bites. I vote Conservative (can’t you tell from all the blue on the page!), a boy who fondly remembers the John Major years before the branded Blair years. I believe in a small government and that new businesses will help to propel the country into prosperity once again.

Ironically my business, Fluidata, started and grew under Labour but I feel it was more with one hand behind my back rather than supporting the company. We didn’t get any special relief or support, just a lot of red tape and now tax for making it a success. What the existing government doesn’t seem to understand is that when the percentage of tax goes down the income generated from tax actually increases. I think because people will accept fair tax rates and will be less likely to avoid them. But red tape is a massive problem; I think we have one of the most complicated tax regimes in the world, with uncertainty on HMRC’s viewpoint prevalent. A simpler scheme would make a big difference to new enterprise.

Another point I feel that has been lost in this election is transport and, more importantly, the 20 million or so car owners who continue to be spanked in the name of the environment. Cars are becoming ever cleaner and will, one day; offer the pollution free motoring so to continue to tax so highly seems very short-sighted.

I visited Microsoft’s London offices today in Victoria to learn about their hosting strategy and new products they are launching. Being involved a little bit in this internet industry I thought it was important to keep up to date with the application layer. Obviously being Microsoft they are a little behind on the curve but nothing prepared me for how boring they made it all sound.

Never before have I ever felt like sleeping in a conference but within ten minutes of the presentation starting I felt myself drift away. How can anyone make such an exciting industry so dreary? They have a fantastic office, with top of the range everything, even a fully catered subsidised canteen but still talk as though the world is coming to an end. There was really nothing new apart from little bit better Exchange, little bit better Outlook and little bit better Windows. It is like the software equivalent of Porsche where every new model is pretty much identical to the previous one but goes that tiny bit faster. Their biggest growth product is SharePoint which apparently got to $1bn in sales quicker than any other product in its history. Well great, but it is still boring and is definitely no IPod moment for Microsoft.

The business has to be very careful over the coming years because, from what I can see, it is becoming very much like IBM. It is becoming the goliath with companies such as Apple and Google retaining the right to David. Cloud computing is a very exciting time for our industry and something we have fully adopted in house (Fluidata) as an example for our clients. I just wish Microsoft used its might to help lead rather than follow and come up with something new that would set my pants on fire.

I had a meeting last week with our Health & Safety advisors in respect to Fluidata’s new environmental commitments and working towards our ISO 14001 standard. This accreditation is a relatively new one to come out of BSI and provides businesses with the guidelines necessary to measure their impact on the environment and measures to take to reduce pollution.

As a young company I felt it was better to go for such accreditations early on than wait until the inevitable legislation when it would be harder to implement. As it is, we seem to be doing a lot right in recycling over 50% of our daily office waste, minimising electricity usage and ensuring everyone uses public transport where possible when commuting. Further advances in high definition video conferencing and a new modern office will help us reduce this impact even further. Hopefully we will become a beacon of light for other businesses to follow and a demonstrator in how embracing the green revolution can deliver long-term cost savings.

Apparently in all the waste currently generated in the UK only 9% is recycled, the majority of which is met by households. Businesses currently have it far too easy and unless you are producing something like a washing machine or a car can remain under the radar of our EU mentalist masters. One of the big issues is actually in a services economy such as ours, where it is very easy to show no local issues but instead outsource all the pollution problems to a third party. In much the same way manufacturers can outsource to China and hence produce very little pollution in the UK; our industry relies on datacentres consuming vast quantities of fossil driven electricity away from our offices.

Over 1% of all global datacentre consumption comes from datacentres which just goes to show how power hungry the information age is. Our addition of a new datacentre last year in Hemel not only met all the economic needs in terms of scalability but also meant we could offer our clients even more efficient hosting. By building a new site from a blank sheet of paper savings could be made in the thermal efficiencies of the site to ensure a reduction in power consumption. And I am sure further advances will be made in the coming years as electricity becomes even more expensive and IT progressively more powerful.

As 2010 rolls in, I am reminded that a decade is a significant period of time and a good one to reflect on, especially in the world of IT and Telecoms. What have we achieved in the past ten years, and what, if any, predictions can be made about the next ten years? Well, for one, Fluidata couldn’t exist until 2004 on the back of ADSL technology, to launch as its own business until early 2006. Which means that the last decade has seen great advances in internet connectivity speeds and brought the word ‘broadband’ into common parlance.

We might be far behind many other countries in this race, but don’t forget in 2000 dialup was the norm and businesses like Freeserve dominated internet access with products offering up to 56 Kb/s. Now people have the choice of ADSL2+ offering up to 24 Mb/s (24,000 Kb/s in old money) or even 50 Mb/s with certain cable broadband offerings. Fluidata, for one, became a leader in bonding technology providing services over multiple carrier networks at speeds up to 60 Mb/s down and 8 Mb/s up with PureFluid. Even gigabit (1,000,000 Kb/s) speed is achievable with the use of fibre, as well as more affordable especially in urban areas.

Networks not only got faster, but also more intelligent, with quality of service, large wide area private networks and MPLS protocols. Businesses put voice over the internet and now video is seeing a resurgence with advances in HD video conferencing. Which begs the question - what will happen in the next ten years?

With the industry talking about FTTH (Fibre to the Home) and FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) more people will be able to experience the high speeds that fibre can deliver. But remember this isn’t like the previous decade when the main infrastructure (the cables) remained the same. This technology requires something new which not only will absorb huge amounts of money, but also time and resource. The cynic in me would say BT’s 21CN (to provide ADSL2+ and more IP services) offering is aimed purely at the LLU carriers such as Tiscali, Carphone Warehouse, Cable & Wireless and O2. I am sure its reach won’t extend over 2,000 exchanges by the end of the next decade. So FTTH or FTTC products are purely to take the fight to the cable operators such as Virgin. And what will quench our thirst for data? I believe there will still be some advances in DSL with products such as VDSL, but also other completely different technologies which will see in excess of 100 Mb/s over copper. Bonding will become more prevalent and give rise to a larger number of niche ISPs able to aggregate multiple networks together, not only to improve performance, but also reliability. Fibre will of course continue to grow in popularity and while still not being within easy reach of home users, will hit more of the SME market as costs reduce.

Other technologies such as WiMAX will become more widespread as companies such as Intel start to bundle the protocols into their mobile chipsets. I know of one company soon to come to market with a 3 GHz service which, if widely adopted, could bridge the gap between broadband and 3G mobile networks. Another product I am looking forward to seeing more of is BPL (Broadband Power Line), which has the potential to deliver many hundreds of Mb/s anywhere in the country over a normal power line. It has been a long time in the making, but I believe this decade will see its widespread adoption.

Mobile broadband still has a long way to go so that future services, such as cloud computing, can be widely used. And what else is in store? Well to be honest, it can be anybody’s guess. The great thing about this industry is the fact it continues to innovate and change - I’m, for one, looking forward to the next decade.

Quite a few members of the company are unashamedly into football, and while I can’t see the appeal, have started a Fluidata football team. They play six a side at the ELMS League in Battersea.  I can actually see the appeal of kicking the pig skin around after sitting at a desk all day, not only getting fit but also on a social basis. Good teamwork is required to win the game bringing people not only closer within Fluidata but also other businesses involved in the league. We have had people from Cisco, Alternative Networks, O2 and Citi Group involved making a good social atmosphere – so much so that I even considered (for a microsecond) the benefits of getting into football.

I think my involvement is best served from the sidelines, probably in a duffle coat shouting orders in a Mancunian accent.