May and June 2008 have been exceptionally busy for Gradwell, with a big focus on talking to customers, improving customer service and increasing service resiliance. Here are some highlights:

Technically:

• We’ve been working on the stability of the email file servers, and had a couple of weeks with no nagios alerts for them (touch wood). We also managed to speed up our backups and shorten the time window.
• We added a further 7 servers to our VMWare cluster, we have 100 Ghz and 168 Gig of RAM deployed under vmware now, and quite a lot more servers to migrate over.
• We’ve installed £48,000 worth of Cisco Switching gear in our London data centres, as part of a plan to upgrade and improve the redundancy of our core ethernet network, and agreed the purchase of further switch upgrades to our Telecoms network (worth EUR 120,000), to be implemented in July and August.
• We’ve implemented a new security policy, and restructured all our internal web applications to further partition and secure them.
• 4 Industrial placement students joined our development team (3 will leave this summer) and have completed their inductions.
• Stuart Herbert, our new Technical Manager, has been with us now for three months and is getting to grips with the wide scope of work we do.
• We’ve done huge amount of other minor fixes and improvements - with over 200 entries logged in our change management system, mainly on email, voip and billing systems.

Products:

• Our broadband product has launched and been well received, with every customer who has switched to resolve a VPN or VoIP quality issue having been statisfied! Premium Broadband does make a difference.
• We’ve worked on the implementation and testing of the new Tiscali Annex M service, an enhancement to our broadband range which will give customers a 2.5 Megabit upstream link - due 10th July.
• We’ve completed 999 test calls on our VoIP Platform
• We are looking at how we can package our expertise in VoIP, networks and products like Trixbox (and IP PBX) into a managed services offering.
• Zimbra testing continues. Zimbra is an email service that provides diary, calendaring and contacts integration, like Microsoft Exchange. Please get in touch if you would like to take part.
• We’ve continued to deploy our newsip VoIP platform for Centrex customers, with good results. This gives more redundancy, scalability, and the ability to view the status of other customers on the phone via Lit Lamps.
• We tested integration with SpinVox, a service which converts voicemails to text, and hope to roll this out in July 08.

Customer Service:

• The support team has been slightly restructured, merging into a broader customer service unit which covers technical support, customer service & billing and product delivery (e.g. number porting).
• As part of this, we are starting to assign support incidents to individual members of staff, so they take a more case orientated approach to resolving customer queries.
• Our new online customer portal now provides a view for support tickets, and will soon track the generic service issues/bugs we know about as well.
• We’ve built the prototype of the replacement for our Gradnoc status service, and hope to get that released in early July.
• The team of 11 continue to handle approximately 600 queries from customers per week, across both technical and billing queries.

Sales & Marketing:

• Sales have continued very strongly in the summer months, breaking a few of our previous records, which is always excellent news. Phone calls are up 79% since January 2008.
• We’ve telephoned nearly all our resellers this month (some 200) and driven 2936 miles in May talkin to them, bringing them upto date, getting positive fantastic and useful feedback - some times it’s just good to talk.
• We held the first Gradwell lunch in Bristol, meeting 15 customers, from one of the first, to one of the most recent. The experience was very enjoyable and again, customers. Come and see us in Portsmouth in July, or Edinburgh in August.
• Emails to promote Unlimted IAX Trunks, Broadband and Customer Lunches were sent out and good a strong response.

Hopefully this gives a brief taste of what has happened behind the scenes at Gradwell, and much more is already underway in July!