One of our main goals for next year is to get closer to our customers. So let’s start of by making sure you know who you’re working with!  This month I have chosen Stuart Herbert to ask a few questions to:
What’s your role at Gradwell?
I’m Gradwell’s Technical Manager.  The role is currently a combination of the more common CTO (someone in charge of all the technology) and CIO (someone in charge of all the technical plans) roles.  I inherited the role from Peter when I joined Gradwell.

How long have your been with the team?
I joined Gradwell early April 2008.

What did you do before joining Gradwell?
Lots of things :)  I’ve worked on, and managed, projects and products for a large number of household names, including Eurostar, Vodafone, Orange (where I ran Orange.net for two years), the Ordnance Survey, the Royal Navy, English Heritage, NASA and many more.  If anyone really wants to see the full list, you can find my longer bio on www.stuartherbert.com.

I’m also active in the open source world.  I’ve been contributing to Linux and open source since the early 90’s (most Linux installs include code that I’ve written - man dialog for details :), and for several years I was one of the senior developers for Gentoo Linux.  These days, I’m probably best known for my advocacy around PHP, and for my work co-writing the Zend Certification Study Guide for PHP 4. I’ve spoken at a couple of PHP conferences over the years, including the recent PHPNW 08 conference up in Manchester, where I spoke about the lessons learned from building Gradwell’s Twittex service.

What’s the best and worst thing about working for Gradwell?
It’s going to sound contrived, but the best thing about working for Gradwell really is the big beaming smile I have on my face every day.  I live north of Cardiff and commute daily to our main office in Bath - a round trip of over 4 hours a day - and you couldn’t do that every day if you hated your job.  My first job after graduating was in the Academic Computing Services department at the University of Sheffield, and that was a very happy time of my life.  In many ways joining Gradwell feels like I’ve come home, if that makes any sense, because of the similarities in what we do and how we want to go about doing it.

The worst thing about working for Gradwell has to be those times when we let you down.  I get to see all the hard work Peter, Ben, and everyone else puts in to building and maintaining our services, and when things fail and our services suffer outages, we feel it just as much as our partners and customers do.

What’s do you have planned in 2009, and how will it affect our Partners?
We’ve three main themes for 2009: growth, quality and innovation.  It’s an ambitious year for Gradwell, and we have a large programme of work planned.

On the VoIP front, our main push for 2009 is to migrate all of our customers and partners onto NewSIP.  NewSIP incorporates all of the lessons we’ve learned over the years since we began doing VoIP, and it also incorporates regularly-requested features like lit lamps for presence notification.  We’re hoping to have this done by the end of March 2009.

Call quality is also at the forefront of our 2009 plans for VoIP.  In 2008, we introduced Gradwell Broadband in order to solve the well-known problems with trying to place VoIP calls over residential ADSL services, and it has been a success.  However, the whole industry still finds it very difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of call quality problems when looking at individual customers.  Gradwell is already a leader in VoIP call quality (recognised in December when Gradwell was awarded UK best business VoIP at the ITSPA annual awards), and in 2009 we’ll become a leader in developing brand new tools to investigate and pinpoint the exact causes of call quality problems.  Work on these tools has already begun, and the early results do look promising.

We launched our new Portal site in 2008, as the long-term successor to our existing control panels.  Led by Dan Leech, the Portal is built on the excellent symfony framework for PHP, giving us a consistent approach for the future.  In 2009, we’re aiming to move our VoIP control panel and the CSR into the Portal, a move that will also see us enable our other headline services (broadband, email, and web hosting) for co-branding and white-label support.

The Portal is going to gain some new areas in 2009 that we hope will particularly interest our Partners.  Matt and Gavin have been working very hard to spec out better ways for us to share our knowledge base, our manuals, and other useful information through the Portal.  We’ll also be introducing online forums too, something that’s been requested for a long time.  We’re aiming to deliver these improvements at the end of February.

With broadband, Tiscali has resolved the teething trouble they had with Annex-M, and we plan to put that on sale once more in early January.  Annex-M is an important product for Gradwell and our partners, because it can support more simultaneous VoIP conversations than our existing broadband products.  We’re already an important partner to Tiscali, and we’re working closely with them on how we can further improve both provisioning and fault-resolution.

Our priority with our email service is to eliminate the outages that have plagued the service during 2008.  Many of these outages are down to our networked storage units - we’ve simply outgrown the iSCSI SANs that we currently use.  We’ve ordered new storage from Hewlett Packard (LeftHand’s dedicated SAN units to be precise), and are currently waiting to hear the delivery date.

We will also be launching two major new email products in 2009.  Many of our customers are growing businesses, and with that growth comes a need for better organisation and collaboration.  Many of our customers are also roaming users, who need better support for smartphones and for accessing their email via the web.  We’re currently working with two development partners to bring a choice to our customers: Microsoft Exchange in the cloud for Windows and Mac users, and Yahoo Zimbra in the cloud for Windows, Mac and Linux users.  We’re aiming for a end-of-Jan launch for Exchange, and a March launch for Zimbra.

We’re not forgetting web hosting in 2009.  In 2008, we’ve already brought our shared hosting platform up to date, introducing long-overdue support for both PHP 4.4 and PHP 5.2 on modern Linux platforms.  For 2009, we’re going to continue our modernisation work, by introducing a new (and hopefully much-easier to use) Hosting Control Panel in the Portal.  We’ll also be introducing a new Virtual Private Server product for those customers who want more flexibility than shared hosting can offer, which will be hosted by Gradwell on our VMWare ESX platform.  We’ve also ordered new storage from Dell (Dell Equallogic dedicated SAN units) which will give us even better performance and the room we need for major growth.

Speaking of platforms … at Gradwell, we’re rightly proud of the platform that we’ve built to run our services on.  It has allowed us to innovate, both with our headline services and more unusual offerings like Twittex.  In 2009, we want to make that platform available to everyone to innovate on.  We’re working on developing APIs for all of our platform, and we are aiming to launch the first of these before the end of 2009.

To support this large programme of work, we’ll be expanding our Technical Department during 2009, and working with existing and new development partners too.  By the end of this programme, we expect to be consistently delivering better quality and more innovation, just in time for 2010.

If you have any questions or feedback about our 2009 plans, I’d be very happy to discuss them in more detail directly with you.  My direct line at Gradwell is 01225 800897, and I can be reached via email at stuart.herbert (at) gradwell.net (Editors Note: But please don’t use Stuart’s email for requesting help on operational/support problems/queries).

What are you up to this Christmas?
Working :)  With most of my team enjoying the Christmas break, I’m looking forward to having a few quiet days to make some improvements to our Gradwell Status website.  Away from the office, I’m hoping for dry weather, so that I can get out and about and catch up with my photography.

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We’re just back from 24 hours of ideas, interesting people and pizza at BathCamp08 and a huge amount of interesting topics were discussed by some very interesting people.

Talks ranged from linking CurrentCost and social media to influence people to reduce their power consumption (an idea I am keen to try out at Gradwell HQ), through to talks on how computing is changing the face of Archeology. There was some hacking, voip and lego in there too! We all had a great time.

But why is such a conference important? Specifically, why as a company, did we put some money behind it? Why should more people sponsor these sorts of things.

There are a few reasons:

• Product Research: It’s ultra-useful to be able to present an idea, without having to give the answer. BarCamps are full of people who know what your subject is and have a useful all round knowledge. So your presentation is more of a discussion - and in our case, Peter Gradwell presented some ideas about mixing up VoIP, Web Hosting and SMS. That’s important as an enthusiast, and ultra-useful as a company.
• Employee & Supplier Search: You get to meet the right-people. At <Gradwell> we want to find good web developers in the locality, who are uptodate with the current trends and technology. Both as an employer, but also as a client, especially for our corporate website, which is permanently in-need of attention! What’s cool about BathCamp is that there was a mix of techies and non-techies, the outcome of which was some really great discussion about how things should be done.
• Technology Trends: It helps us develop and you get to learn about what is going on. We had no idea how many people used twitter and that helps us with our decision to use it for customer communication.

So, after a fascinating 24 hours, we have yet more ideas and things to do on monday when we get back to work.

If you’re an organisation that uses the internet, technology or social media, then we’d encourage you to get involved and cough up a bit of sponsorship too.

Finally, lots of people said how kind we, and other sponsors where for parting with hard-earned cash. The fact is, that writing the cheque is the easy bit - organising an event is not, and we’re very grateful to the BathCamp Organisers for doing so.

Hopefully, we can fill the time between now and BathCamp09 with some informal meetups of the Bath web community.

Peter Gradwell

One of the things we do in Gradwell is write an internal blog. We include three things:

1. We documents all our system changes, so if something is planned, or has changed, we have any easy reference for it.
2. We write up internal case studies of our customers, and feedback from our birthday lunches
3. Weekly, on Friday afternoons, we do a round up of what all the teams (tech, sales, support, billing) got up to that week.

Unfortunately we can’t make the whole internal blog public, but it is interesting to use a new tool I found, Wordle to produce a “word cloud” for that internal blog. A word cloud is an image made from your blog text which gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the text:

We can also compare that to the word cloud that you get from the public Gradwell blog:

It’s good to see the themes are consistent:

• Lots of focus on happy customers, through tickets and Birthday Lunches.
• Lots of continued work on infrastructure and scaling, particularly email and storage, as well as migrating from legacy servers to our newer platforms.
• A huge amount of work being completed and delivered, with many small incremental improvements.

We’d be interested in your feedback as to how we’re doing, via our online survey. Thanks!