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.

If you were one of the 792 people who responded to the invitation to take part, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your time. We’ll be using the findings to improve our marketing, support and administrative communications. Do look out for changes in the New Year, and don’t hold back with your views on what we’re up to.

Key Findings:

• Technical ability
  • 36% of our business customers consider themselves technology experts
  • 47% of our business customers consider themselves broadly competent
  • 17% of our business audience are either completely lost or use it but don’t know how technology works
• The majority of our business customers have fewer than 10 employees and their Internet technology requirements are handled alongside other duties.
• More than half of our business customers either have multiple locations or people working remotely.
• 93% of our business customers class themselves as positive or neutral in regard of their overall opinion of Gradwell.
• Of our current product offering, most of our businesses are considering investing in Business Broadband in the future.
• The top three reasons for using Gradwell were:
  • That we offer the best customer service.
  • That we’re small business specialists.
  • That we offer the best functionality.
• In terms of the performance criteria that are most important to our business customers, these were the top five:
  • Effective incident resolution.
  • Fast incident resolution.
  • Clear and consistent pricing.
  • Technical expertise.
  • Ability to support business critical services.
• Areas our business customers would like us to focus our time in implementing improvements are in overall reliability and the speed and effectiveness of incident resolution.
• Areas our business customers were particularly impressed were in our ability to speak to them in plain English, our ability to advise them on what they need and in the flexibility of our working relationships.
• The top three business priorities for our business customers next year are:
  • Generating new business.
  • Retaining existing business.
  • Reducing their hassle.
• Overall, our business customers weren’t particularly excited by our company strap line.
• The top three communications services our business customers would most like to see us introduce are Call-Back Requests, Customer Forums and Technical Webinars.
• There was a mixed view on whether people would like more technical or benefit-led communications, with a correlation to technical ability – where our technical experts are less interested in business benefits and the technical novices wanting to see what our products mean in a business context.

We also had over 150 people offer to appear as a testimonial or case study for us and as many again opting in to participate in deeper research. This is fantastic, and we’ll certainly be taking people up on these kind offers of support.

This is just the beginning of a programme of customer insight. So, if you’ve not yet had a chance to participate, there will be many more chances throughout the first quarter of next year.

Thanks again to all of you participated. We’re already putting plans into action to respond to the feedback you gave.

Beating rivals such as BT, Enta, Hipcom, Inclarity, Voipfone and Viatel, Peter Gradwell - Managing Director of Gradwell - received the ITSPA (Internet Service Providers Association) Best Business VoIP 2008 award in the presence of Derek Wyatt MP (Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Communications) and Ian Taylor MP.

Among its many other activities, ITSPA, the trade body for VoIP providers, lobbies OFCOM. Eli Katz, Chairman of ITSPA, said:

“A distinguished panel of judges representing the thought leaders in the industry completed an extensive analysis of the UKs top VoIP products and services.

“Entries were judged on reliability, user-friendliness, design, innovation, price and value for money. “The purpose of the ITSPA awards 2008 is to help foster excellence, and to recognise and reward achievement.

“The winning companies feted in the House of Commons yesterday have made a significant contribution to our rapidly developing and innovative UK Internet Protocol communications industry.”

The company winning this business category, Gradwell, has provided the best all-round voice service for the UK business community: the company provides a good selection of business features within its service, including the availability of multiple telephone numbers, and call queuing - and full support for remote workers, he added.

In receiving this ITSPA 2008 award, Peter Gradwell commented:

“When we started Gradwell dot com 10 years ago, we knew our product had to be easy to set-up, reliable, and good value.

“We think we have achieved much of what we set out to do, and have focused very sharply on customer care: if there is a glitch, we have a great team to get things sorted as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

“This ITSPA award is the icing on our 10-year birthday cake – and it could not have been achieved without the excellent workforce that Gradwell has at its – and its customers’ – right hand.”

Gradwell operates at the Micro/Small end of the SME market place, providing email, telecoms and broadband services to over 7000 billing customers. We’re one of the largest UK SME VoIP service providers (user base of over 30,000) and we have strong ambitions for growth. We have a turnover of 2.4 million and 30 staff based in our offices in Bath.

To continue supporting our demanding growth, we are looking for an experienced system administrator to help manage our linux based application platform.

The Role:

• Provision new Physical and Virtual Servers.
• Plan and perform day to day unix systems maintenance.
• Design and deliver solutions for new products and services.
• Monitor and manage server capacity.
• Monitor and manage server security.
• Meet service availability targets.
• Ensure that services run and are proactively maintained with a “zero defect” approach.
• Maintain system monitoring tools (nagios).
• Document architectures and procedures for systems operation.
• Organise junior systems administration and contract staff.

Key Skills:

• VmWare VCP Certified with experience of iSCSI
• Experienced Linux Sys Admin (Centos)
• Experience of FreeBSD
• Strong perl and bash scripting
• Experience of complete OpenSource stack(MySQL, Apache/PhP, Mail Daemons, Radius, anti-spam and virus, Asterisk, OpenSER, Load Balancing)
• Exposure to and a basic understanding of networking in a Cisco/Juniper environment
• An aptitude for learning
• Ability to present and report about progress, projects and performance to the rest of the business

Additionally, experience of ITIL Process Management would be beneficial.

Salary;

This is a full time position (37.5 hours) based in our Bath Offices (26 Cheltenham St, Bath, BA2 3EX). In addition, you will be required to work as part of our on call rota, as part of a team of 3/4 responding to out of hours fixes.

Salary: Region of 30,000 pa, plus Benefits.

Application Details:

For an initial discussion, please contact Stuart Herbert (stuart@gradwell.net, 01225 800 897) and apply via email.

Our offices are located on the Lower Bristol Road in Bath, a 10 min walk from the train station, next to the Green Park Tavern.

Gradwell is a rapidly growing Internet Services Provider who focuses on VoIP (www.gradwell.com/voip/), email and web service solutions. We are a pioneer in the exciting new world of Internet telephony and this section of our business is growing rapidly.

We are looking for a senior systems administrator with expertise in storage to come in and help us review and cement our network, storage and VMWare infrastructure, so that it can support our growing customer demand and application environment. This shall initially be a 3 month project, with possibility of extension.

The key tasks in the role:

• Reviewing our network setup for iSCSI support and implementing any necessary configuration changes.
• Reviewing our VMWare ESX setup for best practice and redundancy, and implementing necessary changes.
• Ensure no single points of failure in network, esx and storage configuration.
• Plan and Migrate current virtual machines on legacy SANs onto new SAN storage.
• Upgrade, reconfigure and reprovision legacy Infortrend SANs
• Virtualise existing services (mysql servers, customer shell server, spam, anti-virus) into new virtual machines, to allow us to expand esx cluster.

Knowledge Required:

• VMWare VCP with practical experience in a 15 ESX server environment.
• Knowledge of iSCSI and TCP/IP networking, with multiple VLANs in a Cisco environment.
• Experience with LeftHand and Equallogic SAN storage
• Strong experience with Linux (CentOS 5)

General Experience:

• Proven track record of delivery of robust infrastructure
• Ability to commit to and deliver deadlines
• A love of documentation
• Ability to work flexible hours (changes will need to be made late evenings and weekends)
• Ability to implement changes without disruption in a live environment.

Location, Start & Rates:

• This is a full time role with a minimum of 2-3 days/week spent in the office.
• Our servers and network are located in Telehouse and Sovereign House, Docklands
• Role to start early January 2009, subject to purchase of new storage units
• Target rate £40/hour, billed monthly.

Application Details:

For more information, please contact Stuart Herbert, Technical Manager (stuart@gradwell.net, 01225 800 897).

Monday 22nd – 8am to 6pm
Tuesday 23rd – 8am to 6pm
Christmas Eve – 8am to 6pm
Christmas Day – CLOSED
Boxing Day – CLOSED
Saturday 27th – 9am-1pm
Sunday 28th – Limited email support
Monday 29th – 8am to 6pm
Tuesday 30th – 8am to 6pm
New Years Eve – 8am to 6pm
New Years Day – CLOSED
Friday 2nd January – 8am to 6pm
Saturday 3rd - 9am-1pm
Sunday 4th – Limited email support
Monday 5th – Return to normal 8am-8pm weekday hours

Naturally, our systems will continue to be monitored over this time and our engineers will remain on call to attend to any issues that might arise.

As the year draws to a close, we’re delighted to be the bringers of good tidings. We received glowing reviews from our industry peers, being named Best Business VoIP Provider at the ITSPA Awards in December. We also completed first stage of our customer research programme, in which 93% of our business customers showed up as satisfied or pleased with Gradwell – which is great news for them and for us.

More importantly the research we’ve completed and that planned for the new Year gives us lots of insight for future improvements – we’d like to win again next year, for VoIP and all our other products, so we’ll be working hard on putting plans into action to reflect what you tell us is important to you. Find out more here on our blog.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your custom in 2008 and to wish you a fantastic festive period.

All the very best for the coming year.

The ITSPA Awards aim to reward excellence in the UK VoIP and Unified Communications markets, with categories such as Best Unified Solution, Best Business ITSP and Best VoIP Hardware.

The winners of the awards will be unveiled on Thursday 11th December.

The awards ceremony will take place in the Members Dining Room at the House of Commons, with Derek Wyatt MP (Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Communications) and Ian Taylor MP co-hosting the event.

For more information on the awards please visit http://www.itspaawards.org.uk

What You Need To Do

Whilst we expect the majority of web sites to continue working without any issues, it is important, because of the software changes, that you test your website as soon as possible to see if there are any problems that need to be addressed. Apart from ensuring compatibility, you do not need to make any changes to your site or DNS.

Please raise any faults with our new cluster to our Customer Services team.

If you’d like to know more about the new cluster, please click the link below.

Technical Details

At 10pm tonight, we are moving the following IP addresses from our existing FreeBSD web hosting cluster, and binding them to our new CentOS 5.2 cluster:

• 193.111.200.150
• 193.111.200.151

The new cluster offers the following technical features:

• CentOS 5.2
• Apache 2.2.9 + mpm-itk
• mod_php 4.4.9
• Perl 5.8.8 via CGI
• mod_perl 2.0.4
• Python 2.4.3 via CG

… all running on (currently) four virtual machines under VMWare ESX.

The new cluster sits behind a pair of load balancers, and a pair of reverse proxies running Squid.  The Squid proxy is non-caching (although we can enable caching for an individual website on request), and it allows us to direct individual websites to any of our web hosting clusters without any DNS changes.

The FreeBSD servers are being decommissioned in December, and will be making way for more VMWare ESX host servers as we continue to grow next year.

It has always been our policy to quote prices exclusive of VAT and therefore there is no need to make price adjustments.

Resellers should note that all whitelabel and cobranded bills will be automatically adjusted.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this delay.

As always, you can contact the support team for any help that you may need.