Client description:

Needing to deliver important health services, Berkshire-based charity Ostomy Lifestyle’s advice to stoma surgery patients offered on its 0800 telephone lines must be dispensed with 100% efficiency.

The medical conditions that lead to stoma surgery affect people of any age, gender, profession or race. The charity was established in 2007, in response to the lack of accessible information about ostomy issues.

The charity seeks to empower people, enabling them to make informed choices and to communicate frankly about all aspects of the surgery. “We are working to raise awareness of ostomy topics among the medical profession and the general public,” explains the charity’s Neil Basil. “Having a stoma should not be a barrier to leading a full life.”

He and his 16 colleagues offer impartial advice, and aim to inspire callers that barriers can be overcome.

The charity produces a regular newsletter, information sheets, and a website.

Advice given on the telephone complements existing healthcare services, to reduce the challenges that patients have to confront head-on.

“Our support services must be accessible to people of all backgrounds – so using our telephone system is perfect for this,” says Neil Basil. Someone can call needing basic stoma care advice and have their problems solved quickly, without needing to visit a hospital or local GP.”

Analysis and history of Gradwell’s VoIP service:

“We were still establishing Ostomy Lifestyle in 2007, and moving into new premises - so were looking for a solution that would adapt and grow with us,” explains Neil Basil. Gradwell’s advice and ability to provide what the charity required was well-documented and explained.

“Most of our staff work at our office in Reading – but some of our volunteers and Trustees benefit from the flexibility that working from home offers. We are now more likely to conduct meetings over the telephone, taking advantage of teleconferencing facilities.”

Helpline staff spend their time responding to queries from callers, as well as researching bowel and bladder topics and conducting training courses for nurses, support groups, and medical industry companies.

“VoIP worked very well from the start for us, once basic glitches were resolved,” comments Neil Basil.

Calls to Gradwell’s support team have been entirely satisfactory, he added.

“VoIP has given us the flexibility we need; it allows us capacity and functionality that we would otherwise not achieve.

“VoIP is a very technical service - so it needs a fair bit of involvement from our own staff; but we are learning all the time and Gradwell’s support staff resolve any problems quickly.”

Please see www.ostomylifestyle.org

Dear Customers,

Starting from Monday 19th January, core Gradwell services (email, web hosting and VoIP) suffered from repeated outages.  Each outage lasted several hours at a time, and all customers were affected.

The team have now completed all planned work to improve the stability of our services, and are now monitoring the situation to determine whether any further emergency work is required.  I apologise for the disruption caused by these outages, and want to reassure our customers that this continues to be my top priority.

In this blog post, my Technical Manager, Stuart and I want to explain to our customers what went wrong, and the changes we have made to put it right.

Ultimately, the root cause is technical equipment failure, but our design decisions have exacerbated the situation. We have received, and are grateful for, the large amount of customer feedback and have identified opportunities to improve our communication, operational process and the management of both our operations and customer support teams.

Some of these improvements have been implemented immediately, others will take a little longer. However, Gradwell is a well supported business, by customers, our staff (and even our bankers!) and there is no question that we cannot progress forward and work with customers to rectify circumstances as required and reconfirm our position as a leading provider of Internet Services to UK Small Business.

Stuart explains below in more detail what went wrong and how we’ve taken action to prevent it re-occurrence. We caused severe disruption to all, both customers and staff and we sincerely regret our failure to deliver excellent service in the last few weeks.

Yours sincerely

Peter Gradwell

Technical Overview

Gradwell relies heavily on server virtualisation, using the industry-leading VMWare ESX platform.  All of our services run on the ESX platform, and rely on virtualised storage running on dedicated networked storage servers.

On Monday 19th January, we began to experience multiple issues with two of our networked storage servers - a combination of faulty hardware and trying to work the networked storage servers too hard.  These simultaneous issues caused the networked storage servers to hang, which in turn caused all of the ESX servers to hang.  During each individual outage, we recovered services by resetting the networked storage servers and then resetting all of the ESX servers.  Regrettably, the process of rebooting all of these servers in the correct sequence took several hours to complete from start to finish, causing our services to be unavailable for extended periods of time.

Gradwell has addressed these issues by:

1. The faulty hardware has been either replaced or removed from service.
2. We have purchased and installed five additional HP storage servers partly to replace the failed hardware, partly to reduce the demands on the remaining storage servers, and partly to ensure better redundancy against future failures.

We apologise for the length of time it has taken to complete the work to address these issues.  This was due to the lead times for purchasing, testing and installing the new storage servers.

We apologise for the inconvenience caused by these outages, and want to reassure our customers that we will be continuing to improve to our infrastructure to ensure we do not have future outages like this.

If you’d like the full technical details of the faults and how they have been addressed, please read on for more details.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Gradwell has always been dedicated to understanding and meeting customer needs. To formalise this a little, we’ve just kicked off the first in a series of customer surveys to find our more about your businesses, your priorities and your views on our performance. In December we asked for feedback from our business customers, in the New Year we’ll be asking for input from residential users and resellers.

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.