Cobweb

A new data centre for Cobweb and some new technology to go in it...

Friday was a big day for us technical guys at Cobweb as we hit the first milestone in a project that will deliver the next generation of technical platform for us.

We've just signed the deal to take some data centre space in a leading data centre that's not in central/east London. Good data centres are hard to come by outside of Docklands, but we found one in the Equinix LD4 facility. It's a leading data centre, one of the latest generation (with which only opened fully in 2008. Importantly for Cobweb, this location has connectivity to the internet and peering networks that is diverse from the data centre hub of Docklands, giving independence and resilience from any major London DC incident.

Also on Friday, we announced that the BIG-IP solutions from F5 Networks will become our platform of choice for load-balancing and application management. This is a big step forward for us and we'll develop beyond simple load-balancing of HTTP/S connection to improve performance and responsiveness for our Managed Services, especially for connection-critical applications such as Hosted Exchange and Hosted SharePoint

All in all, this is a very significant investment by Cobweb and one we are certainly going to make the most of!

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Mobile Twitter – Twikini out now

I’m hooked on Windows Mobile and Twitter, the mobile browser interface wasn’t working well for me so I started looking at the mobile apps available. The best app for me has been Twikini. It’s clean, simple and best of all it makes a bird tweet noise when new updates are received.

Try it free, http://www.trinketsoftware.com/Twikini.

It integrates with Twitpic and services like TinyURL. You can add location information using GPS, or by entering a place name. I added my location to tweets the other week and so far I haven’t noticed any new stalkers.

I’m undecided whether to use “Tweet song info” about songs playing in Windows Media, it could generate a lot of updates and be a bit embarrassing when I’m listening Kylie.

If you update multiple Twitter accounts there is a “Switch account” option, which is proving pretty handy especially if you have personal and company accounts to update.

Try it for free from http://www.trinketsoftware.com/Twikini and follow me from your Windows Mobile.

Daniel
http://twitter.com/dannoakes

Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile,Twikini,Twitter,Trinket Software

ActiveSync (beta) for Andriod HTC Magic

If you have bought a HTC Magic or HTC Dream you can get a free beta ActiveSync client from http://www.dataviz.com/products/roadsync/android/.

You get Push email with HTML formatting, calendarand contact synchronisation including caller photo ID integration.

For the security conscious a remote wipe can be initiated from Exchange Server should the device go missing.

The beta ends on 30 May 2009

Daniel
twitter.com/dannoakes

Tags: ActiveSync, Exchange, Anroid, HTC

Pay Once BlackBerry from T-mobile

If you use a BlackBerry for email and web T-mobile could have the deal for you. For £179 you get unlimited data (Pay as you Go talk/text) for 12 months and a BlackBerry Perl, that is less than £15 per month.

More details here, http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/mobile-phones/phones/blackberry/

Daniel - twitter.com/dannoakes

Next up... Microsoft also announced Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010

As expected, it was a busy week for the Microsoft product teams this week with "Wave 14" announcements. Exchange 2010 is leading the way with a public beta release out already, and a final release to market (aka RTM) in the second half of 2009. Now Microsoft has announced Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 with a technical preview expected in late 2009 and release in 2010 for both products.

There was a press release from Chris Capossela of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group, which included some talk about Ray Ozzie's vision of the Wave 14 releases. It's worth a quick read, but here are the key announcements

• Using Office Web applications, customers will be able to create, edit and collaborate on Office documents through a browser. Office Web Applications is a set of lightweight version of Office applications that run from the web, like Google Docs. These include Word Web, Excel Web, PowerPoint Web, and OneNote Web. Office Web Applications will allow you to view, edit, and collaborate on Office docs in a web browser.
• SharePoint 2010 can be deployed and managed on-premise as a server, or hosted as a service
• For developers, Microsoft are working on Open APIs, deep support for industry standards and developer tool support with Visual Studio 2010. This will further enhance the Office Web experience and uptake.

As you can see, there's a name change for SharePoint. They've dropped the Office tag from Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to give clearer brand distinction. While there's no specific mention of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), the SharePoint Team are definitely working on a v4 release of the product. There's some more info about this on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog

 

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Microsoft announces the next-gen messaging platform – Exchange 2010

Today, Microsoft have publicly released details of the next generation of Exchange server - Exchange 2010, formally known to Cobweb and the TAP programme by code-name "E14"

Yesterday at Interact2009 in Reading, I heard from Rajesh Jha the Corporate Vice President for Exchange in a live keynote from Microsoft Corp in Redmond, Seattle. He was asked to describe his top 3 or 4 features in Exchange 2010, and here they are for you;

1. A clear focus on the user experience and end-user productivity. $650 billion is lost in productivity due to poor/unreliable/inefficient email systems.
   1. With Exchange 2010, there is support for any browser and any mobile device.
   2. Outlook Web Access really does replicate the Outlook experience, including presence information (just like Messenger with online, offline, busy status etc.), instant messaging, and (working) built-in support for Rights Management to fully protect your company confidential emails. There are some good example screenshots here
   3. Mail Tips. These are information bar messages, just like the pop-up blocker in Internet Explorer, that warns you if you're about to email an internal document to internal recipients, or are going to spam a distribution list with 2000 recipients, or if the recipient has their Out of Office set.
   4. Ignore Conversation button (as a VP in Microsoft, this was Rajesh's favourite feature) - when you're CC'd in an email conversation that's never ending and you've done your time, just hit the Ignore button and it's consigned to Deleted Items forever more.
2. Mail Archiving & discovery. Big mailboxes, retention of items including deleted mail and mailboxes, plus the tools to provide email discovery for compliance purposes. It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against the tried and tested (and trusted) third-party archival & compliance products from the likes of Autonomy ZANTAZ and Symantec EnterpriseVault
3. Further performance gains. Once again, big claims of disk I/O reductions, and there's support for big capacity SATA disks which are less costly than traditional fibre-channel SAN arrays. There are availability and replication improvements that are providing ways to improve service delivery that were previously very expensive to enter into.
4. Exchange 2010 will run as a Server or as a Service, i.e. on-premise or hosted.

All cool, exciting stuff. Cobweb are already running a build of Exchange 2010 internally so we will be able to go into more depth on these features and we will share our experiences to date on our Exchange blog site www.exchange2007.com

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Hosted Services – no assembly required

Microsoft has worked hard over the years to simplify the installation and configuration of their software... Next-Next-Finish - Job done, server is working, the boss is happy. Microsoft has also worked hard to provide supporting documentation and tools to assist with the design of systems. That's what I'm going to talk about here...

There's a great article from Neil Hobson, an Exchange MVP, on the sizing of Exchange solutions which pulls together a number of these tools to analyse, calculate, plan, design, stress-test, load-test and finalise your system design. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of technical documentation is available for download if you want it.

What's most worrisome though is the massive possible variance in the results from these tools – first up, you need to estimate the profile of your users; light, average or heavy-user, based on the number and size of emails they typically send. Some wrong numbers here or some increases in mail usage can throw those results out of the window. Why do I say this? Because we know how easy it is to get this wrong. Take a look at the article – have you got you CPU-core and storage group ratios right for the RAM you have in your servers?

Capacity planning, which includes performance planning too as an over-capacity platform equals performance issues for sure, is the biggest single challenge for any hosting company. If you don't get this right it goes very wrong, very quickly. My teams spend a lot of time working with these tools modelling and re-modelling our system designs using actual production user profile data, and despite our best efforts the resulting designs vary in more ways that you'd imagine. We overcome this issue with an N+1 model for redundancy with an additional +1 added for capacity, i.e. we always have at least 1 more server or cluster than we need in the already redundant solution.

Using a hosted service completely removes the unpredictability of capacity management. There are no issues with increasing or decreasing user numbers, no worries about the impact of increased usage profiles, more traffic, email volumes or variables which are out of your control.

So don't read those documents and don't download the storage stressing tools – you don't need the stress!

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Hosting Summit Day 3 - Dan Golding, Tier1 Research

Yesterday, we heard from Dan Golding from Tier1 Research. Dan is a very well respected honest talking analyst with a specific focus on the Hosting Industry and I think he really knows his stuff.

Dan's topic of the day - Where are the Hosting Opportunities?
These were the key messages for me;

• Cloud computing - it's important to remember that it's what the end user/customer sees that is important. Not the building blocks underneath the service. Don't confuse the enabling technologies with the products.
• Remote Desktop - still in infancy. One of the "big successful hosted desktop players" in Europe has just 800 desktops. Not exactly a successful market yet then.
• Don't the big guys own this space? Google, Microsoft, Yahoo.
  Sure, they get lots of media attention, but that doesn't mean they will win. These guys have an advantage only, a small one at the moment.
• Mid-tier Enterprise are the sweet spot, that's 100 seats and upwards. They want databases, volumes of storage, development platforms.
• He's predicting a shift in 2012 where applications such as HR & accounting, project management & collaboration, and file servers, will actually become better suited to be in the cloud rather then locked away in on-premise silos. It's time to make this stuff accessible!
• What do SMB and Mid-Enterprises want?
  Speed of provisioning - instant and flexible. They want to move from a capital cost to operational costs. Importantly these services need to be flexible and must represent good value
• What don't they want? Well interestingly Dan Golding says that consumers of cloud/SaaS services are not interested in brand!

The Cobweb view: sorry Dan, we really don't agree on this last point. There's no brand affinity at the moment because most offerings are raw compute services and they are all the same, therefore you're right - who really cares where they come from? However, if you add proper value on top of the technology then you can create a great brand following - Cobweb prove that every single day.

His session was, for me, one of the highlights of the Summit and we'll be showing the recording of the session on the big screen back in the office to spread the message - Managed Services is a big opportunity.

Microsoft Online comes to Europe - A good thing? probably....

Microsoft today announced what those in the business have known for some time that they will be bringing their suite of online applications to the UK and Europe. Microsoft are an important partner for Cobweb so we like many partners have been trying to figure out what the future holds for such a partnership as they might be seen as competitors, but are they? We certainly don’t think of Google-mail as a competitor, nor other large providers who have many mail users, so let me take the opportunity to give a detailed response to the press announcement;  

On the whole we welcome this move into online, as it validates the Software-as-a Service model that we have been providing since 2001. As a Microsoft Gold Partner we have worked closely with Microsoft over the last 7 years, being active members of various Technology Adoption Programs, Partner Advisory Councils and Founding members of the EMEA Hosting Club and regular visitors to Redmond, we have known about this move from Microsoft for a long time and have worked hard to ensure that our Service Offering is significantly different (better).

The SaaS model has been already proven successful by the likes of SalesForce.com and Solution Service Providers like Cobweb who, already have over 5000 small and mid market business customers taking a variety of services. The market has changed: when we started in 2001 it was all about the technology now, in 2009 it is all about Customer Service, having a UK Support centre, dedicated Account Managers, Self Service Control Panels, and Online Help through web chat and knowledge bases, providing good technology is no longer enough. Large organisations have a problem providing good technical service at scale, look at BT, but businesses like Direct Line have proved it can be done, it will be interesting to see how quickly Microsoft can be successful on this front

This market has been the market for early adopters and technologists for too long and Microsoft’s entry means will force traditional Microsoft resellers to look at this business model and we believe that Cobweb is the only credible alternative to the Microsoft offering in the UK.
 
Taking a closer look under the hood of the Microsoft Online offering it becomes quite easy to see some of the key areas of difference between the Cobweb and Microsoft offering

• Cobweb offer multi-tiered Enterprise levels of Service capabilities and service support
• More features and applications that add value to end Customers , Email Archival, Blackberry, Microsoft Hosted CRM, Online Backup, Webhosting, Managed Windows Server Hosting to name a few 
• Much greater levels of configuration and customisation  and integration
• Dedicated or semi -dedicated or shared environments depending on the customer requirements all running from a UK Data Centre

And for Partners, who Microsoft are making a big play for in this space (they have to don’t they?) we have had a successful reseller channel for 6 years, with range of successful partnerships from Telco’s down to local IT resellers they have told us over the years what they need which can be summarised over and over again in the first two bullets

• CUSTOMER OWNERSHIP – Our resellers own the customer relationship, including billing – Not the case with Microsoft Online Services
• MARGIN, MARGIN, MARGIN – These services can be expensive to sell and onboard so a high margin is essential for a profitable service offering Cobweb offer up to  40% recurring margin compared with 6/12% like for like
• Mature Partner management support including Sales and Marketing support, Technical help and business model development  
• White label or Sell with options
• Full Service suite resale opportunity including Hosted Exchange, Hosted SharePoint, email Archival, Blackberry, Microsoft Hosted CRM, Online Backup, Webhosting,  Managed Windows Server Hosting
• Greater opportunity to earn additional, increased Professional service fees because greater allowable customisation, configuration and migration and integration scenarios
• Sophisticated “Parallels” Control Panel

So we think taking all these differences into account we think there is a lot of room in this growing market space for Microsoft and Google to fight over who has most Mailboxes and who offers the best price, and for Solution Service Providers like Cobweb to carry on offering a great value service, that is tailored to the customer need whether for 20 or 2000 users.

Finally , what puzzles me most from the Microsoft announcement is the glaring omission of the Power of Choice message that was pushed so heavily at the Worldwide Partner Conference last July – I was there when the most senior Microsoft people evangelised about the Power of Choice; Microsoft, On Premises, or though Partner – where has that gone? Is this a sign that partners are being hung out to dry? Well we might find out this week at the Microsoft Hosting Summit in Seattle – I shall be sure to ask...

Mark

Redfly: Mobile Companion

I have had my eye on Celio Redfly for a long time and last week Expansys started selling it for about £130, get more information at www.celiocorp.com.

The Redfly is a terminal device for connecting to a Windows Mobile phone, Celio call it a mobile companion. I use mail and calendar on my phone a lot and it does the job well, but if you have ever tried to use Word or Excel things are not so great. So by adding a larger screen, keyboard and mouse can you ditch the laptop?

I was very surprised just how usable Office Mobile and even Pocket IE becomes on a larger screen, I wrote this blog post very easily. I only found a few occasions where I needed a desktop application, at which point I used Remote Desktop mobile to connect to my PC. A great demo of this is and an insight in to mobile vitalisation is on YouTube.

You can connect using Bluetooth by just powering on the Redfly (~2 secs) and pressing the Bluetooth button. If you use USB it will charge your phone from the internal 8hr battery.

A few more highlights come from the systems administrator point of view. If the Redfly gets lost there is no data at risk, all data is on the Windows Mobile which can be remote wiped at the click of a button. I haven't seen too many laptops that can do that. It is also one less device that needs security and anti-virus updates.

Daniel