Rack Pack Blog

Don’t let your brand go down

Posted by Rack Packer - 28/03/12 at 09:03:24 am

So you’ve had the big brain storm, come up with the latest clever online marketing idea, built a brilliant website, designed the app to go with and you’re about to unleash your latest campaign. Your big bucks client thinks it’s a winner that will generate a surge in interest in its brand and the leap in sales it’s looking for.

The first few hours of the campaign go even better than you expect with thousands of people visiting the site and downloading the app – leads are pouring in. It’s all looking good and you’re about to give yourself a huge pat on the back for a job very well done until….the website crashes. All your brilliant work goes straight down the pan. The campaign hits the rocks and you’ve got one angry client shouting at you down the phone. The client’s brand and your reputation have been seriously damaged.

Why has this happened? Because the one boring, yet vital part of the campaign equation you should have considered – how is the campaign website going to cope with the demand?  - was neglected in the excitement of the rush to execute your big idea. No-one thought to check whether the expensive ‘bells and whistles’ website you built had enough capacity to cope with the huge increase in visits.

Now that online marketing has become the de facto marketing channel that clients are putting their money into, making sure that your campaigns are supported by the right IT infrastructure is vital.

The internet is an infinite resource and once you’ve launched a website or online campaign for a brand, you have to be ready for anything. If it takes off, you need to have planned to cope with the huge amount of hits and online interest that result.

That’s where the technology behind the campaign comes in to play. Many retail, advertising, marketing and events practitioners are embracing cloud and virtualisation technology because of the elasticity that on demand hosting offers. These two complimentary yet slightly different technologies allow clients to scale up and scale down their web capacity according to need, saving them from having to pay for servers that would otherwise lie dormant for much of the year. 

Sports events leader Nova International has embraced this way of working. Nova creates and develops some of the UK’s biggest televised mass participation sports events including the Great North Run, the world’s biggest half marathon. Nova’s ticketing and information website gets half a million visitors over the weekend that the Great North Run takes place – that’s a fifth of its total traffic for the whole year over a two day period. Nova now uses the cloud to cope. Chris Kewin, Nova’s IT Director, says using cloud technology means he gets “additional processing power during peak business periods rather than owning, managing and paying for that processing power all year

The cheap flights specialist Skyscanner, gets 14million+ visitors to its website every month. It’s totally online business is growing at a tremendous rate. Skyscanner has migrated to a fully virtualised private cloud, allowing it to reduce the number of servers it has while at the same time making the ones it does use much more powerful.

 As Phil Dalbeck, Skyscanner’s Infrastructure Architect says, “Migrating to a fully virtualised private cloud provides the business agility we need to support our exceptional growth….the business can now expect to see additional server resources deployed within minutes rather than weeks.” And, he adds, this “has allowed us to scale up as fast as possible, while still allowing us to serve our millions of customers in a professional, responsive and personal manner.”

At the end of the day the slogan ‘the customer is king’ still rules whatever devices you use in your campaign. If the customer is annoyed by the failure of whatever channel you’re using to communicate or sell, this is not going to do you or your client any good. Perception of failure reaches right through the marketing concept, right down to the IT you choose to use. Just ask the guys at this year’s Olympics. Despite creating a hugely successful London 2012 brand, they’ve still taken a kicking from customers and the media for the significant glitches around their ticketing website. 

Even the most basic IT support is necessary in this mobile marketing world we live in. Activinstinct is one of the fastest growing online sports retailers in the UK, specialising in high quality, performance sportswear and sports equipment. It’s already launched successfully in France and this year is targeting the German markets. Key to its marketing campaign has been to make sure its website is 100% available at any time of the night and day from wherever it’s being accessed.

Activinstinct CEO Mike Thornhill says, “Great marketing and customer service is of course hugely important but what has been absolutely crucial for our commercial success this year has been our decision to move to a new hosting provider. We now have a beefy hosting platform that doesn’t collapse when subject to increased demand, something that had happened to us several times before.”

Most online campaigns are pretty quick hitters. As human beings we now got such short attention spans that after a week or two, or maybe even just a day or two, we’ve moved on to the next ‘latest thing’. Having web servers that can be scaled up to cope with the initial rush of interest and then scaled back down again afterwards so you’re not paying for extra capacity that you no longer need is the way forward.

So, whatever you are planning for your clients this year, don’t forget the dull, behind-the-scenes IT.  It’ll mean that you can get on with making your campaigns the successes they ought to be, without the ‘bits and bytes’ letting you down.

Don’t put a black mark against business going green

Posted by Rack Packer - 05/03/12 at 04:03:48 pm

As we enter the third month of 2012, we can but hope that this should be the year that the UK Government finally realises that its Carbon Reduction Commitment Scheme is bad for business.

Introduced under the banner of helping UK industry to become more energy efficient it seems to want to do nothing but penalise growth.

Our raison d’etre as the owner and operator of five UK data centres is to help businesses and organisations throughout the private and public sector to consolidate their IT infrastructures. By moving their servers off their premises into data centres like ours, which are efficiently run to maximise computer usage in environmentally-controlled settings, we are driving business efficiency.

MPs seem to think that because we use a lot of energy that we waste it. We don’t. In fact energy stewardship is critical to our business success. Our customers have the benefit of control panels that show them exactly what energy their servers are consuming so that they can make sound business decisions as they move forward.

Virtualisation of servers is shrinking carbon footprints by making organisations less reliant on enormous racks of hardware. And in terms of the actual consumer, the move to online retailing has lessened the need we have as human beings to always be driving in and out of town to go shopping.

The first ‘league table’ for the Carbon Reduction Commitment Scheme was published in November 2011 with Manchester United among the twenty two organisations ranked joint first. Manchester United came top alongside several NHS Trusts, OFGEM and British American Tobacco plc.

Comparing like with like? The CRC scheme rightly produced as much hair dryer treatment as Sir Alex Ferguson does in the dressing room – with Tim Yeo MP, chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee calling it ‘a straight forward theft’ after it was revealed that the decision to recycle the revenues from the scheme had raised £743m for HM Treasury.

There is a real problem for companies wanting to improve their green credentials because their ranking might not necessarily reflect their commitment to carbon reduction. Investing in more efficient technology to do this might lead to an increase in their energy consumption in the short term while trying to reduce it in the long term. A clearer picture needs to emerge and for businesses and organisations to be judged on all the different ways in which they are trying to reduce their environmental impact, not just their use of fossil fuels.

Data centre providers are making efforts to use renewable energy where possible. Iceland has opened its first 100 per cent carbon neutral data centre site to support UK and US companies in their environmental strategies. The Keflavik site taps into Iceland’s renewable energy power grid which takes advantage of hydro and geothermal energy sources and the country’s ambient temperature for cooling. And social network giant Facebook is to build its first data centre outside the US in the northern Swedish city of Lulea, close to the Arctic Circle, because of its access to renewable energy and its cold climate. In the UK even Swindon is playing host to a new data centre from Capgemini which has invested in the latest cooling technology.

Yet these are all £multi-million new builds. David Cameron pledged to make this ‘the greenest government ever’ by shifting to a low carbon economy but where are the incentives for existing data centres and their customers?

Cold aisle containment, virtualisation and the cloud can only take us so far.

The IT industry is like the development of the motorways in this country. When Harold Macmillan opened the M6 Preston By-Pass, the UK’s first motorway, in 1958, it was just two lanes of highway stretching a mere 8 miles. Today there are over 2,200 miles of motorway, connecting all parts of the country. The internet is like a super motorway, its network allowing people and businesses to connect, shop and trade like never before without having to get into their cars to do it, and yet it seems to be seen as a pariah because it uses energy.

Nobody’s saying that energy efficiency isn’t important but businesses, especially SMEs which the government says it wants to drive recovery, need to be encouraged to think about their carbon use rather than be punished for it.

Technology can help to reduce costs and provide innovative ways to work and increase revenues. This in turn points to sustainability and growth, important issues in times of economic difficulty.

Reducing the carbon footprint is not easy, but European businesses must invest in green technology that enables them to be more energy efficient and rely less on natural resources. Over the next 20 to 30 years, Europe has some specific green regulatory targets to meet and the uptake in the Smart Grid, which can generate energy through renewable resources, will be critical in achieving these goals. The investment in renewable energy will also create new employment opportunities so it is in the interest of organisations to support the initiative by utilising greener technology.

The UK Government should be considering how to supply us all with the renewable energy we would happily use, at a price that we can afford. We don’t want UK business to be driving along the back lanes while everywhere else in the western world is speeding along the digital superhighway.

The Cloud was this year’s Black but are we any Greener?

Posted by Rack Packer - 22/12/11 at 02:12:51 pm

Living in a Material World was the Madonna mantra for the 80s. Everything was about money, buying things, and owning stuff. You could easily apply this to way that businesses first thought of their data. In-house IT departments wanted to own it, manage it and keep it away from prying eyes. Fast forward to the 2010s. Now it really is the Virtual World.  The back office servers are going and hosting companies are becoming the IT department’s best friend. 

 

So, now that outsourcing IT is officially a go-to business option, how has the notion of green IT played into this and has it moved higher up the financial agenda?

 

2011 has definitely been the year in which cloud computing and virtualisation really took off. As one prominent Gartner analyst said at a symposium recently, “The cloud is here and its utilisation is growing. Enough said.”  Staggering increases in the uptake of cloud services are predicted. According to one leading market research company, MarketsandMarkets, the global cloud computing market is projected to almost triple from $37.8 billion to $121.1 billion by 2015.

 

You only have to look at some of the recent data produced to see what a significant benefit this growth could have in terms of reducing overall carbon emissions. For instance, a recent study by the Carbon Disclosure Project showed that blue-chip companies in the UK plan to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing from 10% to almost 70% of their information technology by 2020. The study claimed that these companies could realise £1.2 billion in energy savings and 9.2 million metric tons of CO2 savings annually by 2020, that’s equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4 million passenger vehicles. A US study by the same organisation predicted even greater annual energy savings of $12.3 billion if a similar uptake of the cloud took place by companies there.

 

There are several issues driving businesses to consider their environmental impact: brand reputation, cost reduction and potential punitive taxation and legislation.

 

Green IT and sustainability are no longer topics that are the preserve of the ‘tree hugger’ or ‘eco-warrior’ but rather a fundamental element in any organisation’s strategic business plan. IT has played a major role in this attitudinal shift. The internet continues to drive the world’s economy and the demand for computing power keeps rising. The IT industry as a whole, from manufacturers to service providers, is reacting to this trend by working harder, smarter and more efficiently.

 

Businesses are more aware of their responsibilities to the environment however the key drivers for any business will always be revenue generation, increased efficiency and cost reduction.  The trick is to ensure that green policy is built into a business’ strategy to ensure that it makes a visible and valuable contribution. If a CIO can take an FD through a series of IT proposals that will deliver a demonstrable reduction in cost or improve business efficiency, which has an element of environmental benefit, then they are far more likely to gain buy-in.

 

If we are talking about greener IT in a wider sense then we have to include a whole range of elements. It is not simply a power issue. We should be considering every element of the IT supply chain. Where does your redundant kit end up? In the skip? 2011 saw many TV programs and column inches about the shameful practise of dumping IT equipment in landfill.

 

In 2012 we should make a huge effort to determine how we can better sweat our assets for longer and how we can re-deploy or find alternate uses for them once we have finished with them and are ready to upgrade.  We should also be considering data overload. Do we need to store everything? And returning to the power theme, we should be considering the use of renewable energy where possible. The IT industry should be using both its influence and purchasing power to demand that the energy providers deliver a constant and sustainable supply of renewables to our data centres. 

 

Which brings us onto the subject of ‘Greenwash’ or ‘CloudWash’. One pleasing aspect of the cloud hype these past months has been the lack of dubious ‘green’ claims.  We haven’t witnessed companies shouting “The cloud is green, come and join us!” and with good reason. Approximately 60 to 70% of data centre energy is still derived from fossil fuels. In the past, many marketing claims about being green haven’t stood up to close scrutiny and I think the cloud providers have avoided this pitfall in the main. Ultimately, the best way to avoid greenwash is to present straightforward communications and messages which highlight the business benefits of the cloud.

 

What is clear is that businesses have an opportunity to use the cloud to benefit from both economies of scale and expertise. If we can remove 400 separate mini-server rooms into a cloud infrastructure, which is deployed in central purpose built data centres containing the latest cooling and energy saving technologies, we will have improved the overall environmental impact of all those disparate servers. It doesn’t make us green, but it does achieve overall greater efficiency. This is where cloud computing can help.

 

Five years ago hosting providers were seen as the enemy of the IT department. Most organisations didn’t understand what their IT departments did, they almost had a magical/mystical quality about them and whatever they said was acted upon. If the IT department said the business needed 10 extra servers, then you needed them. But that has changed. IT is very much viewed as a business enabler now and there is a wider acceptance that virtually every technical service can be acquired, many at lower cost with greater capability, from third parties.

 

Today, as budgets are being pared back, the IT department has come to view the hosting provider as their friend.  This is where we have a true cloud benefit. It gives you the flexibility to make an informed choice. For example businesses such as charities which traditionally run seasonal campaigns, can use the cloud to cope with expected traffic demand at peak times rather than investing in expensive hardware which becomes redundant once the campaign is over, yet has to be left powered up and consuming energy. These are the benefits that the cloud can bring to both an IT department and the environment, and no you don’t have to be wearing open toed sandals and hessian underwear to enjoy them!

Why we need to get behind Scotland’s new E-skills Initiative

Posted by Rack Packer - 01/12/11 at 06:12:31 pm

The UK Government has this week finally thrown its weight behind the campaign to improve the teaching of computer science in our schools. As it reviews ICT provision in the curriculum it will be the responsibility of government to work with industry to ensure that computer skills are now taught properly.

The government’s statement follows the publication in February of the Next Gen report co-authored by Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope, which highlighted the poor quality of computer teaching in schools as one of the biggest obstacles to growth for the video games and VFX industries in the UK. Next Gen reported that only one-in-five ICT teachers described themselves as being able to write or modify even basic computer programmes. Ian Livingstone, who’s the life president of British video-game publisher Eidos, wrote a compelling article about the issue in this week’s Independent.

Video gaming has been the pulse at the heart of one of Scotland’s cities, Dundee, for many years but it’s not just the gaming industry that can benefit from better teaching of computing skills, it’s the whole of the Scottish economy. 

The IT industry already contributes something like £3 billion to the Scottish economy and at a time when the devolved government is making a concerted push on all things digital it’s important that youngsters hear the message about how IT skills are key to their future as well as that of their teachers.

What better message could there be at a time of economic difficulty than one that says there are jobs out there, there are opportunities to be creative and innovative and earn a decent salary in a sector that’s growing and here to stay?

iomart is one of a number of IT companies in Scotland that’s been asked to help address these issues. Along with organisations like Microsoft, Oracle, Logica and the Scottish Government, we’ve helped e-skills UK launch a new website called Big Ambition Scotland which showcases the different careers that are available in the IT industry here.

Michael Kowbel, e-skills UK’s Director for Scotland, said: “Over the next five years we need over 400,000 new IT professionals to meet the demand of Scottish businesses.  The launch of BigAmbition Scotland is just the first stage in the development of a fantastic resource to give young people in Scotland the inspiration and ambition to pursue the fantastic career opportunities IT can offer.”

At its launch some worrying figures were presented. The numbers of children taking computer related subjects at schools in Scotland has fallen by 13% in the last five years, while the number of applicants to study computer-related Higher Education courses in Scotland has fallen by 33% since 2002. Computer science it seems is a very uncool subject for Scottish schoolchildren.  

There’s also a lack of young women coming into the industry in Scotland, where two thirds of teenagers studying for computer-related Highers are boys. In the UK as a whole, women make up only 17% of the IT workforce. 

iomart has been fortunate to have a number of talented women join its technical teams. One of them is Group technical manager Anne Bryson. She says, “Women are naturally very logical and good at communication so IT should be a natural career choice.” Anne wants more girls in Scotland to consider IT as a career and can be seen talking about her role on the new Big Ambition website.

The overall problem appears to be one of perception, with many youngsters still believing that IT spells GEEK (see the great e-skills Geek video here ), combined with the poor standard of computing courses available in schools, not only in Scotland but the whole of the UK.  

The UK Government has finally woken up to that fact and Scotland too has pledged its future to a digital economy. We don’t need to dress up, spray on the tan and speak with transatlantic accents to make IT glamorous, we just need to tell it like it is. It’s exciting, it’s innovative, it has a job role for virtually everyone and it’s rewarding both financially and creatively.

As Mark Feeney of e-skills UK said at the launch: “We’ve got so much great talent in Scotland but we need to nurture it.”

At a time when some of the greatest innovations in IT are allowing our children to live, learn and play in a way we never dreamed of, we should be telling it like it really is “IT is sexy and we know it!”

The travel industry flies the flag for the cloud

Posted by Rack Packer - 03/11/11 at 08:11:23 am

Remember the times when you used to go down to your local travel agent and return home with a pile of brochures a foot high which you then spent days leafing through to find your dream holiday?

These days there’s no time to sit gazing at all those glossy shots of glistening sands, palm trees and infinity pools. Instead it’s a short click to a website to punch in details of your family, your holiday dates and your budget while a quick search reveals the available destinations …in a sense the holiday probably picks you now rather than the other way round.

The burgeoning of cheap flights and price comparison sites means the internet is now the shop window for all your holiday requirements.

As the internet has created this magical way to widen your holiday or travel company’s customer base so it has meant that making sure your website is fully available every minute, of every day, from anywhere in the world, has become crucial to maintaining your revenue streams.

One trend that is becoming apparent is the steady rise in the number of travel and holiday companies looking for scalable and reliable support for their online presence. Indeed the travel sector as a whole seems to be leading the way when it comes to moving to the cloud.

Accessing flexible computing power via the cloud allows them to scale up the number of servers available at times of seasonal rush, such as for school holidays or Christmas, and scale back down again when the spike recedes and demand isn’t quite so high. It also gives them the ability to move fast to launch new products without incurring large additional costs or delays. All this means greater efficiency, lower energy use and a smaller carbon footprint.

One such travel company that has made the cloud transition is Skyscanner. The UK based company specialises in cheap flights and deals on over 600 airlines, competing for airspace with fellow search engine providers such as ebookers and expedia. The company’s website is visited by over 14 million people every month, is available in 27 languages, and has recently reached peak traffic capacity, leading to a call to arms for help with the demand for its service.

Phil Dalbeck, Infrastructure Architect at Skyscanner, explains: “Migrating from a traditional physical infrastructure platform to a fully virtualised private cloud provides the business agility Skyscanner needs to support our exceptional growth. Capacity planning is no longer the headache it once was, and the business can now expect to see additional server resources deployed within minutes rather than weeks.”

Many analysts predicted that the smaller SME would form the cloud ‘hot spot’ and that larger organisations would be somewhat reluctant to embrace the concept, but this is now appearing to be wide of the mark.

If the travel sector is indicative of other industries, then we are witnessing a sea change in attitude towards cloud computing. Not only is this sector embracing the benefits of scalability, cost reduction and flexibility for its own consumption but it also utilising the cloud for new services and products to offer its customers, as evidenced by airline giant Lufthansa. The company has developed CloudStream, a cloud-based service which enables its passenger’s to create a ‘playlist’ of assorted cached content prior to departure, which can then be enjoyed once onboard via the airline’s FlyNet Internet access.

In its 2010 Annual Report, the airline opens with: “Even as the global economy picks up again, companies in all industries are faced with the challenge of cutting their costs sustainably and improving their adaptability in a volatile economic environment. One prerequisite for doing so is further optimisation of business processes, for which the IT sector plays a key role, irrespective of the industry.”

The report then states: “Airlines are faced with a particular need to increase their efficiency and flexibility in order to combat competitive pressure and price erosion. There is nevertheless no sign that IT spending in the airline industry will increase significantly in the years ahead. The overall IT market is under considerable and sustained pressure to change as a result of many factors. Key technological drivers are cutting-edge technologies such as tablet PCs and cloud computing. However, by making targeted investments in IT infrastructure and product development, Lufthansa Systems is nevertheless creating the conditions for its customers to benefit from the advantages of new technologies.”

In a couple of paragraphs, the airline has succinctly and overtly made a case for cloud. The travel industry may have been subjected to economic pressures rather more quickly than some other sectors – many consumers consider holidays a luxury item when money is tight – but it certainly has been quick to address the situation, and cloud is forming an important element of its recovery plans.

Who would have thought a few years ago that the industry whose services we all use to seek sun, sand and sangria would be welcoming the arrival of clouds?