Quarter Review & Update

2010 was another good year for Datanet, having completed the build-out of the third and final phase of the Aspen House Fleet (AHF) data centre, financed largely from our own resources with some help from HSBC.

With the help of the increased data centre capacity, 2010 saw turnover increase by nearly 20% with excellent net profit and further improvements in assets and the balance sheet. Cash flow is well managed and healthy and over 80% of our income is from rental business providing a very strong recurring income stream. As well as investing in our data centre we also made a major investment in our virtualisation infrastructure with the purchase of an enterprise EMC SAN and further VM and EMC training for our engineering staff. We also renewed our programme of encouraging all our staff to pursue further training and currently have 20% of our staff on long term, part time, academic and professional training courses.

As we approach our fifteenth birthday, client loyalty reflected by excellent client retention and increased client spend, our diversification into new technologies, supported by our long serving highly skilled staff means the company is in an excellent position to continue to grow in 2011 and benefit from our position as the UK’s longest serving, award winning ISP. Datanet provides Business Class Internet Services with key focus on: Hosting and Virtualisation along with Private Circuits and Business DSL built on our own data centre and network infrastructure.

Juniper VPN Client & Windows 7 resolved!

For those of you that have recently upgraded to Windows7 and have been experiencing problems with using the Juniper Netscreen IPSec VPN client, we are pleased to announce that we have found an alternative application which is fully supported called Shrewsoft VPN Client

Datanet have been successfully trialling and testing Shrewsoft VPN client with XP, Windows Vista and Windows7. Those clients with premier support can contact our support department to discuss the upgrade process.

If you have a client using the existing Netscreen Remote software you can continue to use it on Windows XP and Vista, however you will need to upgrade if you wish to use/upgrade to Windows 7.

Client Satisfaction

Datanet continues to seek valuable feedback from our clients on levels of service you are experiencing from us. During the first part of this year our sales support team have been contacting Datanet Clients to ascertain how they perceive the service that they are receiving from us. We are pleased to report that

10% Stating we were excellent
72% of our Clients scored us above average for service (63% Good & 10% Excellent)
No Clients thought we were below average for service (23% thought we were average)

We continue to welcome feedback and from April we will be looking to undertake this online and publish the results in our quarterly news letters. Just some feedback from some of our clients….

“Just a brief follow up… as usual KWE are very happy with the technical support provided by Datanet and the friendly personal contact our two companies have together….Regards Alex.”

“We’re happy with Datanet. We had a few performance problems a few weeks ago, but Adrian was very helpful and persistent, and managed to get to the bottom of the problem and fix it.

One of the things I like about Datanet is that I am able to talk to Adrian directly. He knows what he is doing and got the problem sorted quickly. My experience with larger organisations is that we end up talking to someone useless, normally in India, who then proceeds to waste a lot of our time with irrelevant questions and then take weeks to fix the issue!

Faster Broadband for *free?

21CN is the name given to BT’s 21st century network programme, which was announced in June 2004 and is being continuously rolled out with the aim of making it available to the whole of the country by 2012.

21CN is the means to deliver new and compelling products and services such as ADSL2+ up to 24Mb services,FTTC(Fibre to the Cabinet) up to 40Mb and FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) up to 100Mb.

For your benefit, Datanet has implemented a completely free and automatic migration to clients who are currently using the 20CN 8Mb service. You therefore need not take any action, unless, at the same time, you would like to upgrade your service to one of our up to 24Mb services as follows:

SoHo24 offers speeds of up to 24Mb with 15Gb download limit for £25 pm + VAT
Enterprise24 offers speeds of up to 24Mb, elevated traffic priority, unlimited downloads and, if required, 4IPs for £69 pm + VAT.

As we migrate these services we will advise you, nearer the time, on what date your migration is scheduled to complete. The migration can take place at any time during the 24 hour period but will most likely take place during working hours. There will be a short outage while the re-jumpering takes place at the BT exchange and this is usually no longer than 30 minutes and in most cases much less.

To find out if your local BT exchange is ADSL2 enabled, go to our DSL Checker or alternatively, drop us an email with the numbers to OpsTeam@datanet.co.uk to register your interest and we will do the checking for you!

*Free relates to regrade fee of £20 in migrating from 20CN to 21CN only.

iPad Competition

We had a fantastic response to this quarter’s incentive around VMware Hosting Solutions we are pleased to announce that the winner of the Prize Draw is Gary Hindmarsh from Evo Electric Woking. Congratulations Gary, it will be winging its way to you shortly.

Structuring for growth

We are pleased to announce the recent appointment of Clare Robinson-White as our Marketing Manager. Clare brings with her a wealth of sales & marketing experience within the telecoms sector. Her core function is obviously the promotion of the Datanet brand, but a key priority and benefit to you, is a strategic review of our pricing and product offering to keep Datanet in line with market conditions, positioning and client requirements.

You would have already noticed that we have revised our Recommended Retail Price (RRP) on our world class VMware hosting packages and as of 1st April 2011, we have also revised the cost of dedicated server offering by up to 50% in some cases off last year’s RRP.

Next on the pipeline is a review, in conjunction with our existing telecoms partners, of our connectivity pricing & bundles, where we will be focusing on our ADSL & FTTC pricing, so watch this space for more pricing reductions.
We have also been on a recruitment drive during the 1st quarter of this year, having appointed a Quality & Projects Manager (Natasha Ginn), to ensure that all of our implementations run smoothly. We are also looking to increase our technical resource and move to a fully manned 24hr full support mechanism. More details on this to follow in our next newsletter.

In addition to all of the above our Solutions Team have undergone a minor make over, with Lee Burke, now fully focused on managing our existing client base, Nathan Smith focusing on New Business and Donald MacMillan, in addition to being responsible for Datanets Sales’ effort, will be responsible for building and developing our channel proposition.

Revised Pricing on Dedicated Servers

As mentioned above, we are pleased to announce that we have launched our revised dedicated server offering. Based on state of the art Dell servers, we offer 3 core products, Expert, Business and Enterprise Servers all with RAID options. Each dedicated server is fully configurable to your requirements, at a significanly reduced rate, in some cases up to 50% off the RRP.

Bonded ADSL, what is it, how will it benefit you?

What is it?

Bonded ADSL is effectively the combining of multiple ADSL lines together via either a CISCO or Virtual Access router to provide increased bandwidth and therefore throughput. Datanet have trialled and tested up to 4 x ADSL lines, in addition you could consider bonding FTTC for maximum bandwidth.

Who would use it?

Organisations that are suffering slow upload/download and for those that need increased resilience in the network.

What are the benefits?

Excellent value for money vs leased lines
Faster upload/download speeds
Faster implementation against leased lines
Builds resilience into your WAN
A gateway to further technologies such as ‘Cloud’ applications/infrastructure

Contact our Solutions team for further information.

Notable Closure Dates (24hr Support continues for eligible services)

Please note that over the next quarter there are a number of Bank Holidays. Our offices are closed as follows, but those clients that have support contracts will be able to contact our 24hour Technical Support as normal.

Good Friday 22 April – Closed
Easter Monday 25 April – Closed
Royal Wedding 29 April – Closed
Early May Bank Holiday 2 May – Closed
Spring Bank Holiday 30 May – Closed

Celebrating…..

This quarter we at Datanet are celebrating a number of things…..

We are about to release our Financial Report for 2011.
It’s the Easter Bank holiday and an additional one to celebrate the Royal Wedding.
Interestingly, The Royal Wedding will be the first of its kind to be televised over the internet with an official website.
Datanet celebrates its 15th Birthday, more news to follow on this.