Under The Hood

Under The Hood

When I was first asked to write a blog about what goes on behind the scenes in the Operations area of bluArc, my first thought was "who'd want to know?" followed shortly thereafter by "do we really want our customers to know?" :-). When I think about the relationships that we've developed with the vast majority of our customers over the years, it doesn't take long to get comfortable with the idea of sharing with you some of the challenges and triumphs that take place "under the hood".

As this is the first of hopefully many such blogs, a little history is in order. Over 5 years ago when Jay and I signed the first of what would become many contracts to get this show on the road, our challenges were many. Not the least among them was shaking out the little bugs and gremlins that plagued our early internet and DSL services. At that time my Blackberry would emit sonar pings whenever an email came it, and our monitoring systems would alert us to network issues by sending me emails. As soon as the first two or three pings would sound from my Blackberry, everyone in the office would look around pie-eyed, like sailors in a submarine waiting for the depth charges to go off.

Those days are thankfully long gone. We overcame those issues and many others as we sorted through our early growing pains. Fast forward to the more recent past and you see an entirely different set of growing pains. By the way, of all the various kinds of pains there are out there, growing pains are the best kind to have!

Last year when we crossed the cash-flow positive threshold our CFO, Sheldon, asked me what we'd need to do to deliver 300 seats per month. (Last month our Sales crew signed up 282 seats!). Since then we've introduced on-net customer sites all the way out to Vancouver, introduced SIP trunking which allows us to port phone numbers in major rate centers coast to coast, upgraded a number of our servers, and brought our system software up to the latest general availability release. We're in the process of extending our network to link with other service providers to allow for rapid on-net bluArc services deployment in downtown Toronto.

The main issue which faces us in Operations now is bringing in the right tools to automate our processes and improve quality and timeliness of services delivery and support. With more people joining the team both in Sales and Operations, we need a scalable framework that allows team members in all of our offices to move jobs forward and keep current with what's happening with our customers. In 2011 alone our sales team will more than double, and our Operations team will grow by 75%.

This year is our "break-out" year as we gather ourselves for the big shift into second gear. As we make this transition, it is my goal to ensure that we hold onto the culture of maintaining the personal relationships with our customers that has made working in this business so enjoyable. For those of you who are new to bluArc, I hope that you grow to feel the same way too.

Brian Parisien