Pet hates - credit munching

One business practice we find particularly annoying is "credit munching".  Credit Munching is where the organisation arbitrarily decides to cancel credits a few months after they've been purchased. Not only have you already given the company a free loan for the period, they then decide they confiscate the credits because you've not used their services recently. It is little better than an act of corporate theft, like people stealing money from a fountain where people have thrown coins to make a wish and/or donate to charity.

Those organisations think they can justify this practice by sending you reminders warning that credit you paid for is about to expire and can be saved if you do business with them.  If the are so concerned about the (non-existent) administrative effort of maintaining the credit records they should refund the credit to the original card. 

When an organisation plays this deceitful little trick on my company we automatically blacklist them. In our terms that means:

• they automatically become the last choice for any future business;
• we never recommend them to clients or friends;
• their domain name is added to our email blacklists, so we are never troubled by their emails again.

If the majority of consumers adopted these reasonable defensive measures the despicable practices of Credit Munching would stop. We apply the same rules to loyalty point systems.

Here's our current blacklist:

British Airways (as a consequence of Air Miles, Avois) - ba.com

The Air Miles organisation - for loyalty points munching -  airmiles.com

iStockphoto.com - for credit munching

Hilton Honors - the hotel chain - for loyalty points munching.

BA and the Hilton have lost substantial amounts of business from us as a direct consequence. They'll come off the blacklist when they apologise and refund in full the credits/loyalty points.

It looks great a great Data Centre, but ...

I've just visited a small data centre which had been developed by someone who's had little previous training in creating such rooms/buildings. This lady has good business qualifications and has had plenty of experience as a general manager, but little in the operation of a data centre. 

She was proud at the low development costs of the site, partly achieved by using lowest bid general contractor. The overall decorative appearance of the "Data Centre" is good, but when you dig a bit deeper into the construction methods the picture changes. 

To spare her blushes I won't go into too much detail but there were some basic mistakes. I've made some recommendations relating to safety which shocked her as there's now no budget to fix the issues and she doesn't want to interrupt operations with additional works.

There are many factors to consider when planning and designing a Data Centre, but here are the main factors I put into consideration:

• Power
• Cooling
• Resilience
• Weight bearing capabilities of the building structure
• Noise and vibration
• Insulation
• Security and safety
• Lighting
• Personnel
• Access
• Data, telecommunications and power cabling
• Shared Mechanical and Electric facilities
• Space allocation
• Storage
• Maintenance
• Expansion and upgrading planning

These factors overlap and are often interdependent leading to many careful design decisions being required.

In the case mentioned at the start of this blog article. I've recommended an increase in the fire rating of a couple of walls and doors. It is possible to retro-fit this, but the process will require some minor building works. I've also recommended one stud wall where there is public access should have greater security by adding security mesh lathing with a surface covering of lightweight wallboard. I'm sorry to ruin the wallpaper!

Interest Rate Swaps to small business debacle

Just watched a BBC article about a small childrens nursery business which had taken a loan from Barclays and which bundled in an Interest Rate Swap trade to "protect" them from interest rate increases. The additional cost above the loan so far has been £100,000.

I'm not surprised by the reports of small businesses being caught out by interest rate swaps. The banks who sold these to businesses can have no defence. I was working in a City of London Moneybrokers in the 1990's and remember the banks being forced to unwind similar IRS deals made to the treasury departments of Local Authorities. If Local Authority had been caught out by such trades it is obvious that small businesses were in a much worse position when it comes to being aware of the risks.

Karcher Dry Ice Blasting - do they want to do business>

My company is looking into providing dry ice blasting as part of a Disaster Recovery Service. Cleaning up after flood and smoke damage can be expensive and messy. Features of dry ice blasting are attractive in that they do not create secondary waste material and are not as abrasive as sand blasting. In order to venture into that business area we've allocated a substantial R & D budget to investigate what equipment is most suitable to offer a service and also to provide operator training.

As part of those investigations we decided to look at the Karcher IB 15/80 dry ice blasting machine. We made contact through the Karcher UK web site with a view to identifying local distributors and the investment required to start using their equipment.

The only response from Karcher was a phone call a couple of days later from a sales clerk whose opening statement was that Karcher wanted to send a representative around to inspect our site. When we queried why we were given the response that this was for "Health and Safety." There was no discussion of our requirement, and no request of what information we needed. We terminated the call immediately saying we were no longer interested and there were alternative suppliers we could approach.

There's since been radio silence from Karcher. No follow up to determine why we backed away. We do wonder if Karcher really wants this type of business in the UK.

Filling gaps in Datacentre

Windchill Engineering market a fire rated memory foam which is good at filling gaps in your datacentre thus avoiding air loss.

Microsoft Azure outage - again

There must be a few CTO's feeling rather uncomfortable at their recommendation to the Board that their organisation should use Microsoft's Azure hosted computing facility. It was down again for eight hours on 23rd February from 9pm GMT. Someone in MS had forgotten to renew a security certificate. This is almost on the anniversary of a similar failure last year.

Apparently Microsoft will offer "credits" for the lost service hours. They should be showing someone's head on a platter, after paying genuine compensation.

Protecting your building during construction work

Like most business managers I get loads of emails every day which I quickly delete after a cursory glance at the title and contents. One which caught my attention was from a company called Protecta Screen. They do a range of temporary protective sheeting for floors, walls, doors, stairs to prevent damage during construction and decorating works. It is worth noting their web address if you are likely to be involved in any office, home or data centre expansion work. It might be worth suggesting such a range of products to your contractor.