So what happened since April last year ?

The aspiration to be a regular blogger didn’t even last the first few weeks of starting with Demand247, so what happened?

I think it’s fair to say that I got busy, very very busy. Having a senior position in a startup company is demanding and very rewarding, it also requires focus, dedication and a responsible head – helping steer the team to strive to delight clients.

In a small business you quickly realise that you have to do *EVERYTHING* yourselves, if you don’t do it there isn’t some other function or role in the organisation that can flex or be arranged to pick up the slack, this applies to working through the invoicing and chasing up timesheets, answering RFPs, calling clients, dealing with critical situations to making the coffee and tidying up.

I’m really pleased to say that October 2010 marks the 2nd Birthday of Demand247 and we are now embarking on Year 3 – we’ve hit our revenue plans for the first 2 years and grown from a small nucleus to a permanent staff that can be self-sufficient. We are keeping a sizeable offshore team working very hard to support, extend and develop existing and new eCommerce sites. We started supporting ATG clients but are now setup to work with multiple eCommerce vendors – with a clear market / client technology approach. We know what differentiates D247 from the herd – we specialise not just in the build, but the long term run, manage and optimisation of sites. We keep our clients up all night! Up through the day, round the clock and the calendar.

When an eCommerce site fails the impact to a modern retailer is immense – lost sales, lost reputation, lost faith. When criticism can spread virally and reputation awareness is a motivating concern of Marketing ensuring a reliable and dependable web presence is ever more critical. I’m going to expand on this a bit more in future posts – lessons we’ve learned and now apply with our clients, what were doing with different technologies – from getting Hybris running in a private cloud to building highly resilient architetures, from baselining an ATG BCC (the hard way) to tackling unstable web sites.

Year 3 is going to be amazing and I’m really proud of what the team has achieved in such a short time. You’ll have to excuse me now, apparently it’s my turn to make the coffee….

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A new adventure begins

For a few days now I’ve been developing a mental image to help share what I’m currently preparing to do. I’ve been imagining that I’m base jumping with my career. You meticulously check everything, ensure your parachute is packed properly and that the landing area is clear, the wind is just right, then you pause, clear your mind and at some point you choose to jump, to step into the void.

Today I have resigned from IBM UK to begin an exciting new adventure. From early May I will be the Technology Director of Demand247 who are a young and vibrant provider of hosted and managed services.

Lotus and IBM has been my life for very nearly 13 years and I want to thank everyone that I have worked with, you are all remarkable people and I owe a lot to a great many friends, colleagues, mentors and managers. I’m nostalgic and dewy eyed with memories of projects (good, bad and ugly), business partners, sales gigs, events and social time together (especially the BOI ‘residency’ in Dublin in 2000/2001, Vegas, Barcelona and Lithuania).

I want to also thank my family for putting up with all the late nights, time away from home, early mornings, insistence on dabbling with a laptop or a Blackberry at any available opportunity and who are now putting up with me becoming all entrepreneurial.

Thankfully with increasing ubiquity of social software tools my departure from IBM should only be a small hurdle in the maintenance of communication, for those that want to stay in touch here are some means to do so:

Blog: http://www.paulmartinsmith.co.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/paulmartinsmith

Email: paul@paulmartinsmith.co.uk

As I seem to have a soundtrack for everything I do, so as ever, I have prepared a spotify playlist to say ‘Goodbye‘ with.

With Demand247 I’ll not be a million miles away and I’m looking forward to working with you on hosted solutions in the future.

Very best regards

Paul

A 'rather chipper' Paul Smith

A 'rather chipper' Paul Smith