Those of you who kindly follow this blog will have noticed deathly quiet from about September time. Deathly quiet doesn’t quite capture it actually – it’s more the kind of quiet you get when cotton wool falls on to a deep pile carpet, and then misses, falling slowly into an abyss of blackness.. well you get the point, it’s been a while. I won’t apologise, but I will explain, and hopefully remind you as to why you signed up to receive updates in the first place.

Being the CTO for a small technology company is a strange and wonderful thing, given to periods of glorious progress only to be interrupted as rude reality pokes a hole in your grand designs. The last four months have been pretty stressful to say the least, but also very rewarding. We have cranked both our business and technology up a level and are feeling more confident than ever that we have something special to offer, but we’ve also had some tough times, related mainly to our service uptime, that have lost us a couple customers (our first customer losses ever).

So first the good things. Our business is growing great guns, so a massive thank you to all our customers. We do appreciate your business and we are determined to provide you with the best possible platform on which to base your remote device support. Customer numbers are up, average device counts are up, so are web hits and conversion rates. I probably shouldn’t jinx it but we are on track to triple revenues this year – now there’s a story for these gloomy economic times. Importantly though we are seeing more and more of our customers expanding their businesses and increasing device counts. We’d like to think that we help this trend by continually listening to customer feedback and focussing on developing features that add real value.

Talking of which, we released 70 new features this year. Yes some are small that hardly go noticed but others have been real hits. The new support tools available in the CAG browser are an great example. File transfer, event log viewer. registry editor, task manager, chat, quickjobs… these are all features that genuinely make remote support easier/quicker/faster. We also released patch management, power management and monitor policies, and there’s the new ComStore to help you customise your CentraStage to just the way you need it. We have just launched radius two factor authentication this week as well. Did you know we have our software on a large number of mobile phones now as well..?

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by Ian van Reenen l December 20, 2011 l No Comments »

We all know how it is, Christmas is the time of new gadgets and pretty much all of them are now connecting to the internet, and we know who will be called up to configure these new devices… the IT Superhero of the family – you. Not to mention the troublesome printer that has an error message on screen, the slow laptop which is being handed down, and anything else that’s not working, and on top of that you’ll have ongoing questions and troubleshooting you’ll have to do for the lifetime of the new devices.

The initial set-up of such devices generally happens around the Christmas tree – typically two minutes after it’s been opened . That’s not a big problem as most of us can set up a new piece of kit fairly quickly… it’s when we leave and the person rings up saying… “how do I…?” “I can’t…” and typically we try guide these non tech-savvy people on how to do these things.

It got me thinking how CentraStage can help – we offer a free account which allows five devices to be managed – access all areas. So when you get that call to set something up, or a how do I, you can jump straight on and help your family or friend out, making a half an hour call two minutes

If you haven’t already got an account, why not join the CentraStage community today. After all it’s going to make being an IT Superhero a lot easier this Christmas!

by James Fletcher l December 20, 2011 l No Comments »

CentraStage have been shortlisted for a Public Sector Digital award for the work we have done helping East Sussex County Council transform their IT support service to schools. Thus far we have not put ourselves forward for too many awards – in all honesty I took some convincing that they are worthwhile (all a little too self-publicising for me somehow, which sits uncomfortably with the modest Englishman in me…). However the ongoing relationship with East Sussex encapsulates why we have developed CentraStage, and how it can be successfully used to improve the IT experience for the end user (in this case, schoolchildren).

On a pure IT front, technology in the schools across East Sussex has never run better. This is down to CentraStage, but also down to how the team at East Sussex have implemented it, and put in place the necessary structures, processes procedures, teams and relationships to deliver a new model of IT support to school. The ultimate goal? To prove the link between the quality of the IT in schools, and pupil attainment – after all, why else is there IT in schools, if not to help children learn, and to equip them for the future. Anyway, fingers crossed for the results in January, as it would be great for both us and East Sussex to get some recognition of what has been achieved.

by Christian Nagele l December 13, 2011 l No Comments »

Last week Matt Barton, from Ostrich IT posted on the CentraStage Community that he will be hosting a webinar to share how he has increased is managed services business by choosing the right tools.

Date: 20th December 2011

Time: 4pm – 5pm GMT

Sign up to join Matt here!

by James Fletcher l December 12, 2011 l No Comments »