The use of the word “Cloud” dates back to when people first drew diagrams of the internet - where lots of computers were shown around the edge of the diagram and the bit in the middle (the internet itself which connects all the computers) was shown as a cloud. In reality the internet includes lots of server and networking hardware so it was just an easy way of avoiding going into any of that detail.

But recently the idea has taken hold because server hardware is getting cheaper and everybody’s internet connection is getting faster. A lot of providers have realised that they can offer a “cloud based” solution which minimises the amount of work that needs to be done on the customer’s own computer.

And – guess what – we’ve given it a try and it seems to work pretty well. We had a recent requirement to provide a service to a number of office users running a pan-european logistics operation. The users were spread out very widely geographically – in four different countries, actually – and they all needed to use Truckcom to view tracking data, history, and driver messages for their fleet of vehicles. We installed Truckcom for them on a rented, “virtual” server in the cloud and now they can easily use the system wherever in the world they happen to be.

So now, if a customer wants Truckcom to be hosted by us – that is, they don’t want us to install it on their computer, as we always have done in the past, but instead they want to access it “in the cloud”  – we can easily do this. It’s not just the international operations that might want to do this; consider a small haulier where the management are very mobile – and they want to see what’s going on with a laptop anywhere they happen to be. For this kind of user, the cloud based approach may be a very useful step forward.

The big thing for us is that proper smartphones at these kinds of prices are a gamechanger for a product like Truckcom. Just a few years ago, our customers were rolling out Truckcom on Windows mobile devices that retailed for £300.

Truckcom passed the cost-benefit test back then easily, including this high device cost. But if phones are now available now for such a small fraction of that earlier cost, the case for adopting a system like Truckcom becomes overwhelming. And a side benefit is that operators can be a little more relaxed about thefts and damage – which although rare, were a worry in our early years when devices were so much more expensive.

But then again, will such a cheap device do the job? We’ve done some tests, and our verdict is … yes it, probably can. We need to be a bit careful at this stage, of course, because we don’t have many hours of real operational use – but initial tests are positive.

Underneath the t-mobile branding, it’s actually made by a company in the far east called Huawei. Probably the reason it’s so cheap is that Huawei, based in China, are competing against premium brands like Samsung (South Korea) and HTC (Taiwan) – and they correctly think that western consumers expect a Chinese phone to be cheaper.

Like several other products over the years (and certainly HTC did a lot of this when it was starting out) it appears under different names on different networks – on Vodafone it is sold as the “Vodafone Smart” and on Orange as the “Orange Stockholm” – but the branding is just a gloss on the basic phone, the Huawei U8160, which is pretty much the same in each case.

If you bought one of these for general use expecting it to be as good as a far more expensive device, you’d probably be disappointed. There are several compromises the makers have made to keep the price low. But here’s the thing – to run Truckcom on a phone, you don’t need a powerful, expensive device. Truckcom doesn’t place high demands on the phone it runs on. So from a Truckcom point of view, it’s pretty much just as good as a more expensive device.

The Chinese proverb “May you live in interesting times” seems appropriate on two levels. These are genuinely interesting times in the Smartphone market – but it’s partly because we’re living in interesting (in the bad sense of the proverb) times economically that we see prices falling like this.

This is good news for us here at Truckcom, as we have pinned our hopes to the Android operating system as the pre-eminent operating system for smartphones.  This looks like a good policy based on these figures. We’re finding that Android handsets are very easy to come by for our customers now, and this is helping us towards our best ever year this year.

Go on Android – keep it up!

“Pryor were an interesting prospect for us” says Hugh Wightwick, Truckcom’s technical director.  “They are a key player in an important sector of logistics that is not generally using systems like Truckcom at the moment. They had a number of specific requirements, which included special facilities for management of bulk/tipper haulage operations, a bespoke interface with their existing IT systems, vehicle based and mobile phone based tracking, and provision of vehicle tracking information on their internal intranet system”.

“When we first saw the Truckcom demo, we felt it ticked most of the boxes already but we also felt that there was a need to adapt it a little to fit in with Pryor’s existing systems and procedures” says Chris Elwood, Pryor Group’s IT Manager.  “The thing that really sold it to us was the helpful and co-operative approach they have to changes and adaptations. The other companies we looked at had far more of a ‘take it or leave it’ approach”.

“Truckcom provides us with an opportunity to significantly revamp the way we manage our vehicles, our drivers and our work” says Clint Layzell, Pryor Group’s Transport Manager.  “We now have the system fully up and running for routing and tracking on our Tipper fleet. It’s been very easy to get started with Truckcom, even during a busy time for us when our fleet has been expanding significantly”.

“We feel it’s very important for both companies to view this initial roll out as just the start of a productive partnership” says Hugh Wightwick. “We will be pleased to work in close collaboration with Pryor Group to ensure that Truckcom meets all of their requirements, now and in the future”.

Early on in our history, when Truckcom could only be used on Windows Mobile, this wasn’t too much of a worry. The windows mobile devices weren’t particularly fashionable or (to be honest) very capable devices. We found that as long as we put in a warning on screen that unauthorised access to the internet was forbidden, it generally wasn’t an issue.

But these days, with funky new Android handsets being used for Truckcom on a regular basis, it’s a bit more of an issue. That’s why, ever since we started with our “black screen” big finger friendly software in 2009, lockdown has been built in. What do we mean by lockdown?

Lockdown stops the handset being used for anything other than

• Truckcom
• Making phone calls (which can be restricted to certain numbers if you need this)
• Sending SMS messages (again these can be restricted if needed)

With Android, we can provide a bit more flexibility to our customers, which can be useful. If a company decides that they want to use other applications on the phones, and they feel they can trust their drivers (and even give them a little bit of a reward and an incentive by giving them a nice new Android phone which they are allowed to use for other things) then we can optionally take lockdown off the devices. This can be done on a case by case basis – it’s a customer decision. Also, for some owner drivers using our system, it’s completely appropriate to release the lockdown and allow Truckcom to be used along with other applications.

So as you can see, lockdown is a powerful tool for us – and for our customers – to make sure the devices are used the way the operator wants them used.

Big is Bad

Looking at this from inside the IT industry, it becomes a bit more fathomable. It turns out that the problem is, purely and simply, one of size. Of course, big isn’t necessarily bad in other industries, but very big software development projects are very often failures. What makes them fail is their size. But why?

Software development is a peculiar discipline. There are a several things about it which are just downright odd (and which defy common sense). For example, what do you think of these statements:

1. The more software developers you put on a large project, the longer it will take you to deliver a useable product.

2. It is impossible to know before you start a large software project what you’ll ultimately deliver to your users.

3. The worst software projects of all never finish.

4. The best software projects of all never finish.

When you start saying things like this to the average project manager who works outside the software industry, they look at you rather oddly. If you believe stuff like this, then a software project cannot be managed in any kind of conventional way, can it?

No, absolutely, it cannot. If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, it’s very hard to assemble a big team and manage it effectively. If the aimpoint is regularly changing, a big team will have to spend increasing amounts of time agreeing amongst themselves what it is, each day – and even after spending that time they may maintain different views. In short, a project management nightmare. You can start to see how the NHS IT system gradually fell off the rails.

Lets discuss the four statements above a little bit more:

Statement (1) above is stated as a general rule, which is a bit unfair – of course there are some circumstances where it isn’t true. But there are a surprisingly large number of circumstances where it is true, and software developers need to be continually mindful of whether they are on the right side or the wrong side of it.

Statement (2) is the clincher. Software is not something you specify at the start, then develop, then test at the end. Why? Because doing it that way you miss the trick – software can be adapted and re-crafted, in ways you hadn’t even considered when you started, but which offer themselves to you once you’re underway. So when you develop software you need to have an eye for these opportunities. Sticking to what it was you thought you were building to start with guarantees you’ll miss these opportunities, and for a lot of software, missing them is a mission critical failure.

Statement (3), as long as you don’t start quibbling about exactly what I mean by “never”, is unarguably true. The NHS system is an example – enough said.

Statement (4) is, I assure you, very true. The best pieces of software (of course, Truckcom is one of them – you knew I’d say that…) never stop developing. That’s the aim – to never stop. And that’s a good link to the next bit.

And yes, small really is beautiful

So you need a commercial framework which will keep things going indefinitely. At Truckcom, our commercial approach has been very carefully designed to match up with this model. It isn’t so hard to do for a small team, once everyone’s expectations are matched up – and as long as you make sure you’re managing it as an ongoing process, not as a start it – do it – and then stop it exercise (i.e. a project).

And when you start to consider the other rules above, they fall down one by one.  A small team works quicker than a large one, mostly because it’s so much easier to keep just a few people on the same page, and up to date with the latest objectives – so you’ve won against rule (1).

With rule (2), though, the trick is not to conquer it but to accept it. With a small, close knit team, you can move the goalposts regularly and it just works.  In fact it becomes the big win for small teams – the brilliant flexibility they can bring to the rewarding process of developing stuff quickly that works well.

Rule (3) doesn’t apply – and rule (4) is a given – if things are going well, why would you want to stop? After all, it takes quite a long time for the kind of evolutionary approach that develops the best software to deliver it’s very best results.

So yes, small really is beautiful.

Truckcom’s central servers are the unsung heroes of our service. All the information that passes between thousands of Truckcom mobile devices and hundreds of office users pass through these machines. They also host the various websites which our customers use operationally – including this website you are on at the moment!

We now have three brand new central servers fully online and in use. The new servers are located at St Asaph in North Wales, and are managed for us by Hostinguk (www.hostinguk.net) who have been our hosting partner since the very beginning.

The history of Truckcom’s central servers is a reflection of how the company has grown. At the very beginning in early 2004, we used shared hosting facilities from HostingUK – we didn’t have any of our very own servers at all. Then in 2006 we commissioned our first “dedicated” server. As our user base grew, we added a second server in 2007 and and a third in 2009.  Early this year we decided the 2006 machine definitely had to be retired, and we realised there were many advantages to installing three brand new, much more powerful quad-core machines rather than upgrading what we had piecemeal.

The process of moving customers over to the new servers has been completed during an intensive series of weekend swapovers which took place through July of 2011.

We have never suffered a significant central server failure at any stage in our history over seven years of operation - but just to play things especially safe, the new servers have additional spare capacity and an improved redundant, fail-safe design. The system is set up so that if any one server should fail, normal service can be quickly resumed with minimal disruption to users using the other two.

Throughout our operating life, HostingUk have provided an excellent service to us and we are pleased to be continuing to work with them with our new generation servers.

However, they were cautious about making the change because they needed to ensure that any new system covered everything they were already doing better than – or at least as well as – their previous system.

“When we first saw Truckcom, we felt it could be a good solution for us but it needed several tweaks” says Pete McMunn at Craven. “As a bulk operator we have legal obligations to report on things like Trailer Sanitisation, which wasn’t in Truckcom when we first saw it”.

“Also we felt the tracking could be improved by showing the direction the vehicles were moving in.  As well as these changes, we needed the system to allow easy scanning and entry of weighbridge tickets, and we wanted the invoices to be presented in as similar way as possible to our old system”.

Craven were pleased that Truckcom were prepared to work on adaptations at no charge as part of their sales process to ensure Craven  would be able to operate the system exactly as they required. “Without obligation, Truckcom started working on the changes,  in collaboration with us” says Pete. “We were able to review the changes and make further suggestions, over a period of a couple of months,  just to make sure everything was set up the way we needed it”.

During the same period, the company started to use a few of the mobile units in their fleet.  “We were impressed by how easily the drivers got the hang of the system” says Nigel Simpson,  who supervised the early stages of the rollout for Craven. “We opted for the Vehicle Checks and Defects Module and we were able to get this set up very quickly, and we could see the time-saving advantages of it straight away”.

The rollout was completed in February 2011 and Craven are now using Truckcom across their fleet.

One of our biggest customers, Goldstar Transport, has taken Truckcom to new frontiers – literally. Not content with their large and growing UK operation, they have just started operations in Sri Lanka.

Goldstar have been with us from very early on in Truckcom’s history. We started deploying devices to their vehicles in early 2006, which seems a long, long time ago now. They’ve been an excellent customer for us over the years and they use every single feature of Truckcom.

So when they were planning their first international venture, it was a given that they would use Truckcom to manage it. Preparation of the Truckcom side of the operation has been reasonably straightforward. Goldstar’s IT staff set up a server here in the UK on the Sri Lanka timezone; we did some work to make sure the system would work in different timezones and checked that the Sri Lanka maps appeared correctly in the Tracking screen; and Derek Cawston, Goldstar’s General Manager, tested a device during a visit in January to check it would all work as expected. It all worked fine.

After a little struggle with Sri Lanka customs to get the vehicles into the country, Goldstar Sri Lanka operations are now starting up. We’re delighted that Goldstar are continuing their expansion in such an innovative way, and we’re looking forward to working closely with them on the Sri Lanka project.

(that’s “New Beginnings!” in Sinhala)