Full of (North) Eastern promise

Read an article about the economy in the North East of England, and you will be regaled with high unemployment figures and low manufacturing statistics.

Despite mixed messages about the economy the network industry is booming.

High tech in the North East is changing the region's fortunes, says David Shepherd, executive director of the North Information Applications Agency (NIAA). "There is a body of evidence to support a claim that this is the fastest changing region in Europe," he says.

Shepherd reels off examples of many projects that are currently being conducted in the region. One novel project is an electronic sheep market called Countrywide Mart, enabling sheep buyers to view the animal for sale on-line, make their bids and arrange collection directly from the farm.

Another is the Maria project from the University of Newcastle. This project uses video technology and ISDN to let children with cancer scattered through the region benefit from the skills of a paediatric optometrist at one of the teaching hospitals in Newcastle.

"In addition, the University of Newcastle is the first academic institution to launch an MBA in Strategic Telecommunications Management for people who are going to run these new telecommunications-oriented businesses," adds Shepherd, explaining that the educational infrastructure is preparing for the explosion of networking and telecommunications facilities in the North East.

Successful Enterprise Zone

Commercial developments to house telecommunications and datacommunications facilities are proceeding at a rapid pace.

Doxford Business Park - a facility housing 260,000 square feet of office space in Sunderland - is one of the UK's Enterprise Zones. This means that business residents are sheltered from tax payments until the Enterprise Zone status expires in year 2000.

The park houses a number of IT and telecommunications facilities, including Northern Rock Building Society's computerised mortgage records, and call centres for household names including Mercury One2One and London Electricity.

"Doxsford International was given preferred developer status to develop the whole of the site by the City of Sunderland. We had a business plan to develop a million square feet," says Jane Priest, director at Doxford International.

"When the Enterprise Zone expires we will employ roughly 5,000 people.

We have 260,00 square feet let at the moment with 280,000 square feet more under construction. There are 1,400 jobs on site at the moment, which is likely to expand to 2,000 by Christmas."

An independent report by research agency Roger Tym & Partners has shown Doxford to be the most successful Enterprise Zone in the UK, attracting 15 per cent more jobs at under half the cost of its competitors. Job creation costs #8,200 on average compared to #21,000 at other Enterprise Zone locations.

Call centres saving economy

Tom Fenton, chief executive of the Tyne & Wear Development Corporation, believes that call centres are the lifeblood of the outer areas of the North East region.

For example, the insurance arm of the Automobile Association (AA) runs its call centre from the area, and the organisation is shortly to bring its breakdown helpline call centre to the region too.

Fenton adds that the attraction to service companies comes from Sunderland's heritage in manufacturing. He qualifies his statement by adding that lower ground rent in the Sunderland area is still attracting call centres.

Mercury - which officially opened its 38,000 square feet call centre in Doxford in July and now employs 100 local people - is planning a switching centre for the Doxford site by the end of the year.

Completing urban cables

Call centres are not the only success story. There is a widespread effort on behalf of local cable companies such as Telewest and Bell Cablemedia to increase fibre-optic connectivity in the region.

NIAA's Shepherd explains that 57 per cent of the people in the North Eastern region live on 10 per cent of the land, which poses problems for companies wanting to cable up the rural areas.

"There are one million homes in the North East, of which half are in urban areas. I would guess that we might have completed about 10 per cent of homes at the moment. Tyne and Wear has 340,000 homes and will be finished during 1998.

"Cleveland has roughly 200,000 homes and will be finished by the turn of the century. Bell Cablemedia, which handles the 200,000 homes in Sunderland and Durham, will complete them early next century," he said.

Part of the problem is that companies deem it uneconomical to finance the long digs that are necessary to cable the rural areas of the North East.

Shepherd is convinced that something must be done to stop the region turning into an area of communications haves and have-nots. Wireless communications are the answer, he claims.

"Digital over radio looks competitive. It will grow, especially for transmitting large bandwidths. BT won a 2GHz fixed radio access license, which means, as I understand it, that you can deliver a 64Kbps return path," he says.

"For parts of the world like this, non-wired technologies will become increasingly important. There is another effort to extend GSM mobile coverage.

It's fine going up the M1, but go through the valleys and you have no signal. One of the things we want to look at is how to get proper mobile coverage."

Shepherd adds that wireless service providers currently find it uneconomical to install wireless services in these areas.

Equality for the community

There are plenty of other projects afoot in the region. Some of the most interesting community-oriented projects are being conducted by the local councils.

Michael Riley, head of special projects at Newcastle City Council, describes the Equality project, a #500,000 scheme half-funded by the European Union.

Equality uses Acorn Netstation network computers to help housebound people shop from home. To be piloted among 100 users this November, the system works by enabling people to dial up an Internet connection through Demon, to servers at TAG Technical Software - the consultancy which hosts the retail databases - over a PSTN line.

The network computer allows the users to view the goods available on their television screens and place grocery orders online. These are then faxed to the retailers, who can prepare the orders for collection by helpers.

"We download all of the price databases from the major retailers and then we retransmit those over the Internet, so that housebound and disabled people who can't do their own shopping can order their weekly goods," he explains.

The system allows the use of credit cards in association with supermarket loyalty cards for payment over the Internet, says Riley. He adds that the retailers involved have made a considerable investment in cataloguing their goods for the Internet.

The North East has a burgeoning network industry. The people of the North East can only benefit from the wealth of community-based projects and private investment in the area.

FINANCIAL BUSINESS AIDS FOR THE NORTH EAST

Newcastle and much of the North East region is a Development Area, designated by the Department of Trade and Industry as qualifying for Selective Regional Assistance.

Companies wanting to invest in the North East can receive between 5 and 15 per cent of fixed project costs in grants. Manufacturing and services companies investing in fixed assets such as opening plants, expanding an existing plant or adding facilities can expect to benefit from this assistance.

Companies should approach other possible sources of finance such as the private sector before applying for an RSA grant in the North East. Applications must be filed at the local Business Link office of the Government Office.

If they apply for a grant, they can expect a quick response.

For grants up to #2m, the response time is 60 days. Applications for up to #250,000 will take 40 days, and for grants of up to #25,000, that time is reduced to 25 days.

SUNDERLAND CITY COUNCIL

Sunderland City Council is enhancing the management of its many resources by using a networked Oracle database. The Council's Environmental Department, set up in March 1995 to effect easier access to information, has compiled data from different departments in the council onto one central Oracle 7 database.

According to David Wheatley, senior IT officer for the department, the information available over the network is restricted to internal staff, but the Council is considering ways to extend access to the public over the Internet.

"The database holds a lot of information. The car park data is being used by management to look at parking price strategies. We can look at where people are parking and find out what the effect will be if we raise the tariffs by 10p," he says. "We also store car park crime data, so that we can use our patrols in areas that show high rates of car crime."

The department also installed a Token Ring network with 70 Windows 95 clients. The number of clients will be expanded to 100. The network supports two network servers, one running the Oracle 7 database and the other running Microsoft Office. "We are connected to the corporate system using a backbone looked after by the Computer Services department," he says.

The Environmental Department is installing an Intranet to make access easier for staff. Using Microsoft Front Page to create the Web site for the Oracle server and Microsoft's recently-released Explorer v3.0 browser, staff can submit queries to the database in object data base connectivity (ODBC) format. "We are trying to make it easy for our staff to use because they have varying computing abilities," Wheatley explains.

CASE STUDY: SWAN HUNTER SHIPYARDS

When shipbuilding company Swan Hunter was bought by Dutch firm THC in 1993, the workers cheered. They had been made redundant three months earlier when Swan Hunter had closed, but now a large proportion of them would be asked back.

THC, which won a contract to provide the superstructure for the Solitaire floating oil rig, realised that it needed a more robust network at its Wallsend shipbuilding yard in Tyne and Wear to support the CAD requirements of the new contract. The new network would have to handle the immense administrative burden associated with the job, and cope with 50 more users in addition to the existing 80.

Consultancy Croft Computers was called. Mick Keeble, network sales consultant at Croft and a former electrician's apprentice at the yard, knew what the network needed.

"The network was a Fast Ethernet Category 5 UTP Ethernet network. There were fibre-optics running down to the far areas of the Wallsend yard, and then the Fast Ethernet hubs delivered dedicated 10Mbps pipes to servers and workstations," he says. "The problem was that the network's 'engines' were missing - the switching system was not there".

There were two Compaq Proliant 1500 dual processor 133MHz Pentium servers: one acted as a primary server, the other as a backup. Croft altered them to rack-mounted systems, and upgraded the 10Gb Raid storage system in one server to 20Gb.

Croft then separated the CAD and the administration traffic into two virtual workgroups, running at 100Mbps and 10Mbps respectively, and added a 6-port FMS3000 100Mbps switch to segment the network. He also added two 24-port FMSII 100Mbps switches to provide more capacity to support the growing user base.