Telegraph CTO: 'Speed is everything'

Telegraph CTO Toby Wright: 'Google Cloud Platform's new UK region will shave vital milliseconds off Telegraph websites' performance'

Toby Wright, the CTO of t he Telegraph newspaper, has welcomed the launch of the Google Cloud Platform's new UK region, saying that it will shave vital miliseconds off page load times for his websites.

Wright was speaking at a launch event at Google's offices recently, during which the first instance was ceremoniously created in the new region.

He discussed his organisation's use of Google BigQuery - the firm's analytics warehouse - and the fact that speed is essential to his business.

"We've been a Google customer since 2008 when we started with G Suite," said Wright. "And now we support everything we do from BigQuery; our mobile e-commerce tools use it, and we use it for reporting, the single customer view and real-time user measurement.

"Speed is very important for us. We have to compete and be quick, you have miliseconds to load pages on a device. We use measurement in real time detect how fast things are loading on page, and we can do stuff about it if it's not working well. This new London data centre now chops out some of those miliseconds. We make lots of round trips so knocking out a few miliseconds from that is really important for us," he explained.

Before the launch of the new UK region, Google Cloud Platform's UK customers were connecting to the firm's other European region in Belgium. Google has plans to launch further data centres in the region.

Wright added that the Telegraph produces around 15,000 written articles per month, and in the region of 900 videos. However, simply producing articles is no longer enough, with falling advertising revenues affecting the entire publishing industry, more diversied revenue streams have been needed.

"In November last year we launched Premium. In the past we had paywalls, which were pretty blunt. You'd read 20 articles and then we'd suggest you pay to read more. It didn't add value to the journalism. With Premium, there's a small percentage of content you have to pay to read. When you pay that opens up better comment and long-form articles," he stated.

He concluded by expressing his delight at Google's new launch.

"We're really happy to see Google's continued investment in the UK, and we're really excited to be working with them."