Thoughts
2017 in Review
I’ve been working at Wirehive for a few months now, and have learned many things in that short time (if you’re interested you can read them here). But our CEO Robert Belgrave has clearly been with the company for a lot longer. I managed to persuade him to sit down with me to review the year.
He’s a pretty well-known guy in the world of digital, with a clear grasp of the direction of the industry as a whole, so as well as asking him about 2017, I took the opportunity to ask him a little about what he thought would be big over the next year or so.
If you’re not a video person just keep scrolling to read a brief summary below.
Wirehive’s own transition
There is no denying it has been a year of great change for the entire hosting industry, and Wirehive has been no exception.
We’ve always prided ourselves on providing a personalised service, designed specifically to meet the individual needs of our customers, and so the move away from pure hosting, to also offering a digital transformation consultancy service was a logical step to take. Within the company we have a vast array of experts, and in 2017 we have added to that team with a number of strategic appointments.
Added to that we have been working more and more closely with Microsoft as an Azure Silver Partner, and close 2017 in an ideal position to help deliver Microsoft’s agency business for the forthcoming year.
Wirehive 100
If you haven’t worked with us, and got your information on Wirehive purely from Google you’d be forgiven for thinking that we were a company that primarily focussed on the Wirehive 100 Awards.
To be fair I felt much the same way when I started working for Wirehive as my first job was to help run the 6th awards at the O2 Guildhall in Southampton. It was an amazing event, and a real testament to the amount of work put in by everyone involved over the last 6 years.
They were originally set up to celebrate the wealth of talent in agencies across the south of England outside of London, and have done that job incredibly well.
Alexa Stop
In March, Rob joined up with a friend of his, Jim Bowes from the Shoreditch based agency Manifesto, to record the first episode of what would prove to be an extremely popular Podcast. Jim is clearly an extremely intelligent and well-informed chap, but having previously worked as a Stand-up Comedian he, at least in part, plays the part of the foil to Rob’s technical know-how.
The ongoing theme for the podcast is an in depth look at how technology is changing our lives. Each episode looks at industry news and current affairs, before an in-depth discussion and interview with a guest expert. They’ve covered subjects as diverse as Computational Propaganda, Hyperloop, and of course Blockchain. They year finished with a live recording, and so far the first 6 episodes for 2018 are already planned with guests booked.
The Future
It’s clear that Wirehive is going from strength to strength, and that our digital transformation consultancy service will play a big part in our growth. But as 2017 included the launch of the 4th generation of our own public cloud hosting platform, the development of both our managed AWS and GCP hosting, and our official status as a Microsoft Azure partner our traditional business is growing too.
On a personal level I am very excited to have Rob on record as agreeing to produce more informative videos with me, so keep your eyes open for a regular vlog where we look to explain some of the complex issues that are current in the digital world.
