This week was: wow. Long hours, multiple projects, like one long day. But damn it was exciting.

  • 🔵 - This week was defined by the announcement that Claranet has acquired Six Degrees. I’ve been involved in this one for months, spent quite a bit of time on the technical due diligence and it’s been frustrating to keep that out my these weeknotes - but hey! that’s why we have NDAs. The acquisition has meant that this week has been meetings with managers and my team. Introduction calls me new 6DG team members and the start of a new discovery period. Technical due-diligence is one thing - you find out about the scale, the products, the tools and the customers but what you don’t find out about what any of those actually “feel” like. Are there customers that are more difficult than others? Are they tools and systems that engineers love or hate? Are their products are services that are difficult to deliver? My next two weeks will involve actually talking to any many engineers and sales people as I can to get the answers to these questions. So just like some of the discovery I’ve been doing with Project-R2, 6DG discovery will mean lots of calls, lots of reading documents and lots of poking around systems. Importantly, this period is not the first stage of an integration plan but the stage that you use the gather enough information to build one. No upfront plans here - listen, learn and adapt accordingly.

  • 💻 - Right after Monday’s big announcement, I had a half-day workshop in the office with one of our longstanding customers who’ve now got some new management, some new ideas and a great opportunity to turn a close partnership into more opportunities and more product co-build. More exciting conversations in an already exciting week.

  • 🧩 - Project-R2 also continued this week and we started to collate all the additional requests, improvements and projects that were coming together from all of our meetings and discovery. So far we have 19 on our list and we expect this to at least double over the next few weeks. As Claranet’s biggest customer in it’s history we were temporarily very impressed with ourselves when we signed this deal. We’re now even more excited that there is a long stream of additional projects coming our way (as if there isn’t enough already).

📈 - This weeks stats:

📺 - This weeks background entertainment: