Ctrl O

02/10/2025

We're delighted to have opened up a London office for our software company Ctrl O. It's in London, just near Marble Arch, and has lots of space for friendly meetings over tea and coffee on the large ground floor, and there are also meeting rooms for more confidential conversations.

If you're passing through the capital and would like to have a catch up with some of our team, do get in touch. Carla Francome and Andy Beverley are based here, and John Hayden and Pete Ward too when they're in London.

There's a cosy fire, an unusual chess set to play, and even the chance of a celebratory whisky if you purchase our software LinkSpace!*

*Double shot available if you're purchasing a medium-to-large system or above.

This office is in addition to our Yeovil base in Somerset. The new office is just near Hyde Park and lots of great shops too, so come and see us and make a day of it!

19/06/2024

If you come and visit us at the Abbey Manor Business Centre, we are currently sharing the space with some feathered friends, who may have a window in their diary for you to say hello to them too 🦆🦆

Paula and Sue in The Cafe Abbey Manor Business Centre keep everyone here well-fed and watered during the day, but they’re now looking after some others too, as 9 new duck babies have arrived.

“This is the first year we’ve had ducks breed in the pond here” says Sue, “and it’s lovely to see. The folks behind the Abbey Manor business centre have installed a better water filter system, and then, low and behold, a mummy and daddy duck appeared!”

Sue and Paula promptly dashed out to buy some duck food for them, and love watching them grow. “They always swim over whenever we have our food out” says Sue, “and we have lots of squirrels around here too”.

Not only is there lots of wildlife to enjoy here, but Paula and Sue also make a mean coffee and walnut cake, so it’s definitely worth a trip!

24/04/2024

Our new blog post is up! It’s about when Carla Francome met Colonel Glynn Evans at the RAF club, his colourful stories of his trips abroad, and what it’s all got to do with our landmark software LinkSpace.

You can read all about it here …

Last week I had a really interesting meeting with Colonel Glynn Evans at the RAF club on Piccadilly. It’s a fascinating building steeped in history, with lots of beautiful stained glass (and of course, many pictures of airplanes).

22/04/2024

So, our support technician Dave Roberts has had a bold haircut! ✂️👀

He’s told us that already today, three people have said he looks like a certain someone.

We’re saying nothing. Absolutely nothing* 🤐

But we do know what we’re getting him for his birthday - a model of a 1986 Fleetwood Bounder!

*Just for the record, Dave is a thoroughly upstanding, law-abiding citizen, and isn’t even a fan of chemistry! (He prefers physics).

21/04/2024

Happy birthday today to Dave Roberts, our Junior Support Technician at Control O!

(Oh and he’s not at church, our offices are in an abbey!)

If you haven’t spoken to us before, give us a ring just so you can hear Dave’s one-liners, he’s a total pro and they fly off the tongue.

EG:

“You want to find interesting things out about me? I work in IT, what do you expect to find?”

“I’m a bit of a nerd. In the same way the ocean’s a bit damp”.

When co-worker Carla Francome called this week, and complained of always going straight through to Dave, he said “yes well they’ve got me set-up to deal with the nuisance calls” 😆 (potential clients fear not- he wouldn’t say this to anyone else. Ctrl O are always happy to hear from people!)

In his spare time, Dave loves cooking. “My grandad was a chef, he taught my mum, and she taught me”. He’s also learning Japanese and wants to go to Osaka to visit in a couple of years, “it’s on my bucket list”. (His name in Japanese is Daibu by the way)

Of an evening, he enjoys reading tomes about technology. “You have to keep up with everything- it’s all changing so fast”.

But reading IT books hasn’t dampened his creativity. “My friends say I’m an open book, it’s just that it’s written by Dr Seuss and illustrated by Picasso”.

Happy birthday Dave!

17/04/2024

Yesterday I had a really interesting meeting with Colonel Glynn Evans at the RAF club on Picadilly. It’s a fascinating building, with lots of interesting stained glass (and of course, many many pictures of airplanes).

And Colonel Glynn is like a cat- in that he has certainly needed all of his nine lives, he has had a lot of close calls over the years. He spent many years in the army as an anaesthetist, and served in Northern Ireland, Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan among other regions.

Glynn’s first trip abroad was to Northern Ireland in 1995, and he was the first anaesthetist over the border into Iraq in 2003. He told me that one night, when in Iraq in 2007, a missile landed in the corridor just feet from his bedroom when he was sleeping. It went around 7 meters underground, but luckily for Glynn, the fuse had been added incorrectly, and it didn’t detonate. He continued to sleep just near the missile. “Don’t worry” he was reassured. “If it goes off now, it's so deep underground that it won’t hurt you”.

Colonel Glynn has had many close shaves, and has lived to tell the tale.

He has also delivered a lot of training, teaching military personnel overseas. He spent 2 weeks in Sri Lanka, teaching the local military Battlefield Advanced Trauma Life Support (known as BATLS).

So what does any of this have to do with us at Ctrl O?

Well, the Ministry of Defence has British Military personnel around much of the world, doing non-operational activity- such as training. Also, military personnel from other countries often come to the UK for non-ops purposes too. This is all known as International Defence Engagement, and is part of a national strategy to build relationships around the world.

And this International Defence Engagement can be vital work. Between June 2022 and November 2023, 30,000 ordinary Ukrainian men and women trained to become soldiers on British soil, in the largest military training programme here since world war 2.

All of the information about which British non-ops personnel are overseas and when, and which overseas military personnel are here, is stored at the Ministry of Defence in LinkSpace, a software that we’ve created at Ctrl O.

In LinkSpace, it's data that’s really well protected and secure. And at any one time, the MOD can get a huge amount of information at the touch of the button.

Glynn, a Consultant Anaesthetist, is now working in the NHS, and during our chat yesterday, agreed that LinkSpace could work well in the hospital he’s at. “We know just where the patients are- they’re in their beds- but it’s the doctors we can’t keep an eye on- they’re always moving around and changing departments!” He thinks that keeping information centrally about which doctor was where would be very useful - especially when a large bunch of junior doctors arrive.

If you’re in a company that could benefit from getting the LinkSpace treatment, do get in touch!

10/04/2024

Good morning from Yeovil in Somerset, and near the headquarters of Ctrl O!

And to the back garden of our COO John Hayden to see his morning ritual.

At 7 AM, he jumps into an ice bath ❄️🥶

“It’s hard to get into cold water” he says. “But that’s just in the mind, and it feels good overcoming that. There’s that story about how you should swallow the frog at the beginning of the day, as everything is easier after that. And that’s how I feel about the ice bath. Once I’ve jumped into a huge bucket of ice, I’m ready for anything”.

“Also, after the initial shock”, he continues, “you start being really in the moment- I notice the nice view in the garden, and how the birds are singing. It’s like having a moment of clarity before the day properly starts. And it certainly wakes me up”.

John’s wife walks in at this point. “I think the ice bath is good for him, and it’s good for me too- he’s definitely less grumpy first thing”, and she gives us a wink 😉 and they both laugh 😃

29/03/2024

This week’s blog is up! Have a read next time you grab a cuppa ☕️

It features: A legend about a Persian queen accused of adultery, an important meet at the Ministry of Defence, and a spreadsheet demonstration involving a coffee and a croissant. 🥐 ⬇️

We had a good day in the Central London sunshine this week! Our COO John Hayden jumped on a train to London early in the morning on Wednesday as he had an important meeting at the Ministry of Defence. I met him at Waterloo, and as we took a stroll across the Thames, the sunshine was glittering on th...

28/03/2024

Over coffee yesterday, John Hayden talked me through one of the advantages of LinkSpace with some unusual props- a croissant, a coffee and a cardboard knife 🥐☕️🍽️.

He explained these all represented data in a company. So let’s say it’s a huge company with three departments, one with loads of data on croissants, one with data on cardboard knives, and one with data on lattes (I want to work at this business in the croissant department!)

Now- with a regular type of spreadsheet, all departments can see all the data and frankly it’s too much isn’t it! If you’re in the coffee department, do you really want to see 10,000 pieces of data on croissants? No you don’t! (As much as we all love a croissant 🥐)

One advantage of LinkSpace, John explained, is that you can have a huge sheet of data, and each department only needs to see what’s relevant to them. So the cardboard knives team could happily just look at data on that, and wouldn’t need to give two hoots about the data on lattes. This is a handy function isn’t it!

LinkSpace has lots of great features, I’ll be explaining them over the coming weeks, hopefully with more and more elaborate props! 🤓🤓

27/03/2024

So, John Hayden had a really productive afternoon at the Ministry of Defence today, talking to people about our flagship software LinkSpace.

Relatively new users said:

“It is highly configurable and its ability to manipulate data is good”

“It’s more user friendly than other systems”

“The k***s and controls you have to tweak make it easy to fine-tune the views of the data”

Someone who has been using LinkSpace for a while said:

“It’s a quick and easy way to know what is happening at any given time, and it’s really configurable to look at just the bits you need. Previously, when doing budgets, people were keeping individual spreadsheets, so you were having to wait for them to come back from leave and could never look back and see the history. This works so much better”.

LinkSpace! It’s working a treat for these folks at the MOD!