Opinions by Daniel Thomas
Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is worth a selective rollout
Microsoft 365 Copilot Business deserves a selective rollout, not an automatic licence for everyone. Assess recurring tasks, checked outputs and the full annual cost before expanding.
I tried to predict 2025 from 2015, and 2026 has marked my paper
I wrote about 2025 back in 2015. A year past the line, here is what I got right, what I got wrong, and what it means for an AI strategy in 2026.
The UK Cloud Armageddon
The Miniaturisation of IT and Data Centres
HPE teams up with vArmour for application-aware micro-segmentation
Is Oracle a sleeping cloud giant?
Rise of the Millennial
Crouching OEM Tiger, Hidden Cloud Dragon
The China dream in terms of cloud and technology is for China to move beyond a manufacturing economy to one of technical greatness. China wants to become the designer, producer and retailer of these solutions, not just the manufacturer.
The technology landscape in the year 2025
The Great Cloud Juxtapose
A blog to Storage Marketers regarding IOT Scaremongering
Will the last reseller standing please turn off the lights?
Is your data locked in?
Daniel Thomas considers software defined networks and asks if your cloud services are locked in to your data centre?
Big Data and machine learning as a force for good
Daniel Thomas considers Big Data, machine learning and how our cloud computing expertise could benefit humanity.
A day with Arrow: Transforming the data centre
Daniel Thomas reviews Arrow's "Transforming the Data Centre," a launch event aimed at enabling MSPs to grow their business.
Articles by Daniel Thomas
Cisco Meraki, Fortinet FortiGate or HPE Aruba for retail SD-WAN
UK multi-site retailers choosing branch SD-WAN can compare confirmed reseller pricing for Cisco Meraki MX68 and Fortinet FortiGate 60F, both in the low thousands of pounds per site over five years, against HPE Aruba EdgeConnect's quote-only, WAN-optimisation-focused platform. The right fit depends on whether stores need simple failover on decent broadband or deeper optimisation on poor circuits.
Ubiquiti UniFi vs TP-Link Omada vs Cisco Meraki for UK Office Wi-Fi
Comparing Ubiquiti UniFi, TP-Link Omada and Cisco Meraki for a UK small office Wi-Fi upgrade shows UniFi and Omada costing £316 or less ex VAT for three access points with no recurring fee, against roughly £1,950 for Meraki once its mandatory per-device Enterprise licence is included. Meraki Go, Cisco's old licence-free small business line, stopped being sold new in April 2025, so a fresh Meraki quote today is the full, licensed range.
Renting GPU Capacity by the Hour or Buying an NVIDIA DGX System
UK enterprises training AI models pay a 25-30% premium to rent NVIDIA H100 GPU capacity in AWS and Azure's UK regions compared with US regions, based on each provider's own live pricing data. Buying an NVIDIA DGX system breaks even against continuous UK cloud rental at roughly 56% utilisation for a DGX H100 and 82% for a DGX B200, while AMD Instinct MI300X capacity is available directly from Azure's UK South region at a lower per-GPU rate than NVIDIA H100 instances.
Sage 200, Business Central or NetSuite for a UK Manufacturer's Next ERP System
This buying guide compares Sage 200, Dynamics 365 Business Central and NetSuite for a UK manufacturer turning over £5m to £50m, focusing on implementation cost rather than headline licence price. It sets out published and partner-quoted GBP figures for each platform, a manufacturing feature comparison, and a rollout checklist.
Personio or BambooHR for a UK mid-market business replacing spreadsheet HR
This comparison checks Personio and BambooHR's own pricing and payroll pages to answer a UK mid-market HR manager's question about per-employee cost and native UK payroll. It finds that BambooHR publishes real US list prices while Personio publishes none, and that neither platform runs UK payroll itself, both hand off to Xero or Sage 50 for the actual HMRC filing.
Mimecast Proofpoint or Abnormal AI for Business Email Compromise
None of Mimecast, Proofpoint or Abnormal AI publishes per-mailbox pricing, so UK enterprises must compare them on deployment architecture, bundled modules and quote-scoping rather than a public price list. UK Finance and FBI IC3 data show email-based fraud is rare by case count but disproportionately high value, which is why a verified callback step matters alongside whichever platform is chosen.
1Password Bitwarden or Keeper for a UK mid-market SSO rollout
For a UK mid-market business rolling out single sign-on, 1Password Business includes SSO without a paid upgrade at $8.99 per user a month, while Bitwarden and Keeper both gate SSO behind their $6.00-a-month Enterprise tier, shown as roughly £4.42 and an estimated £4.53 once converted. All three vendors list prices in US dollars; Bitwarden's own GB checkout is the only one that converts and shows a VAT-clear pound figure, while Keeper's own page would not render a number at all.
Vector Databases and Graph Databases Explained, and Who Actually Sells Them
This piece explains vector databases (meaning as coordinates, similarity search, retrieval-augmented generation) and graph databases (entities and relationships as first-class records) in plain English, then shows why AI agents moved both from niche to mainstream through RAG, agent memory and GraphRAG, including Microsoft's open-source GraphRAG work. It maps the vendor landscape as checked against vendor sites on 6 August 2026 — Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, Milvus/Zilliz and Chroma; vector search inside Postgres, MongoDB, Elastic, Redis and the hyperscalers including Amazon S3 Vectors; Neo4j, Neptune, Memgraph, Arango, TigerGraph and FalkorDB in graph; Zep, Mem0 and Letta in agent memory — with UK hosting availability, published pricing, the documented cost-unpredictability of usage-based tiers, and the requirement-led questions that decide whether a dedicated purchase is needed at all.
Running Chinese Open-Weight AI Models Privately in a UK Organisation
Chinese labs now publish frontier-class model weights under MIT and Apache 2.0 licences, and a UK organisation can run them entirely on its own infrastructure. This piece separates the hosted-API route, which triggers restricted international transfers under UK GDPR, from self-hosting, which triggers none. It verifies each current model's licence at source, sets out the hardware tiers from a single workstation to an eight-GPU node, prices self-hosting against the official APIs, and reports the documented evidence on censorship, jailbreak resistance and code security from NIST, CrowdStrike and Booz Allen, alongside the absence of any UK guidance naming Chinese-origin models.
What the CMA's Cloud Commitments Actually Change for a UK Business
On 31 March 2026 the CMA announced it would not open the Strategic Market Status investigations its cloud market investigation had recommended, accepting voluntary commitments from AWS and Microsoft instead. For anyone running cloud infrastructure in the UK, that produced a set of dated, checkable changes: switching windows extended to 180 days, at-cost multi-cloud egress, direct datacentre connections between rival platforms, and contractual addenda that convert discretionary goodwill into enforceable rights. This sets out what changed, when each piece takes effect, and the three things the CMA decided not to fix.
Which AI Projects Actually Clear the Board, and Why Copilots Keep Falling Short
Most AI investment goes into individual-productivity tools, yet boards approve initiatives that move pipeline, margin or risk through a metric they already track. Drawing on a June 2026 discussion among technology leaders and published evidence from MIT NANDA, Danish administrative data, the ONS and DSIT, this piece shows why time saved by copilots is redistributed rather than banked, why company-wide averages hide the signal, and why process-level AI that removes steps clears approval. It sets out the bridge-builder principle, the regulatory floor under materiality for UK companies, and a seven-step method for building an AI case a board will pass.
The PSTN Switch-Off Arrives on 31 January 2027 With 1.5 Million Lines Still Analogue
The UK retires its analogue phone network on 31 January 2027. Openreach said in July 2026 that 1.5 million lines had yet to migrate, including roughly 350,000 business premises. This piece traces how the date moved from December 2025, what stops working (voice, ISDN, ADSL and WLR-based FTTC, plus lift lines, alarm signalling, telecare, door entry, card terminals and franking machines), how to audit a line estate, the migration options (hosted VoIP, SIP trunks, SOGEA, full fibre, mobile signalling), the protections for telecare users, sector-by-sector exposure for hospitality, property, care and retail, and a dated checklist for the months before the deadline.
Construction Project Management Software for UK Contractors With CIS and RAMS
UK contractors need construction software to do five jobs that generic project tools were never built for: CIS verification and deductions, RAMS production and sign-off, CDM 2015 documentation, payment applications under the Construction Act, and retentions tracking. This comparison establishes that the international platforms (Procore, Autodesk, Fieldwire, Bluebeam) do none of these natively, while UK products (Access Coins Evo, Eque2 Construct, Causeway) and specialists (Payapps, HandsHQ) do, and sets out published sterling pricing where it exists, quote-only status where it does not, and a checklist for choosing a two-layer stack by contractor size.
The Bank of England Now Oversees Your Cloud Provider
HM Treasury designated Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL, Google Cloud EMEA Limited, Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited and Oracle Corporation UK Limited as critical third parties, effective 13 July 2026 under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 regime. The Bank of England, PRA and FCA can now set requirements directly on the providers, including scenario testing, phased incident reporting to regulators and affected firms, self-assessments and skilled-person reviews. The piece explains the designation criteria, the obligations and their timeline, and the point the primary documents state plainly but commentary will miss, that regulated firms keep every outsourcing and operational resilience obligation they already had. It closes with practical steps for fintechs, insurers, payments firms and the MSPs serving them.
ERP for UK Manufacturers Turning Over £5m to £50m
This guide compares the ten ERP systems realistically available to UK manufacturers turning over £5m to £50m — Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Sage X3, Sage 200 with a manufacturing add-on, SAP Business One, Epicor Kinetic, Infor CloudSuite Industrial, Oracle NetSuite, 123insight, WinMan and Priority. It establishes that only Business Central publishes a UK list price, explains the licence-versus-implementation cost structure behind quote-only pricing, documents UK data residency and compliance checkboxes, describes what buying through the UK partner channel means in practice, and turns the published record on ERP implementation failure into specific questions that de-risk selection.
Shadow AI Discovery and Governance Tools Compared for UK Buyers
The tools sold to govern employee AI use do five different jobs that vendors blur: discovery, enforcement, sanctioned access, data protection and licensing visibility. This comparison groups Microsoft Purview and Defender for Cloud Apps, the SASE platforms, browser and endpoint tools, and the AI gateways by the job each does, states which prices are published and which are quote-only, and sets out the Microsoft licence tiers and consumption meters Purview's AI capabilities require. It then examines the dividing line that matters most: which tools read employee prompt text, and why ICO guidance makes that a workplace monitoring decision needing a DPIA, transparency and a lawful basis before deployment.
Digital Social Care Records Hit 80 Per Cent Sixteen Months Late - What Providers Still on Paper Should Do
The government's target of 80 per cent of CQC-registered care providers using a digital social care record by March 2024 was reached in July 2025, and DHSC's latest statistics put adoption at 83.7 per cent of locations in March 2026. This piece reports the documented target and outcome, then turns to the practical side for the providers still on paper: NHS England's 22-solution assured list and what assurance does and does not mean, the current state of funding, CQC's position on digital records, GP Connect access, published pricing, and the selection questions that DHSC-funded research links to buyer regret and abandonment.
Choosing a UK Data Centre for Cloud Repatriation in 2026
The piece establishes that UK cloud repatriation is real but selective, with AWS itself telling the CMA that customers move back, and vendor surveys (disclosed as such) showing most organisations considering partial moves. It maps the UK colocation market from operators' own websites, showing London's 91 per cent grip on 1,803MW of live capacity against a thin regional layer, and explains why Ofgem's 125GW connection queue makes power the deciding constraint. It then sets out seven selection criteria with the exact questions to put to providers, weighs London against regional sites on latency, cost and staff access, and closes with a workload-led decision framework and a ten-point checklist.