Planet takes Linux lead with GBdirectPRESS RELEASE — 11 August 1999 GBdirect and Planet Online, both leading players in the European market for Linux skills and services, today announced what is believed to be the UK's biggest ever Linux training programme. Over the next six weeks, 60 delegates from Planet Online will attend GBdirect's basic, intermediate and advanced courses in Linux Systems Administration. The students will be engineers and technical staff from Planet's Leeds headquarters, the home of Freeserve, and already the greatest concentration of Linux expertise in Europe. Dave Fisher, Head of Business Development at GBdirect, made it clear that he saw the programme as more than just a for-money contract. He commented: "A few weeks ago I saw a full-page article in the IT press, proclaiming no commercial demand for Linux training. Linux specialists, like ourselves and Planet, know that's nonsense, but we need big projects like this to get the wider IT community to wake-up and smell the bacon." According to him, GBdirect's Linux training has already expanded beyond small in-house projects, into large and public events like this and their forthcoming courses on integrating Linux with Windows/NT. Planet's staff are already amongst the most skilled and experienced users of Linux and UNIX, as David Earnshaw, HR director at Planet explains: "We are committing our staff to this programme because we want to maintain our leadership in this field. There is demand and we need to meet it with a high level of expertise and support. We want to ensure that we are all speaking the same dialect of UNIX and that every one of us is up-to-date on the very latest developments in Linux administration." If Planet's enthusiasm and response to the Linux training is anything to go by, the company will be difficult to beat in the skills arena. Within hours of announcing the proposed training, all of GBdirect's courses were so over-subscribed that they are going to be repeated at least once and possibly twice. CTEC, the national IT training provider, is both hosting the series and providing its Leeds training centre for the training programme. NOTES TO EDITORSABOUT GBDIRECT LIMITEDGBdirect are Europe's leading specialists in Linux training and are providers of blue-chip E-commerce consultancy. During 1999 they have helped Dell, Compaq and IBM with their European Linux projects and are currently working with government and the leading Linux distributors, SUSE and Red Hat, to develop certified Linux training across the continent. Consultants from GBdirect have been key-note speakers on Linux and E-commerce at the leading national conferences (e.g. ComDEF, Linux '99, etc), have written definitively, and provide press/commercial briefings on these emerging markets. Other current clients include Creda, Wessex Water, Bryant Homes, BSS and Hawke Systems. FOR MORE INFORMATION OR PHOTOGRAPHS, PLEASE CONTACT: Dave Fisher, Business Development ABOUT PLANET ONLINE LIMITEDPlanet Online, the UK's leading business ISP, is a member of the Energis Group. Planet Online has the largest web server hosting data centre in Europe and provides the hosting infrastructure for Dixons' Freeserve which has attracted over one million users. Planet Online customers include some of the major corporations in Europe, companies such as Colt Mitsubushi, Xerox, Yamaha Music, Pirelli Tyres, Samsung, Rover Group, Nestle, Microsoft and Virgin Clothing. The Planet Online web site can be visited at www.theplanet.net. Energis plc, the telecommunications company focused exclusively on the business marketplace, built its national network primarily along the National Grid's electricity pylon infrastructure. The company has over 6,500 kms of fibre optic cable installed throughout England and Wales, a capacity sharing agreement with ScottishTelecom and an international licence. Energis offers businesses a full portfolio of national and international services together with value-added Internet and intranet services. These services include innovative telephony services, advanced Frame Relay and ATM for data transmission and enhanced voice services such as local rate, national rate and freephone. FOR MORE INFORMATION OR PHOTOGRAPHS, PLEASE CONTACT:James Nunn, Press Office |
CSS/XSLT/XHTML Design at The RegisterGBdirect staff recently completed an overhaul of the content management system (CMS) and website design for The Register. Every user should notice the aesthetic improvements, but we hope that most will also experience significant improvements in usability and performance as a result of the shift to open standards compliant HTML, CSS and XSLT. A brief description of the technologies involved is available and you may be interested in this rather approving account from The Web Standards Project. Journalists and editors are already noticing a dramatic improvement in the usability of the content management system. If you are interested in a similarly high usability, standards compliant, website design please contact our development team at development@gbdirect.co.uk. If you would like to learn how to do something similar yourself, take a look at our website design training course and our Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) training course. |
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