apology letter

Dear Valued New Continuum Customer:

First and foremost, I must apologize. The level of service you have experienced on the network side recently is embarrassing to me personally, and I am truly ashamed. This is unacceptable to me, and I will not tolerate it. At times like these, talk is cheap, though as my customer, you deserve to know what is going on. So, I have decided to write this, because you need to know that I take outages extremely seriously, and view them as a personal failure. I will not offer excuses in this message, instead I will offer transparency. As you may know, over the last several months, we have completely overhauled the operating team and network team. We have branded ourselves as New Continuum, and we have implemented new protocols and policies based on industry best practices. Our new operating team quickly identified our network as a material weakness. The equipment is approaching its end of useful life, and the previous team had embedded faulty code throughout the network, without eve
 r documenting what they did. We decided that the only way to deliver a level of service that we could be proud of, was to invest significant capital and resources to entirely replace the equipment, write new code, and improve bandwidth providers. We announced these plans to you a few weeks ago (see below). However, before our new equipment arrived, the old equipment began to act erratically, and has been unable to perform basic routing functions. We have implemented static routes and are manually re-routing as required, but this is clearly a temporary solution. We are monitoring the situation very closely with both internal dedicated network staff and expert outside consultants. We believe that we are making the best decisions at every juncture, with the best resources available. However, to be totally transparent and forthcoming as your partners, we must inform you that until the new equipment arrives and is installed, we are on high alert. The new equipment will arrive ear
 ly next week, and we will work 24x7 to get everything installed and implemented with the entirely new network by the end of next week. We will be reaching out to BGP customers to schedule cut over dates in the coming days, and we are available to answer questions at any time in advance. We know that performance lately has been unacceptable, and if we expect to continue to serve you as customers, this must end. We assure you that we will continue to be vigilant and focused on delivering the best service we can, and reaching a level of service that makes us proud.

We wanted to take a few minutes to update you on the improvements we are making to our product, and specifically to our network. As our customer base is evolving to a larger, more demanding end user, our product must also evolve. Accordingly, we have made, and will continue to make significant investments in our team, equipment and infrastructure. First, we hired a full-time, dedicated senior network engineer with a master’s degree in Computer Science – Network Engineering and Management. We continue to add seasoned NOC professionals with a variety of network qualifications, and members of our existing team have gained new certifications. We are increasing our bandwidth to mitigate the impact of malicious denial of service attacks, and we are creating additional layers of
redundancy on the physical network. Finally, we are investing in new switches and routers to complete a network redesign and offer added redundancy across hardware devices. We expect to have many of these improvements completed by end of Q4 2015.  All of these investments are geared toward one outcome, which is a higher level of service for you. We value your business, and we look forward to supporting your growth and to providing you with ever improving service for years to come.

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Eli D. Scher    CHAIRMAN AND CEO