Business Info - issue 147

businessinfomag.uk magazine 32 WORKPLACE I couldn’t do my job without... to the amusement of my colleagues and customers, who just see a hand putting down a cup of tea. 4 On-Air Sign Outside my office, there’s a studio ‘On-Air’ sign that I found on eBay.When I’m on work calls, I switch it on and that means I’m not to be disturbed. Tea is an exception, obviously – that magic right hand can always sneak in. 5 Video Conferencing We are a US-based company, with a growing European client and channel base. Our growth has been significant, even in a pandemic, and the last year has been spent on Zoom, Teams and Meet – you have to have every Video Conferencing client installed because your next meeting will almost certainly not be on the same platform as the last one.Without Video Conferencing technology, both the economic and the emotional impact of the last year would have been much greater. It’s not ideal, but it has allowed us to carry on, grow the business, keep in contact and enjoy a few funny moments along the way. 6 Slack It’s what we use internally. As well as for the serious stuff, it has become the de facto channel for office banter and human interaction that comes from being in an office with colleagues. Like Video Conferencing, it’s an essential tool in our working day, and one we are starting to use with customer and channel partners in the UK and across Europe as well. Yugabyte is a global open source distributed SQL database company. Founded in Silicon Valley in 2016, the tech innovator helps manage business-critical applications with high performance and cloud native agility. In EMEA, its activities are headed up by DavidWalker who encourages, supports and helps large businesses and Yugabyte’s growing network of channel partners to embrace the value of cloud native database technology. Here, he reveals the six tools he couldn’t do his job without. 1 Audio Technica LP5 Record Player I have a large vinyl collection, but like most people’s, it has been in the loft for years gathering dust. In the first lockdown I bought a record player, put it by my desk and catalogued the whole lot on the Discogs website, a crowdsourced database of audio recordings. I am enjoying listening to some classic albums again, and the 20 minutes per side is a great prompt to stop, stretch and take time out from being plugged into a screen all day. It’s in the background on my Zoom calls, too, often acting as an ice-breaker. 2 FitBit I do 10,000 steps every day, without fail. It’s been two years now and I haven’t missed a single day. But there are consequences. It takes around 90 minutes to do those steps, and it’s rare to have a clear 90-minute period in a day, so you have to plan your time carefully. I often walk past the local dairy farm, and hearing cows on a Zoom call makes an interesting change to the usual cats and children, especially for my US colleagues in and around the Bay area. Going out to do your steps at 10pm on a cold, wet, winter night is no fun, but the FitBit keeps me focussed. 3 A Cup of PG Tips Tea This is an essential, and I’m eternally grateful to my wife for the continuous supply of tea to my office. The ‘right hand of tea’, as it is known, appears unprompted at regular intervals, much David Walker Yugabyte Database Hub You can learn more about open source distributed database technology by downloading the recently launched YugabyteDB 2.7 from https://github. com/yugabyte .Whether you are an organisation helping enterprises migrate to the cloud, modernise and embed a cloud native database or an OEM software solution developer looking for a cloud agnostic database on which to build your platform, we could be the perfect fit.