Miners, Mercenaries and Millionaires

STEPHEN D’ALTON excelaWRITER@gmail.com There’s no denying it, I am a massive fan of James Bond. From Ian Fleming’s ‘Spy story to end all spy stories’ through to the present day Bond films. I love them all. So much so, that when our son was born we named him Timothy after actor and fourth Bond Timothy Dalton. Bond is of course no stranger to Russia. For many years he traded blows with numerous agents of KGB and SMERSH (‘Death to Spies’). In the 1995 film Goldeneye Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond meets the aptly named Georgian assassin Xenia Onatopp. She asks him if he’s ever been to Russia to which Bond replies quite casually “Not recently. I used to drop in occasionally. Shoot in and out.” Xenia in response assures Bond that Russia has changed and is now a land of opportunity. And so it was for us at Subex, and our efforts to expand our customer base in the East. An opportunity came up to perform a software trial for a state run Telco in Moscow. With projects like these it’s crucial that p

COVID-19. We hear about it all the time. It’s part of our everyday lives. A lived experience. You would be hard pressed to find anyone on this planet who hasn’t heard of COVID-19. And yet the opposite is true of its predecessor Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). According to the World Health Organisation SARS Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) is a ‘virus identified in 2003. SARS-CoV is thought to be an animal virus from an as-yet-uncertain animal reservoir, perhaps bats, that spread to other animals (civet cats) and first infected humans in the Guangdong province of southern China in 2002.’ 1 Sound familiar? Although the first cases of SARS-CoV occurred in November 2002 it was only officially recognised at the end of February 2003. ‘At the time, the Chinese government was criticized for responding slowly to the outbreak and concealing the seriousness of the illness.’ 2 It took several months before they ‘started sharing information with the World Health Organization (WHO).’ 3 The Guardi