Big Brother is watching you

Beware of using your computer at work to have a bet or check on your shares. Because Surf Patrol might be watching. And then you'll lose your job and Steve Purdham's company will win another scalp in its quest to become guardians of the Net

Steve Purdham started wielding big sticks in a small way. He was seven and a bit, and the 10 packs of kindling sticks he was delivering each week on his bike around Spennymore in Co Durham were netting him a modest but worthwhile income. All was going well, and sales eventually reached 200 packs a week, bringing in a significant income of £5, when disaster struck. The business collapsed when his sole supplier, the man with the stick-cutting machine, was caught in a tax fiddle by the Inland Revenue, thus forcing the young aspiring entrepreneur into alternative ventures, which involved delivering papers and soft drinks.

Steve Purdham started wielding big sticks in a small way. He was seven and a bit, and the 10 packs of kindling sticks he was delivering each week on his bike around Spennymore in Co Durham were netting him a modest but worthwhile income. All was going well, and sales eventually reached 200 packs a week, bringing in a significant income of £5, when disaster struck. The business collapsed when his sole supplier, the man with the stick-cutting machine, was caught in a tax fiddle by the Inland Revenue, thus forcing the young aspiring entrepreneur into alternative ventures, which involved delivering papers and soft drinks.

Thirty-six years on, Steven Purdham and his company, SurfControl, wield an altogether different kind of stick, a virtual one designed to prevent employees surfing the internet, buying CDs, fixing holidays, ordering flowers and viewing porn in company time.

Not long ago, computer abuse at work was limited to an occasional game of minesweeper or solitaire. Not any more. The huge growth in internet use means thousands of employees are doing myriad private jobs online, from trading stock and placing bets, to researching their children's homework. "For people with boring and repetitive jobs, the internet with all it offers is very seductive,'' says Mr Purdham who decided his career lay in computers when he was 15.

So great is the private use of business computers that by using domain addresses, major online suppliers can pinpoint whose workers are buying what. The book supplier Amazon, for example, found that the bestseller among one major bank's employees was Hannibal, the novel about a serial killer, a sequel to the film The Silence of the Lambs.

The private use of a firm's link to the internet is also hitting the bottom line, with one industry estimate showing non-work use can cost a 1,000-employee company up to £20m a year. As much as 59 per cent of internet use at the office is estimated as not work-related. And, as a result of all this inappropriate use, increasing numbers of employees are being disciplined and sacked for unwarranted internet abuse.

One of the major problems created by the internet is that although most people know how to work it, many don't really know how it works. And because they don't know, they have difficulty figuring out ways of controlling it. Managers may be skilled in auditing usage of paper, pens and yellow sticky memo pads, but the internet for many of them is a world of hi-tech mystery as unfathomable as the inside of Dr Who's Tardis.

Steve Purdham, CEO of SurfControl, gives the example of how one company couldn't figure out why its network was so slow, delaying the processing of sales orders. The reason, it transpired, was that all the workers in the production area had taken to using the net to listen to the radio.

"We seem to have reached the stage where almost everyone knows someone who knows someone who has been fired for not using the internet properly," he says. "Orange fired 35 last week. But it shouldn't reach that stage.

"One of the problems is that the internet is being put into operations without anyone really understanding the impact it is going to have. The internet is just something else within the company that needs to be managed and there has to be a tool to manage it.'' That is where SurfControl comes in. Its software products allow companies to monitor the websites its employees are visiting, and restrict access to what each company decides are inappropriate sites.

But although the concept, like those behind most successful ventures, is simple, the details took more than two years to develop. To work, a protective system not only has to be alert to words, it has to have a contextually based filter too. A worker who types in the word breast as a keyword, for example, might be looking for porn, but could also be hunting for a cancer site or a cookery site.

"It is very complex. Some addresses are very similar but very different in content. Take moneyworld.com and moneyworld.co.uk. How do you know which is a hard core porn site and which is hard core financial advice. As an employee, if you go to the wrong site, you get fired.'' Moneyworld.co.uk is financial.

The system developed by SurfControl, formerly JSB Software, not only works, it has turned the Congelton-based company into that rare British corporate animal, a market leader in its sector of the US-dominated internet industry.

When Steve Purdham joined JSB it was a run-of-the-mill computer company. "Then it was a bog-standard company supplying up-and-coming micro-systems into companies with business packages. In the last three years the business has gone from a parochial UK operation to a global operation.

"It had grown to a workforce of 40 or 50, and stabilised because there was nothing driving it beyond that point. That tends to happen to companies in the UK. They reach a certain level and they stabilise because you need something to break out of the mould. We are a very successful company, and you are seen as being an overnight success, but it is like everything else - there is a lot of apprenticeship before all the right ducks are in line and everything starts to work.

"The big change of direction came for us about three years ago," says Mr Purdham who was then MD of European operations for the company.

"The real issue was do you continue in a state of mediocrity or do you start taking risks and going for it. It was the realisation that we had to break the mould that was the driving force. No matter what we had done, or how we had done it, we had to think about what we were going to move forward with. And to get there, there needed to be a change of mindset."

The turning point came, appropriately, in a café in California's Silicon Valley when he was on a visit to the US side of the operation with the now executive chairman, Rob Barrow. "We were sitting in this coffee shop saying things like, 'Where do we go, what do we do?' and as a result of that caffeine-charged meeting, the whole ball started to move forward. By spending time in places like Silicon Valley you could see there was more to life.

"At that time, in the Nineties, the internet was growing very strongly, especially on the West Coast. We wanted to do something different, we wanted to grow a business, and we wanted to break the mould. The choice at that time was one of two directions, internet or biotech. We knew bugger-all about biotech, but we knew loads about the internet. So that was the route we went. The concept of SurfControl is obvious now, and the concept is simple, but designing the system was complex. It took us a couple of years to develop the engineering.

"We knew we had produced the best technology with SurfControl, but we were also aware it is not necessarily the best technology that wins, it is about marketing too. We knew the market had to be America. The single biggest thing we learnt was that we had to be persistent and we had to be marketing it all the time.

"In the UK, the attitude has been that you have to sell one thing before you are allowed some money to sell the next one. The Americans say that if there is an opportunity you have to go for it. Five years ago the difference between the two was fairly significant. The UK attitude to investment was that you were limited to never enough money to make it happen, so the probability your investment was going to fail was always going to be higher.''

The company, now worth more than $1bn, has a staff of 300, all but 100 based in America, and more than 40,000 customers world-wide. Its acquisition of Cyber Patrol and Surfwatch means it also has millions of domestic customers. On the business supply side, it not only makes one-off sales with its system, but provides ongoing service and updating. Crucially, that means that as well as taking money today, it is growing revenues for tomorrow.

Despite popular perceptions, company research shows pornography is not the biggest problem among office surfers. Some 59 per cent of internet use at work has nothing to do with the work, but only 2 or 3 per cent involves porn. Sports, news and entertainment are more important, says Mr Purdham.

One of the main defences to private use of the internet is that the company is the winner in the end because transactions on the Net are more quickly executed. But Mr Purdham has an answer to that.

"A guy in New York told me controls were a waste of time because he had bought a new PC in 15 minutes, and that had he gone downtown to buy it, he would have taken two hours. His argument was that he had saved the company one and half hours. I asked him how he had decided which PC to buy, and it transpired he had used the Net for three weeks looking for what he wanted. He then spent another five hours online in work time looking at the different suppliers for the lowest price. The bottom line was that he had spent eight hours on line to save the company an hour and half.''.

Where does he see SurfControl in five to 10 years? "That is a long time nowadays, but we have to grow the business, move out of a loss-making position, and I would love us to become the Microsoft of the UK.''

For a man who sold sticks at seven, built his first crude computer at 13 - "I wasn't too good with the cogs and wheels, so two and two made five'' - and persuaded ICL to pay him through university, such an ambition does not seem overly extravagant.

"When I was 15 and working in a petrol station a Land Rover came in with an ICL sticker in the back window. The driver was an ICL engineer, and I talked to him about computers, and as a result of that conversation I got sponsored by ICL through university,'' he says.

"I have always be taught that if you ask, the worst you can get is a 'No', but you might get a 'Yes'. That is something that came from my parents and which has served me well though life.

"Most people even today describe me as Tigger. If anyone tries to push me down, I will always bounce up again no matter what happens. Many people like that other Winnie the Pooh character, Heehaw, walking around saying the world is coming to an end tomorrow."

That, one suspects, is a philosophy that was honed on the byways and backstreets of Spennymore by a young man on a bike with a saddlebag full of sticks and a head full of dreams. Three decades on, the dreams are a reality, and although the boy is 36 years older and much richer, he is still delivering, and still going places.