Rob Gethen Smith, information systems director at Tate, said, "The decision to move into the cloud was sparked by plans to refresh the front-end of the main website and ambitious plans to increase online interactions and discussions about art. Tate used "bits of cloud hosting" and decided to re-launch with a new hosting package from service provider NTT Europe called Compute Cloud. We had no time to wait around, working out what to do with hosting," said Stack. As it wasn't in the package, we faced additional costs and had to go round the houses to find money. "Previously, we would want to deploy pre-supplied software, such as e-learning and open source software, only to find that we needed specific versions of PHP or MySQL. The organisation has also made changes to its hosting capabilities to cut costs. Stack said a lot of the website is based on hand-coded HTML files, meaning website updates are done manually, which is time-consuming and means only skilled personnel can make changes. We're in the process of overhauling, updating and re-designing every page and every system powering it," he said. "Tate's website is 10 years' old and has never had a website re-design.
John Stack, head of Tate online, said the project to completely overhaul the site has already been two years in the making. This will be replaced with a Drupal 7-based platform to move the site from a "brochure approach" to a social platform, encouraging debate and interaction about art as well as supporting user-generated content. The 10-year-old Tate website, which receives over 18 million visitors a year, currently uses hand-coded HTML files.