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DreamHost Got the Apology Wrong This TimeBy now you've probably read a thing or two about the typing error at DreamHost that caused the company to accidentally bill customers for roughly $7.5 million earlier this week.
DreamHost, characteristically, was quick to own up to the mistake, and let customers know what happened, through its blog. Of course, with a mistake of this magnitude there's really no alternative to the honest-apology approach. I can only imagine that trying to keep something like this from getting out would at best cost the company its customers' trust, and at worst make the whole incident indistinguishable from credit card fraud.
But I wonder how much damage DreamHost might have done to its reputation with this particular gaffe, and more specifically with the form and tone of its apology.
This is particularly interesting to me because of DreamHost's successful past work in the areas of apologies and their tones. I've held up DreamHost in the past as an example of how to go about apologizing for mistakes. After a 2005 outage, it was precisely the way the company blogged about the outage that earned it, in many cases, the appreciation and respect of its customers.
(We ran a story about that situation and its outcome here)
This time, though, the company might have taken the wrong tone in its apology.
It's a tricky thing, being glib. Particularly in the context of an apology. And there's a world of difference between informal/forthright, and jokey and (as I've seen it described in several places) condescending.
Specifically (and I'll keep this brief, since this point has already been made elsewhere) the offenses here are: the title "Um, Whoops" and tone ("Ha, the joke is on you! I guess. Um, okay, no, not really, I'm sorry."), as well as the picture of Homer Simpson accompanying the post seem destined to be taken badly by customers who are understandably upset to find their bank accounts missing considerable sums of money.
This time, it seems, DreamHost's personal and transparent mode of interacting with customers appears to have misfired.
Customer reaction, even the reaction revealed in the blog's comment section, served to illustrate the affection DreamHost's customers had for the company and its methods following its previous problems. The more than 600 comments on Monday's apology post paint a different picture. While not every comment is negative, and certainly some are supportive and appreciative, the usual DreamHost feel-good atmosphere is decidedly absent. And a good portion of the posts are of the "Jokes are NOT APPROPRIATE in this situation" variety.
It remains to be seen just how significant the impact of this error is on DreamHost's business, and how many of its customers actually set off in search of another service provider. But it's certainly a change for me to be pointing out DreamHost as an example of a company doing a bad job of handling a volatile situation.
I can't even think, off the top of my head, of who I'm going to use next time I need an example of "here's how you should have done it" from a customer service standpoint. Will I really have to look outside the Web hosting business.
I hate to be glib myself, given the subject matter, but is it really that hard to get this right? Customers appreciate your candor. But they're not your buddies. Especially when you're messing with their money.
[Note: and here we're just talking about the effectiveness of the apology. Of course, there's the entirely separate issue of just how many major catastrophes necessitating large-scale public apologies are acceptable from a single service provider, and in what span of time.]
WHIR Magazine Preview: January 2008
The January 2008 issue arrived at the WHIR office from the printers today (we sent the files over last week), and while I'm not explicitly, technically there, my understanding is that the new issues are looking good and ready to go.
They ought to be arriving in the mailboxes of subscribers shortly, and with this issue it's particularly worth understanding in advance what to expect.
As you may already be aware, the January issue is the first of what we intend to be an annual exercise, the Hottest Hosts guide to Web hosting services. Of course the notion of gathering Web hosts or similar service providers is nothing new. I can think of at least one very relevant online example.
This particular directory is, to the best of my knowledge, unique to the printed medium, and an interesting extension of the hosting directory ecosystem into a new format.
We'll be going to great lengths to put this issue in the hands of new users, particularly those who might be unfamiliar with theWHIR's work. This will be our largest print run ever, and we'll be distributing the issue at events and conferences throughout 2008.
As I see it, there are several distinct groups of people for whom the issue is of particular value:
Hosting customers or potential hosting customers:
Web hosting consumers will find a long list of hosting providers, arranged into a broad set of categories that make finding the solution to a specific need a simple process.
Hosting providers, or similar service providers:
For hosting providers, the guide provides the obvious vehicle for reaching those readers through their listings. But it puts them on the other side of that transaction, listing many categories of vendor services for Web hosting providers. And it inherently provides a thorough, if not completely exhaustive, portrait of the competition in some of the key areas of the hosting business.
Vendors serving Web hosts:
They have similar access to a venue for reaching customers in the hosting space, as well as a lengthy listing of possible partners.
Companies looking to partner with Web hosts:
People seeking to develop business relationships with providers in the hosting space can look to this guide for cues on where and how to contact important providers in the business.
While on the one hand, we hope the guide will help introduce some new readers to theWHIR, we hope our existing users will find it a useful tool as well.
Interview Notes with Dave Roberts of Vyatta
I recently had the opportunity (actually, it was a couple of opportunities) to speak to Dave Roberts, vice president of strategy and marketing at Vyatta about the company's open-source networking platform. It's an interesting product, and as yet a bit of a departure for the hosting business in terms of the way these services are deployed
As usual, many of the key elements of the conversation made it into the article we posted on the site, but much more was said about the Vyatta community (it is open source software, after all) that helps to further fill out the picture of Vyatta the product. It seemed, as it often does, like excellent fodder for the blog
First, a lengthier explanation of the model Vyatta uses to package its open source product (Red Hat versus MySQL)
"Essentially, there are a variety of open source business models; what we typically call here, just for convenient shorthand, the MySQL model and the Red Hat model. In the MySQL model, a company writes all its code and then releases it as open source. So if you go to the MySQL website, you're basically getting code that's written 100 percent by MySQL with contributions from the outside world. If you go to Red Hat, you're essentially getting a distribution that is pulling components from all over. Red Hat incorporates MySQL, a Linux kernel, Apache, Perl and all these other components and pulls them all together in a distribution and gives you some hooks to be able to manage it. We are more like the Red Hat model than the MySQL model; we are pulling together components from other places, but we're also doing a lot of our own work to integrate those components."
This difference translates into a difference in the way the user interacts with the company's support, and with the product itself:
"Our fundamental belief is that Red Hat's community is different than MySQL's community because of how things are done. So if you discover a bug in MySQL, you're going to send it to MySQL, not to Red Hat, even though Red Hat incorporates MySQL. What you would submit to Red Hat are patches to Red Hat's specific stuff.
To a certain extent, our community is the sum total of all the communities of all the projects that we incorporate."
Finally, Roberts offered an explanation of who he envisions using the product, and how he sees that relationship contributing to the development of the Vyatta platform, both within the user's system and at the top level:
"We're designing for people who want to deal with our package exclusively, but we make it fully available for people that want to go deeper. Our philosophy is to present something that is very highly integrated and wrapped up, and is Vyatta, as opposed to just a collection of packages, even though we're not ashamed of the packages we use and we don't try to hide that. We'll tell you flat out what's in there
One of the things we see as an advantage is its based on Linux. So even though we're trying to provide a nice experience that is one of a traditional proprietary appliance in terms of being highly integrated - the fact that you can jump down to the Linux level, which we don't prevent you from doing at all, is an advantage to people. And you can extend the system, because it's based on Linux, with other Linux packages.
Essentially we're compatible with a Debian package format, and so you can add Debian packages to a Vyatta system. For instance, we don't ship it this way, but if you wanted to run MySQL on your router, you could. If you wanted to extend it with another package we don't yet provide, you could. You'll lose some integration when you do that. You're going to have to administer MySQL at the Linux level. You're not going to do that in the nice GUIs and shells that we provide.
One of the goals that we have over time is to allow the community to provide that level of integration for different packages that they find beneficial. And that's something that we see to a certain extent in the Red Hat community.
If I had to discuss the differences between the MySQL community and the Red Hat community - the MySql community is more of a developer community that is working on MySQL itself. The Red Hat community is more of an integrator community. So they're taking other packages that they find interesting for which red hat doesn't have any official distribution and basically making them red hat compatible."
Lessons from C I Host, NaviSite - Handling a "PR Nightmare"
To someone who covers Web hosting news for a living, the of-the-minute issue of last week was the level of customer outrage stirring around the incidents at C I Host (a break-in and theft) and NaviSite (a week-long server outage).
Though the incidents themselves were very different, their impact on each company's relationship with its customers was nearly identical - in a nutshell "my website is down and I want it back up."
Outrage is an interesting thing. It sometimes seems that a certain percentage of people are inclined to be outraged about just about anything. And I have no doubt that a certain percentage of the customers a Web host deals with in a given day is going to be angry, regardless of how good the company's service is.
This hardly falls into that category, however. In each of these cases, messageboards, blogs and - most interestingly, from a publishing-a-website perspective - the comment sections of the stories we've run on both issues have been spilling over with customers venting their frustration and recounting their own personal tales of lost service, lost business or unresponsive hosts.
And in both cases, the complaints seem to have a lot to do with the confusion surrounding the problems. Customers of both companies - in some cases, people whose sites had been offline for as much as a week - seem most concerned with the fact that they're not getting the kind of explanation they want from their service providers.
There are two sides to this kind of situation (or maybe there are more than two, but lets say for the sake of the next couple paragraphs that there are two).
On the one hand, obviously neither of these companies wanted their services to go down. Obviously, both companies want to get those customers back online as fast as possible. I can only imagine that in both cases, the company threw everything it had at the problem of getting things back online (we can probably all agree - priority number one for a Web host).
And yes, that's priority number one for customers too. But customers also want to know they're being treated honestly.
The other side of these situations is that hosts too often seem to want to cover up or downplay the mistakes they might have made. I wouldn't implicate any host in particular here. It seems that almost every time there's an outage, customers report having to fight to get the cause of the disruption out of their hosts. Sometimes they point to explanations they believe to be outright lies. Those claims may or may not be true, but they illustrate the point - confusion is a problem.
A major outage isn't exactly a find-the-silver-lining sort of situation. You'd probably spend a lot of time looking for it and not come up with much. But a problem is always, at least, an opportunity for a company to demonstrate to customers that it's ready to handle a problem.
In a conversation with theWHIR, C I Host's chief corporate counsel James Eckles said "we're just as victimized as our customers."
NaviSite's chief marketing officer Rathin Sinha said "If we look at this issue as something where unanticipated things happened and the company did everything it could to resolve that and restore services, I think that is where the focus ought to be. And that's where most of our customers focused."
Neither of these is an outright offensive point of view, or blatant buck-passing per se, but I'd bet neither one is exactly what their customers are waiting to hear.
A little free PR advice from somebody who sees a lot of PR: if it sounds like spin, it's not very good spin.
Better than any spin, in my opinion, is transparency.
A great example of that is the major outage DreamHost suffered about 16 months ago (you can read our article about it here). The company used its blog to keep customers appraised of the situation at every turn, and assure them that it was doing everything it could to fix things. It left posts and comments up, creating a forum for customers to discuss things. And it took responsibility for the mistake.
Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of customers who offered up opinions on the incident were understanding and even grateful.
At the time, Seth Godin summed it up really well by writing:
"Lesson one: when things get messed up, being clear, self-critical and apologetic is really the only way to deal with customers if you expect them to give you another chance."
It's important to understand that if you fail to deliver on your services, you could end up backing up your relationships with customers to the point where you're basically selling them on your services again. A good start would be giving them a reason to trust you.
This past Sunday and Monday, separate incidents at Rackspace caused significant outages. Now, Rackspace is quite a bit bigger than DreamHost, but it took much the same tack, keeping customers appraised of its repair process, and most importantly, remaining accountable.
In one of its posts (which are still up on the company's site), the company said another thing I'd like to borrow to help make my point:
"We cannot promise that hardware won't break, that software won't fail or that we will always be perfect. What we can promise is that if something goes wrong we will rise to the occasion, take action, resolve the issue and accept responsibility. If you are a Rackspace customer and don't think we've lived up to this promise at anytime during the outage, please let your Account Manager know."
I'm not really interested in making any distinctions between the quality of the services Rackspace provides and those provided by C I Host or NaviSite, or any other host for that matter.
But I do think that even though the company is living through a very comparable situation, I'd be surprised if Rackspace lost many customers over this outage.
The Green Grid Draws New Guidelines
The Green Grid Issues New Guides We’ve discussed The Green Grid before. They’re the “consortium of information technology companies and professionals seeking to improve energy efficiency in data centers around the globe.”
There isn’t really a voice of authority just yet in the green IT issue, which tends to be a problem among companies touting their “green” services, or more importantly among the customers attempting to discern the value of one “green” claim in comparison to another.
The Green Grid may not quite have it’s eye on that voice-of-authority position, but it is certainly setting itself up at the center of some consensus-based thinking about the environmental considerations of hardware and data center building.
And while involvement in the organization is a paid-for privilege, the products of that thinking aren’t always kept under lock and key.
Last week, The Green Grid posted three new white papers on its site, available for free download to anyone who wants to look at them. Their rather lengthy and descriptive titles are as follows:
“The Green Grid Data Center Power Efficiency Metrics: PUE and DciE”
“Existing Metrics, Guidelines and Programs Affecting Data Center and IT Energy Efficiency”
“Qualitative Analysis of Power Distribution Configurations for Data Centers”
And they can all be downloaded from this page.
There isn’t a ton of freely available hard-numbers analysis or nuts-and-bolts instruction on measuring or improving data center efficiency out there. And that alone should make the white papers worth perusing.
Whether the standards and metrics that the green grid proposes here are destined for widespread recognition and adoption isn’t a sure thing. But metrics and practices such as these have a built-in value that exists independent of any official adoption or endorsement.
More ISPCON Notes: David Snead Brings SaaS Doom and Gloom
Probably the last of my notes from ISPCON fall 2007 here. Playing a little catch-up, but I’m just about caught up at this point.
One of the most interesting things I witnessed at ISPCON was (WHIR blogger and columnist) David Snead’s 8:45 a.m. Wednesday presentation “Negotiating the SaaS Minefield.”
We’ve mostly all been exposed to the SaaS hype, I’d imagine, by this point. It seems like the issue about which hosting providers and their suppliers are most uniformly excited. That is, except for David Snead, who sometimes seems like the lone dissenting voice in the chorus of folks talking up the technology.
It’s not that he’s saying “SaaS is bad.” It’s really more like “hey, wait a second now.” But it’s unique enough to make his opinion especially noticeable, especially in the format of a conference agenda, where much of the material is outright promotional.
David’s particular message regarding SaaS is nothing new to the WHIR – he’s been providing us with content on the subject for quite some time. And needless to say, I’ve read everything David’s written for the WHIR. But that (perhaps surprisingly) took nothing away from his presentation, which was a very informative and engaging lesson in liability as it could apply to a Web host’s SaaS efforts.
In fact, I don’t think I saw as many questions in any other session, and it wasn’t exactly a packed house for this pre-9:00 a.m. event.
His premise: Web hosting itself is technically a “hosted service.” But for the sort of simple “ping, power and pipe” configuration that some hosts provide, it is very easy to do a risk assessment.
Foundational to the discussion is the Communications Decency Act, which, while partially overturned, continues to dictate that if you provide computer access by multiple users, you’re not liable for the data you process, because you do not manipulate the data. Therefore a dial-up provider, for instance, has no liability should a customer watch a copyright infringing YouTube clip.
When you begin to work in SaaS, you begin to manipulate data, and accrue liability. A risk assessment becomes more difficult.
Adding complexity to services adds liability to those relationships. And that liability should be negotiated in the service contracts, both between service providers and their customers and between service providers and their vendors.
Terms of service contracts in the typical hosting model are virtually standardized. That is, companies are comfortable enough in their risk assessments that they’re willing to use standardized terms of service (sometimes borrowing existing ones, often from Rackspace, in David’s experience).
In the SaaS model, nothing is standardized, and companies may be taking on more liability than they realize in offering these services. More complex contracts are required.
One specific piece of advice he offered was that SaaS application providers should have written contracts that actually have customers indicate their written consent.
The expanding of context goes upwards, too. Renegotiating vendor deals is critical too. It’s key, he says, that your vendors have “skin in the game.” Don’t accept their first offer of accountability, and make sure they provide SLAs with compensation when they’re not met, and indemnify you when their products don’t work.
Most of this work is, obviously, something you’re going to need a legal advisor to do for you: drafting your terms of service, negotiating your vendor contracts.
Another thing that can help protect your business against failures in outsourced services is insurance. Your insurance company has special considerations for Internet businesses, but it may not be aware you’re in the Internet business. Make sure that’s the case.
So the title may have been ever so slightly misleading. David Snead’s SaaS message isn’t all “doom and gloom.” But he is acutely aware of the fact that service providers don’t always consider all the legal repercussions of incorporating solutions into their services.
Really, he’s all positivity.
More ISPCON Notes: Douglas J. Erwin Day Two Keynote
Technically, ISPCON ended 10 days ago. However, since that 10-day period includes two weekends and five days of very enjoyable vacationing, I would prefer if you considered the interval between my accounts of the event something more like one day.
One of the standout presentations in a session that included two out-of-the-ordinary keynotes was the day-two keynote delivered by Douglas J. Erwin, CEO of The Planet.
Erwin’s stint as head of the company coincided with the investment by GI Partners that led to the merger between The Planet and EV1 Servers, and the injection of a little bit more big-business culture at The Planet.
That is not to say that the company was poorly run before GI Partners, or before Erwin, but to address the common occurrence that Web hosting companies built by tech specialists are often built around that special expertise first and foremost, rather than according to more old-fashioned business principles.
This are the issues mostly addressed by Erwin, who skipped the standard esoteric hosting theorizing and sales pitch and instead offered quite a candid discussion of what he intends to accomplish with The Planet.
Like the previous days keynote (given by Cogent’s Dave Schaeffer), Erwin’s address had that sort of impact that had attendees nodding thoughtfully. He described a world of “geeks” and “suits,” differing –but not necessarily conflicting – backgrounds that have to be reconciled in moving a Web hosting business forward.
He willingly described himself as a “suit,” and somebody who has been working to learn about Web hosting since he became the head of one of the business’s biggest players. Fortunately, he says, he’s surrounded by people who really understand Web hosting. Maybe that’s where those old-fashioned business principles begin to kick in.
One of the challenges facing Web hosts, says Erwin, is a limited talent pool in which to find employees, and a circumstance that sees those employees following new opportunities from job to job. Among the more interesting projects he described at The Planet was an effort to create a company where employees would be excited about coming to work in the morning and that they would think of as a place to build a career.
Rarely did he talk about technology. He talked about dealing with customers. Asking them if the company is doing a good job, or for suggestions on what the company could do differently, and how. One of the points he tried to drive home is The Planet’s determination to watch whether it is succeeding using tangible metrics, which enable the company to improve.
Those points of focus, customers and employees, were visible in the examples he used, showing the company’s new facilities, and the customer service practices being put in place.
The folks I talked to seemed to feel like they’d left the keynote with something to think about, which is probably the mark of a good presentation. It will be interesting to see if they can identify the places where the old-fashioned business principles fit into their businesses.ISPCON: Dave Schaeffer, Day One Keynote
The way Jon Price (ISPCON organizer) introduced it, I got the impression that getting Dave Schaeffer (Cogent Communications Founder/CEO) to keynote at this event was a big coup for him. That is, he said he’d been working on it for a while, and he seemed pretty happy to have him here.
I can see why he’d feel that way, though. Shaeffer’s presentation had that feeling of significance. There was nothing rote about it – it was a well-reasoned argument on a subject about which he is clearly passionate.
The presentation was particularly articulate, too. As conference keynotes go, it was one of the most free-flowing and confident I’ve seen. Here is a guy who clearly knows what he’s talking about.
Despite the fact that we were given a warning in advance, I found myself less than 100 percent able to keep up with Schaeffer, who – as Jon described in his introduction – says a lot in a few words.
That, and the presentation dealt very specifically, and in a great deal of detail, with an issue of particular importance to the ISP and access business – and did so in some very specific access-related terms.
The crux of the presentation was Schaeffer’s attempt to answer the question at the heart of the net neutrality debate – is bandwidth a commodity?
His answer was, unequivocally, yes. Everything Cogent does, he says, (in particular designing its network) is done with the understanding that the network is a commodity.
The network itself is a very large system for delivering content. And for certain kinds of content (the kinds that require a two-way means of communication), it’s the only way to reliably deliver them.
The problem with the large, incumbent carriers on the other side of the neutrality debate, he says, is that they’re a monopolistic business that has been allowed to ride for a long time on assets that were long ago paid for by their rate base.
Efforts against neutrality, for closed-off networks and prioritized traffic, are based on a desire by those incumbent carriers to keep per-bit rates high – preserving the old model of network and application packaged together, and moving into higher-margin services.
Obviously, this is one side of an argument, provided by the head of a controversial enough company with a clear agenda. But it is a well-reasoned and impassioned argument, which at the very least, makes for a hell of a keynote.
In case it’s not perfectly clear, Schaeffer thinks it’s critical that service providers support net neutrality.
ISPCON: Ravi Agarwal Still Making the Case for SaaS
Attended the morning session “Strategies for Growing your Hosted Business” yesterday, delivered by Ravi Agarwal, CEO of groupSPARK and Rich Bader, president and CEO of EasyStreet Online Services.
The presentation offered hosted Exchange as one such “strategy for growing your hosted business” – unsurprising given the involvement of groupSPARK, which provides a private-label platform for selling hosted services such as Microsoft’s Exhange, SharePoint and CRM.
Rich’s part of the presentation included some interesting insight on the process of selling hosted Exchange – EasyStreet is, among other things, a groupSPARK reseller. The company, he says, focuses a lot of its work on grassroots efforts, making itself known through posting in forums. EasyStreet employs a blogger who focuses on small business issues and has developed a following of small business readers.
He pointed out that the small business market is a business that deals specifically with relationships, and that those relationships with vendors are what convince small businesses to make purchases, with the exception of particularly low-value services.
Ravi’s contribution seemed a bit like the typical groupSPARK boilerplate. Admittedly I haven’t seen this particular presentation before – it’s just a feeling I got. The information had a lot to do with the value of a private label hosted exchange, a point I would have assumed groupSPARK had long since made. I know I’ve heard a similar (or identical) argument at almost every event I’ve been to in the last few years.
That, perhaps, was the most interesting aspect of the presentation for me – I wanted to know what the objective of the session was (for Ravi, in particular). Is he preaching to the choir? Are these attendees who actually haven’t heard the case for SaaS before? Or are they willingly submitting to being won over through repetition?
Fortunately, I had the opportunity to sit down with Ravi shortly after the presentation. He said it was a combination of a couple of those factors. Regardless of how often some of us may have heard that message, he says, some folks are hearing it for the first time. On the other hand, some people are in the process of making a decision about whether hosted private-label applications are something they want to involve in their business.
What’s more, he says, he makes contact with a few prospective (or eventual) customers after every one of these presentations. In fact, he met Rich at an ISPCON event two years ago.
It seems like the SaaS message still needs a bit of a push, even at the very basic level. It certainly answers a question that’s been nagging at me for a while.
ISPCON: Don't Get Greedy, Says Tom Millitzer
My introduction to this Fall ISPCON's program, and one of the sessions in the 9:00 a.m. opening slot, was a presentation delivered by Tom Millitzer – M&A expert, president of New Commerce Communications, WHIR blogger and all-around entertaining gentleman.
I have my suspicions as to the freshness of the material, which seemed like it may have included parts of previous presentations – not because it was dated, but because it was a very sort of general-purpose primer to buying and selling ISPs. Also, Tom said parts of it were from his presentation at FISPA last week.
But I've never seen Tom present at an event like this before, so the freshness of the material is really beside the point
The presentation, "Positioning Your Internet Company for Sale - and Making More Money," was, unsurprisingly, a discussion of the ins and outs of selling an Internet company. And Tom, who makes his living helping companies with this sort of transaction, makes it sound simple enough.
Rule number one, for instance, is "be honest." There's a process a buyer goes through, which he describes in a series of categories labeled: identify, qualify, value, negotiate, structure, validate, close, integrate.
Never having personally bought or sold a company, I am nevertheless able to make sense of those categories intuitively. As a seller (which we'll assume you are for the sake of this blog post), you'll want to make yourself apparent to the buyer as early in that process as possible – around the "identify" or "qualify" stage. That makes a lot of sense too.
In fact, the process of selling a company ends up sounding awfully similar to the process of selling a product. That is, you have to identify your buyer. You have to figure out exactly what it is they want. You have to work to position yourself in that light. And you have to put the product in front of that buyer in a way they're going to appreciate.
Interestingly, Tom says the "big secret" about this sort of acquisition (and I feel I should stress here that he made an awfully big deal about the secret) is that "greed tanks more deals than anything."
Tom says he's seen more deals fall apart as a result of either the buyer or the seller getting greedy (and it goes both ways, he says), than for any other reason.
In the seller's case, they may decide after negotiating a deal almost to its conclusion that they want to raise the price. Or they may assume too soon that they've concluded a deal that isn't quite done.
For the buyer it's much the same. Greed, as he sees it, can mean becoming so enamored of the idea of being somebody who makes deals that they start pushing the price down just to see if they can do it.
ISPCON: Exhibit Hall Setup Pics
ISPCON: Exhibit Hall Setup The exhibit hall opens up at 3:00 today (and frankly, I'm a fan of the scheduling, mostly because I'm not a fan of missing sessions because I'm at the booth, or vice versa), so at the moment folks are just getting set up.
I took a few behind-the scenes photos of the exhibit hall, and since they're already up on our Flickr account (where I'll be posting pictures regularly for the next few days) I figured I'd post up something here as well.
A view from the Exhibit Hall entrance. Tuesday morning.
Exhibitor booths arriving in shipping crates.
The Hostopia booth in "bundle of plastic" mode. Of course, we'd love to have you stop by the WHIR booth, which is booth 213, right between the big ON DEMAND SERVICES sign:
And VoIP CITY:
ISPCON: Getting Underway
The WHIR is here at ISPCON Fall 2007, and while things are just getting started around here, I thought I'd take the opportunity to offer a bit of an intro to our blog coverage of the event. Fall ISPCON is usually, in my experience anyway, held in Santa Clara. But this year's event is going on in San Jose itself. So far, I haven't felt the effect much more than in the form of a considerably shorter cab ride from airport to hotel. Score one for San Jose, I suppose.
The venue - the San Jose McEnery Convention Center - seems a little more confined than last year's venue - the Santa Clara Convention Center. Whether that's good, bad or totally irrelevant remains to be seen. The exhibit hall is definitely smaller.
After a first pass through the session schedule, there are a few sessions I definitely intend to check out.
Tuesday I hope to be in attendance at (WHIR Blogger) Tom Millitzer's "Positioning Your Internet Company for Sale - and Making More Money," "Strategies for Growing your Hosting Business" with groupSPARK's Ravi Agarwal and EasyStreet's Rich Bader and the keynote "Neutrality's Linchpin, is Bandwidth a Commodity?" with Cogent's Dave Schaeffer.
Actually, Tom's presentation has already happened, and I'll post more about it later.
On Wednesay, I hope to stop by the "Negotiating the SaaS Minefield" session with (WHIR blogger) David Snead at 8:45, the keynote "Beyond Hosting: Unlocking Profits with On Demand IT" with The Planet's Douglas Erwin, "Virtualization: The Need for Green Data Centers" with Acronis's Bob Thaler and "Guerilla Marketing for Service Providers" with Larry Loebig of the Guerilla Marketing Association. That's the plan as it stands right now, anyway, after that first pass. By all means, let me know if you think there's something can't-miss on the schedule.
More to come from ISPCON, and if you're here at the show, hopefully we'll get a chance to meet you.
Google Grabs the Modular Data Center Patent
On Wednesday, Google was assigned the patent for something called the “Modular Data Center,” a distinction for which it applied in 2003, and which was given the final approval this week by the US Patent Office.
Specifically, the idea describes a data center built within an intermodal shipping container - the sort of container handled by multiple carriers and shipped in multiple modes.
The obvious application there being the sort of prototype mobile data centers that have been on the road the past few years, such as Sun’s Project Blackbox or, say, APC’s InfrastruXure Express.
The patent itself describes using rack or shelf mount computing systems, mounted and configured to be shipped and operated within the container (A lot of that is, from what I can tell, language taken directly from the patent, just barely paraphrased).
So it would seem that Google managed to patent the (very general sounding) idea behind some of the more interesting data center construction projects in recent years. However, the point here is not “what about Project Blackbox?” As many of the writers covering Sun’s Project Blackbox tour were quick to point out, the mobile data center is not so much a breakthrough as a refinement. HP and IBM have offered things like this for a while – to customers who were willing to pay.
The idea, according to this Register article, seems to be that Google is unlikely to set out immediately to impose its patent rights on companies like Sun, given its past complaints about the injustice of the patent system. But it’s not clear just what Google does intend to do, or whether the company has modular data centers either in production or operation.
According to The Register, Sun is aware of the patent issued Wednesday, but is holding off on making any sort of comment about it until the company is better acquainted with just how it stands to be impacted.
WHIR Magazine October 07 Issue - Who's Who
I’ve got a copy of the October issue of the WHIR magazine sitting on my desk, which means it ought to start hitting mailboxes this week or next. It seemed like now would be a good time to give you an idea of what to expect from this issue.
This one is a bit of a departure from some of our past tendencies. That is, we tend to cover events (the things that happen in the Web hosting business) and trends (the over-arching ideas that direct the industry’s progress).
With this “Who’s Who” issue, we follow those thoughts upstream a little bit, to the companies whose efforts produce those trends and events, and the individuals whose ideas and actions drive the efforts of those companies.
It’s pretty rare in the hosting business that a particular individual is recognized as being a great individual influence on the hosting business, but it does happen. And we set out to profile some of the most notable characters in the hosting business, illustrating some of its biggest personalities, brightest ideas and most interesting stories.
Some of the personalities we profile in this issue include former EV1 Servers CEO Robert Marsh, former Communitech CEO and current Aplus.Net chief Gabriel Murphy, Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons, Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, and former Dialtone Internet CEO Alvaro Albarracin.
Obviously there are other notable individuals, but since we’re operating with a limited amount of space we set out to put together some quality work on these specific stories, rather than fit in everything under the sun. So if you happen to think somebody is “notable” but you don’t find them mentioned on these pages, you’re not necessarily wrong. In fact, I might go so far as to say you’re necessarily right, since you would appear to have noted them yourself.
I’m looking forward to hearing some feedback on this issue, as it’s a bit different from many of the things we’ve done in the past. If you happen to be at ISPCON in two weeks, might I suggest that particular venue as a good opportunity to both pick up a copy of the new issue – that is, if you’re not already a subscriber (it’s free) – and to let me know what you think face-to-face.
PEER 1 Appreciates its Customers, Demonstrably
Last night, PEER 1 Network, the dedicated, colocated and managed hosting provider held a customer appreciation event at the reliable Toronto party-hosting spot C-Lounge. A few of us from theWHIR had the opportunity to attend, and while it wasn’t informative in any traditional manner (nor, I should clarify, was that the intent), I did walk away with some interesting impressions of PEER 1 the organization.
Notably not a business event, the evening did provide for some opportunities for customers to throw back a couple of "peertinis" on the company, talk business with one another, or to get to know the parts of the PEER 1 team they didn’t already know.
I had the opportunity to speak several times, and at some length, to Jose Santos, director of marketing for the company, who has the sort of unique perspective that allows him to provide a very specific assessment of the environment at PEER 1. That is, he has been working with the same dedicated hosting assets since the days of Dialtone Internet, which was acquired by Interland, which later sold its Dedicated hosting business to PEER 1 on the way to becoming the consumer-focused Web.com.
Santos, as a result, has experienced a range of working environments, and a variety of corporate approaches to the same customers and products. He’s noticeably not exaggerating when he says the working environment at this company is the best he’s experienced, and that it would take more than money (or, you know, a lot of money) to convince him to move on just now. In PEER 1’s approach to customers, to marketing and to its business, he sees a lot of potential.
PEER 1, in the humble opinion of one of its hard-working executives, has the potential to be something special. And Santos wants to be there when it happens. It’s an interesting way to receive that kind of endorsement, for me, and it felt particularly resonant.
What that means for customers, in the case of this party, is a display of appreciation that really is that. Nothing more. The company had representatives in town from a few of its various locations, and it made for a unique opportunity to entertain the local clientele. According to Santos, the sales team was under explicit instructions that they were not selling that evening.
According to CEO Fabio Banducci, to whom I admittedly spoke for just a few minutes, this event was the first of several the company plans to bring to customers close to each of its several US locations.