This guest blog was contributed by Wendy Nather, Research Director, Enterprise Security Practice at The 451 Group. Her post comes on the heels of the highly anticipated launch of StillSecure’s Cloud SMS, and it provides some great context for the importance of security in the cloud. For more information about Cloud SMS, visit http://www.stillsecure.com and follow the latest updates on StillSecure’s blog, The Security Samurai.

If you’re a large enterprise, you’re in pretty good shape for the cloud: you know what kind of security you want and need, you have security staff who can validate what you’re getting from the provider, and you can hold up your end of the deal – since it takes both customer and provider working together to build a complete security program. Most of the security providers out there are building for you, because that’s where the money is; and they’re eager to work on scaling up to meet the requirements for your big business. If you want custom security clauses in a contract, chances are, you’ll get them.

But at the other end of the scale there are the cloud customers I refer to as being “below the security poverty line.” These are the small shops (like your doctor’s medical practice) that may not have an IT staff at all. These small businesses tend to be very dependent on third party providers, and when it comes to security, they have no way to know what they need. Do they really need DLP, a web application firewall, single sign-on, log management, and all the premium security bells and whistles? Even if you gave them a free appliance or a dedicated firewall VM, they wouldn’t know what to do with it or have anyone to run it.

And when a small business has only a couple of servers in a decommissioned restroom*, the provider may be able to move them to their cloud, but it may not be able to scale a security solution down far enough to make it simple to run and cost-effective for either side. This is the great challenge today: to make cloud security both effective and affordable, both above and below 10,000 feet, no matter whether you’re flying a jumbo airliner or a Cessna.

-Wendy Nather, The 451 Group

*True story. I had to run some there.

As many of you know SoftLayer is going global. Our Singapore DC goes live TOMORROW, and Amsterdam will follow suit shortly, so we put together a little “jingle” that I think you might know. It might be September, but if the stores are already putting out holiday items, Christmas songs should be fair game in October … And since we are entering that last stretch of work before those great end-of-the-year national holidays that give us a few days off, we can use a classic tune to help us power through.

To those of you who love the song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” you may not want to play the video below. To those who want to rubberneck at our goofiness and join us in a little fun … play away:

If you want to sing along at home (because who wouldn’t?), here are the lyrics for your karaoke pleasure:

Shout-outs go to all the SLayers who indulged us in this little song. We hope it’s less embarrassing than you expected … And if it’s more embarrassing, we hope it’s as terrible and catchy as “Friday.”

Tip: If the song is stuck in your head now, one great way to distract yourself from it is to go and order a server in Singapore!

-@SKinman454

As the “abuse guy,” I deal with all kinds of abuse issues, and as you would imagine, SPAM is the primary point of concern. You’d probably think that dealing with spam ALLLLLL day every day would make most meat products sound unappealing, but there’s one that’ll never get on my bad side.

Bacon … wrapped around random slices of meat.

Now, I could draw a comparison with bacon and a server and tell you that bacon is a mandatory component of any good breakfast, the way memory is to a server is key, but I won’t. I’d rather get right to my point: Bacon, make everything better!

And when its wrapped around another piece of meat, it’s like it marries the meat and they combine during the grilling process and make some sort of new flavorful offspring full of taste, combining the amazing taste of bacon with the inferior yet still good taste of the meat it’s wrapped around!

But wait, there’s more. Bacon also wraps nicely around chicken and cheese stuffed jalapenos, bringing a unique taste of crunchy jalapeno, melted cheese, moist chicken, and of course MORE BACON.

You should really try this at your next party. It’s not hard to do. You need (1) Bacon, (2) Something to wrap it around and (3) Toothpicks. I usually cook the “wrappee” to the point where it’s almost ready to eat before adding the wrapper so the bacon is perfectly cooked at the same time the internal meat is ready to eat.*

The best thing about bacon is there are sooo many choices, from kinds of bacon to available brands. Some bacon is thin, and some is thick. Some bacon is cured and some is smoked. The choice is really yours. And you can’t go wrong! (Well, if you don’t know what you’re getting into, you might go wrong with tofu bacon and other types of fake bacon -aka- facon)

- Dody

*One note to keep in mind and this is VERY important. Bacon tends to be greasy and fatty and if you’re grilling bacon over an open flame, the chances that the grease from the bacon will drip down and catch the area it lands in on fire are very … no EXTREMELY likely and dangerous. The result could be the loss of a lot of arm hair.

Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read a guest blog from UserVoice CEO Richard White. UserVoice offers a complete customer engagement solution that gives businesses a simple process for managing customer feedback and support functions all from a single, easy-to-use environment. To learn more about UserVoice, visit http://uservoice.com/.

The fact that you’re reading this blog post means you probably understand social media. You probably also understand why providing great customer service is important, so I’ll spare you that as well. What you may not know is that there are much better tools to provide outstanding customer service than the ones you’re already using. Here are four big tips for you as you’re planning your support channels:

1. Don’t build a custom contact form.
Building a custom contact form on your website takes valuable time and resources away from your core business. Instead, sign up and get a widget from UserVoice (or one of our competitors) and in less than 30 seconds you’ll have a contact form that supports any number of custom fields you want to add, allows you to append your own customer-specific metadata, supports attachments and, most importantly, will auto-suggest relevant FAQ articles even before the customer submits the form.

2. Don’t use shared email for customer support.
It’s true that you can take managing customer support via a shared email inbox pretty far. You won’t really feel the pain until a couple of issues slip through the digital crack because it wasn’t clear who on your team was responsible for following up with the customer. But why go through that? These days you can choose from a number of inexpensive, purpose-built tools, like UserVoice, targeted at companies that want to provide better customer service. Starting at $5/mo you can have a complete support solution that will grow with your business when you are finally ready to add that 2nd or 3rd support rep to your team.

3. Don’t waste time gathering feedback on message boards.
Scanning message boards to gather user feedback sounds like a good idea, but it’s really painful. Forums are both noisy and insular. Someone posts “I want you to add X” then a few people reply “+1″ but then someone else says “I think X is good but only if you do Y to it.” Very quickly you don’t know what anyone really wants. And you especially don’t have an easy way to follow-up with people directly. Worst of all, you’re only hearing from a vocal minority. Casual users won’t go into your forums and won’t wade through 10 pages of +1′s to add their voice, they’ll just give up.

UserVoice Feedback gives you a better way to harness customer feedback and turn it into something useful. It starts with a simple prompt: How can we make ___insert_your_company___ better? Customers give their feedback and vote up the best ideas. It’s easier for customers to get involved and give you feedback, and it’s much easier for you to follow-up and keep these important customers in the loop.

4. Don’t hide from your customers.
This really should be the first recommendation. The sad fact is, people still don’t expect great customer service, and they certainly don’t expect you to be ready and willing to listen to their feedback, especially with that small gray “contact” link buried in your footer. Show customers that their experience and their feedback is important, nay, vital to your business. Put a big link at the top of the page, or a widget on the side of it. Something that tells people you’re not “business as usual.” Show them you really care.

I started UserVoice because I wanted to make doing all of these things simple so that companies could focus on what really matters: building their products and communicating with their customers, not setting up all this stuff. I hope you’ll find it as useful as our thousands of existing customers have in getting you back to work.

-Richard White, UserVoice

In early September I shared with you a progress report on our first international data center in Singapore. It should be no surprise that our build out has been moving at breakneck speeds. In the last couple of weeks we’ve:

1. Completed the construction of our new regional office in Singapore
2. Built out 3 network PoPs (Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore)
3. Unloaded 4 x 40 foot ocean containers
4. Received over 100 pallets of equipment and gear – with more to come
5. Assembled 220 custom server cabinets
6. Installed 120 customer facing switches (5,760 switch ports)
7. Provisioned petabytes of new shared storage waiting for your data

We’re also ecstatic to have our new Singaporean employees burning the midnight oil with us. We spent countless hours interviewing for a number of positions in Singapore and we’ve only hired the most talented, brightest stars that we could find. Everyone has fit right in, loves the culture and they’re rocking it. We still have a bunch of open positions – if you’re interested, drop us a note.

As our go-live date approaches we’re putting the final touches on the data center. One last check to ensure all cables are seated correctly in their ports, double check the configurations on our internal equipment, light the network and have our first ever international truck day – although, we might have to call it ocean container day.

I’ve included some pictures below that I took over the last couple of days showing the progress of the data center build out. Expect a full set of pictures once everything is live.

-@toddmitchell

SoftLayer absolutely loves attending and participating in technology trade shows and conferences. This year we expect to be at 70 – 80 shows around the globe and chances are that if you’re at a technology show, you’ll see SoftLayer shirts in the crowd.

This year we’re lucky enough to be apart of the Parallels APAC Summit held in Singapore. More than 300 technology partners and enthusiasts are attending informative sessions, networking events and likely attending one or two SoftLayer-sponsored parties!

Parallels was also kind enough to invite our CEO, Lance Crosby, to Singapore to keynote today. We had great attendance, nearly a packed room and Lance spoke about where hosting came from and where it is headed.

If you’re interested in hosting, make a living from hosting or you have partners who provide hosting to you, I’d encourage you to flip through Lance’s presentation:

-@toddmitchell

Recently, the SoftLayer Marketing team refreshed our corporate website. You may have already seen one of the most obvious changes: an updated homepage.

While minor updates to the look and feel of the site have been made over the last two years (adding solid colors to the main tabs, increasing the use of text inside buttons, etc.), the essential layout of the homepage hasn’t changed since December of 2008! We were due for a refresh.

Our updated homepage features a simplified layout with new graphics. Special offers and new products get a large-format banner, which clearly introduces visitors to what we are offering in a way that is more eye-catching than before. Check out the difference between the old-style banners and the new-style banners:

BEFORE

NOW

Below the main banner, we replaced the solid red banner shapes with ones that incorporate photos and colorful graphical elements. Here’s the new design for our Dedicated Server and CloudLayer Computing banners:

Our primary navigation layout has also changed. We now highlight our three main product offerings – Dedicated Severs, CloudLayer Computing, and Managed Hosting – with red tabs that contrast with our other grey tabs, as shown below:

We have also re-organized many of our information pages to make our offerings more clear and to make content easier to find.

The list of changes goes on — enhanced contact buttons on the right of each page to make it easier for website visitors to get ahold of us, a new approach to links at the top and bottom of every page, and so on.

And while the changes we added in this recent site update add a refreshing look and feel, we are by no means finished. You’ll find a lot more going on at http://www.softlayer.com in the weeks and months to come.

-Brad

This year has been exciting for me at SoftLayer. I took on a new role here as a member of our marketing team, and in that role, I’ve played a big role in our trade shows. We participate in a huge number of trade shows each year, and I’ve been lucky enough to meet thousands of current and (hopefully) future SoftLayer customers. To give you an idea of how often I’m on the road, I probably spend about 2-3 weeks each month away from home … And that means I am in airports all the time.

I happen to be one of those weirdos that actually enjoys traveling, but honestly, the travel experience at airports and on planes can be pretty annoying at times, so I thought I’d put together some traveling tips before my next trip so I can hand out the URL when I see violations. Here’s the short list of tips I’ve come up with in my travels:

At the Airport

• When going through security do not choose the “Expert Traveler” line if you are not an expert. The experts will know you don’t belong, and we will sneer at you.
• The security line is not the time to make jokes on terrorism. In fact, there’s never a good time to make jokes about terrorism, especially at an airport.
• If you are selected for random screening, please do not throw a fit. The officer doing the pat down probably isn’t trying to make a pass at you and hates the process just as much as you do.
• If your boarding pass says Group 5 there is no point in huddling near the boarding area when the airline representative has called Group 1. You are the reason the boarding process is moving slowly.

Boarding the Plane

• When the flight attendant announces that everyone should move into their row so other passengers can get by you, he/she is probably talking about you.
• If you have a small enough bag to place under the seat in front of you, please do so. There is a person in Group 6 with a full size carry-on bag that would rather not have to check his bag because your shopping bag is taking up his valuable space.
• If you are seated in the back of the aircraft, don’t place your bag up in the front bin just so you do not have to roll it to the back. The people sitting in the front of the plane would rather not have to wait for everyone to get off the plane so they can walk to the very back to retrieve their bag.

On the Plane

• You aren’t fooling anyone by trying to hide your cell phone between your knees after the cabin door closes.
• If the person next to you puts on their headphones it probably means they are not interested in having a flight long conversation about your life.
• Please don’t get mad at me if I decide to put my seat back. If you need more legroom, spring for First Class or at least an exit row. If you absolutely need me to stay upright, ask me nicely, and you’ll have a lot better chance that I’ll be able to help you out.
• I got the window seat so I wouldn’t have to get up if someone next to me needed to get into the aisle … You got the aisle seat with a little extra room, so please don’t have an attitude if I need you to move to get into the aisle. That’s the tradeoff.
• Yes, the armrest is shared, so you have a right to half of it … This means that if your arm is on my half of the armrest and you’re in my personal space, we have a problem.
• If you decide to talk to the person sitting next to you on the flight, please keep your voice down. People five rows behind you are not interested in your conversation.

And lastly …

• Do not eat foods that may make you gassy before you travel. Passing gas in a plane where air is re-circulated is not cool.

Safe travels!

-Summer

There are so many different types of Social Networks nowadays: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube Channels, the faded MySpace and recently popular Google+. They all have different features but are essentially used for the same purpose. Facebook is the largest player in the market, and every time it makes a change, the world collectively gasps … And a lot of people start yelling.

When Facebook launched back in 2004, it was designed with college kids in mind. I remember when you HAD to have a college email address to set up a Facebook account – the good ole days. A year or two later, Facebook created a separate section for high school students, and not too long after that, anyone on the planet could get a Facebook account, and the growing/changing audience necessitated changes in the platform.

Facebook is a great way to find old friends and catch up, and it’s also an easier way to update everyone all at once what you are doing. I found out my best friend was engaged on Facebook … That’s right. I found out by Facebook before I got a phone call. Facebook is like a drug – it’s addictive. Some people live there all day.

If you work for an IT company, you know that technology is constantly changing. To keep up with evolutions in technology and perceived needs of the growing user base, Facebook will update its platform every few months. If you have a Facebook account, you’ve probably noticed that they released a new layout this week. You’ve probably also noticed all of your friends’ status changes complaining about how they hate the way it looks, how “It’s too hard to use.” Those friends hated the old “new Facebook,” and somewhere down the road, they’ve learned to love and/or depend on that “new Facebook” which is now in the “old Facebook” category. It’s pretty annoying right?

Here’s my advice for the change-averse:

1. If Facebook didn’t change, it would get stagnant and someone else would introduce something better … The same way Facebook supplanted MySpace. DEAL WITH IT.
2. If you don’t like the changes Facebook makes, DELETE your account and move to a new Social Network like Twitter or try out Google+.
3. Instead of complaining how hard the new Facebook is to use, take the time to READ the instructions they have provided for you … From a desktop you are able to mouse over a section and it will tell you what it means and how to use it.
4. Last but not least – whining is for babies and last time I checked you were in your 20′s, 30′s, 40′s, and up – so suck it up!

Whew! Now that felt good …

- Natalie

Features and benefits … They’re like husband and wife, horse and carriage, hammer and nails! They are inseparable and will always complement each other. I wanted to jump right into a key “features and benefits” analysis of one of the value propositions of the SoftLayer platform, but before I did, I want to make sure we are all on the same page about the difference between the two.

A feature is something prominent about a person, place or thing. It’s usually something that stands out and makes whatever you’re talking about stand out — for the purpose of this discussion it will be, at least. It could be something as simple as the new car you’re buying having a front windshield or the house you’re looking to buy having a garage. Maybe it’s something a little more distinct like having your car’s air conditioner stay cool and blow for 15 min after the ignition is switched to the ACC position when you turn your engine off while pumping gas. Maybe your house has a tank-less water heater. These examples are indeed real features, but the first two are more or less expected … The last two make this particular car and this particular house stand out.

So where do the benefits come in? Benefits are features that are useful or profitable to you. With you being the operative word here. Think about it: If a feature does not provide any use to you, why would you care? Let’s go back to the car with its unique A/C feature. What if you live in Greenland? Who cares that the A/C will stay on? You may not even care for the feature of having an air conditioner at all! Talk about that feature in Dallas, TX, where it has been over 100 degrees for the last 2 months and counting, and all of a sudden, this feature provides a real benefit!

It’s now your cue to ask how all of this relates to hosting or, more specifically, SoftLayer.

{ … Waiting for you to ask … }

I am glad you asked! If you haven’t noticed, SoftLayer boasts a wide array of features on our website, and I would like to point out some of the benefits that may not be apparent to everyone, starting with automation. You’re probably aware that SoftLayer has one of the most robust and full featured automation platforms in the industry.

Automation

Think about the last time your IT director sent an email that went into your junk mail folder … You happen to see it on Sunday night, and it reads, “Please stand up five test servers for a new project by the Monday morning meeting.” You know that the vendors you typically use take anywhere from 3 days to 2 weeks to stand up new servers, so you wouldn’t have had a problem if you saw the email a week ago when it was sent — but you didn’t. So to avoid getting a smudge on your perfect employee record, you stumble across softlayer.com where automation enables us to deliver your five servers in 2 hours. Talk about a benefit: You still have time to watch a little TV before going to bed … Five servers, to your exact specifications, all deployed before you could Google the orgin of “rubber baby buggy bumbers.” (For those who care, it was a tag line said by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Last Action Hero.)

At the heart of our automation platform lives the dedicated server, and the blood that courses though our network is the API. All that’s left is the pretty face (which we call the Customer Portal). Our portal provides a graphical user interface to control every aspect of your account from ordering new servers, IP allocations and hardware reboots to port control, port speed selection and billing matters. If you’re more into the behind-the-scenes stuff, then you can use all the same controls from the comfort of your own application via the API. Sounds like a lot of features to me, where are the benefits?

To start, you have options! Who doesn’t like options? You get to choose how you want to manage your account and infrastructure. We don’t force you into “our” way. Secondly, being able to do most functions yourself enables you to be more efficient. You know what you want, so you can log in and get it. No need to wait two hours for your firewall rule set to update; just log in and change it. You want to add load balancing to your account? Log in and order it! How about SAN replication? … I think you see where I’m going with this. Our portal and automation bring this control to your computer anywhere in the world! Some of these features even extend to your iPhone and android platform. Now you can update your support tickets while at the park with the kids.

Look for a second installment of our study on SoftLayer Features and Benefits! There are many more features that I want to translate into benefits for you, so in the more familiar words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, “I’ll be back”!

-Harold

Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read a guest blog from FaxLogic CEO Eric Lenington. The unique FaxLogic service combines the best of analog fax, Internet fax, and fax servers to create a highly reliable, secure and scalable collaborative environment. To learn more about FaxLogic, visit http://www.faxlogic.com/.

Why the (Right) Cloud is the Best Place for Your Documents

Every business produces and consumes documents — this includes both paper and digital, both those created internally and those received from customers and business partners — all needing to be sorted and organized and most needing to be safely stored and easily retrieved (and ultimately, securely disposed of when they are no longer needed). The vast majority of companies find themselves trying to do this today in highly fragmented ways and usually with radically different approaches for paper documents than with digital ones. Often different departments, or even different groups within a department, develop their own way to deal with “their” documents, a way that “works for them.”

Digital documents are usually stored on in-house servers, on “shares” with folder structures that may only make sense to the person that originally built it — not to the person trying to find something in it. And few companies can say that they don’t have reams of paper files stored in file rooms or in “personal” file cabinets. FaxLogic helps our customers solve this problem by seamlessly integrating their paper and digital worlds.

We do this by supporting their existing network of fax machines, scanners and multi-function printers (the “gateways” to the digital world for paper documents) and by incorporating key features of current technologies that we are all familiar with – like email and search engines – into the realm of organizing, archiving, retrieving and sharing documents. FaxLogic is a cloud-based service, running on a cloud-based infrastructure, and it uses “the cloud” to safely and securely store our customer’s documents (whether paper or digital). This was no accident, and that is what I will focus on in this article, trying to “demystify” the cloud a bit, and discuss why it’s the best place for your documents.

What is “the Cloud” and What Value does it Bring?
Wikipedia, one of my favorite sources for good information, defines “cloud computing” like this:

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).

As I said earlier, FaxLogic is a cloud-based service; we are the “application” (document management) that is delivered to the “client” (our customer’s web browser). And we run on a cloud-based infrastructure, using providers like SoftLayer to manage the hardware layer that our application runs on and the networking layer that we use to deliver our service to our customers. Leveraging that “best of breed” infrastructure is a huge win for us, letting us focus where we add value – our application – while leaving the “plumbing” to others. Of course, a choice like that isn’t made lightly.

From Wikipedia’s definition, the term “shared resources” is the key. By leveraging cloud-based infrastructure and platform resources, we are able to use a small portion of a much larger and more robust environment than we could economically build ourselves. But the big kicker is that even though we are using only a small portion of that environment, we get to take advantage of the whole architecture and all its capabilities, just as if we were the only application running on it.

The “80% Rule”
An anecdotal number that’s been thrown around a lot, the “80% rule” says that 80% of all businesses fail within some short time period after a major catastrophe, like a fire, flood or earthquake. But this isn’t just an anecdote, numbers in the 60-90% range are real and well-documented. A study conducted by the insurance giant Chubb in 2008 put the likelihood of business failure after a fire at 70%. According to FEMA, of businesses without a disaster recovery plan already in place, 80% of those affected by hurricane Andrew in 1992 were out of business within three years. I won’t bore you with a long list of depressing statistics, a quick Google search will turn up many more. The point is that data loss, whether caused by natural disaster, human error, or malicious activity, is, more often than not, very difficult to overcome.

Paper files stored in file cabinets, and even digital files stored on backed-up in-house servers, are vulnerable. Ask yourself what you would do tomorrow if even half of the documents critical to your business were destroyed tonight.

The FaxLogic Cloud Solution
Now, I don’t want to suggest for one second that FaxLogic is the single solution for surviving such an event or that our platform should be thought of as a comprehensive disaster recovery solution. It is neither. But it is a critical part of the solution. When it comes to disaster recovery, Ben Franklin’s “ounce of prevention” couldn’t be more relevant. And as it applies to your business documents, that ounce is to get those documents out of harms way in the first place. This is where the cloud comes in.

Companies like SoftLayer provide cloud storage as a service – a highly scalable, secure environment to safely store files of virtually any kind. The architecture that such services are built on and the layers of redundancy they incorporate are beyond the reach of most small and many medium sized companies, but through the magic of cloud computing, we only need a small portion of that shared resource, while still getting to take advantage of the whole thing. The bottom line is that a well-designed cloud storage service will be hundreds or even thousands of times more reliable and durable than anything most businesses could economically build themselves, not to mention more secure.

FaxLogic takes our small portion of that shared resource, and through our application, makes it even more reliable and durable, by doing things like ensuring broad geographic distribution of multiple copies of each file, so there is no single point of failure even in the face of a major regional disaster.

Beyond the Worst Case Scenario
Secure, reliable cloud-based storage is just the basic building block that our application makes useful. Just the fact that your business documents are safer in the cloud isn’t the whole story, nor is it the whole value proposition of the cloud. Beyond the worst case scenario, storing your documents in the cloud brings real and tangible benefits to your day-to-day activities. We make it easy to capture both paper and digital documents and store them in the cloud, organize and easily find your documents when you need them, collaborate and share documents while controlling who has access to confidential information, and manage everything from a simple browser-based interface.

Think about how much easier day-to-day activity would be with capabilities like being able to access a shared document library from any Internet-enabled device, instantly find a faxed copy of a purchase order from six months ago by knowing only the name of the sender, or easily pull up a client’s latest work order revision without having to figure out who’s desk the client’s folder is on. We use the cloud to make this possible. By getting your documents out of their hiding places (stacks of paper on people’s desks, file cabinets down the hall, or even “shares” on local servers) that information is more freely accessible to those who need it.

Take Action
Businesses of all sizes can and are benefiting today from a wide range of cloud-based services, most of which weren’t even available five years ago. The underlying value proposition they all have in common is that they give each customer access to a small piece of a large “shared resource,” one that generally wouldn’t be economically feasible to build and support in-house. And each customer can take advantage of the scale and capabilities of the whole resource. When it comes to capturing, storing, organizing, retrieving and sharing documents, the cloud’s value proposition offers a clear advantage over any on-site approach.

FaxLogic has built a best-in-class cloud-based application on top of best-in-class cloud-based infrastructure and platform services, giving our customers a multiple of that value proposition. By letting our customers leverage their existing equipment and without requiring radical changes to their existing business processes, we make it easy to start taking advantage of the benefits of cloud storage for all of their paper and digital documents.

-Eric Lenington, FaxLogic

HostingCon 2011 in San Diego may have been a huge success for SoftLayer, but I walked away with a different experience following my intense pursuit of building the PHIL’s DC brand. Apparently, the hosting industry wants to see my data center succeed before they believe it, and I think it’s really just fear rearing its ugly head. People are afraid of what they don’t understand, so the uninitiated would probably be terrified as they try to learn what I’m doing.

In an effort to help some of the bigger names in the hosting industry get in on the ground floor of PHIL’s DC, I took a stroll down the HostingCon aisles. Vendors like Parallels and cPanel were obvious choices to discuss business partnerships, and I was sure TheWHIR wanted the scoop on the next big thing in hosting, so I made sure to give them all a chance to speak with me. The documentary film team I hired (the guy I met outside the San Diego Convention Center who said he’d follow me with a camera for $3.50/hour) recorded our interactions for posterity’s sake:

I’d like send shouts out to thank Candice Rodriguez from TheWHIR, Aaron Phillips from cPanel and John McCarrick from Parallels for agreeing to let us film our organic interactions. They’ve further inspired me to build a data center that will make these apparent “snubs” and “rejections” a thing of the past. To Summer and Natalie at the SoftLayer booth: Please stop making fun of my Server Challenge attempt every time you see me at the office … I think I had something in my eye when I was competing, so it wasn’t a fair measure of my skillz.

Oh, and if you didn’t get a chance to attend our “Geeks Gone Wild” party at HostingCon, you’d probably be interested in seeing video from The Dan Band’s performance of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” cPanel posted it here: http://www.vimeo.com/28160105 (NSFW language, The Dan Band take artistic license with profanity)

-PHIL

Once again the Dallas Cowboys let a game they weren’t supposed to win slip away from them in the 4th quarter. Again it was Tony “oops” Romo that had a hand (or “didn’t have hands”) in the loss. I can’t blame it all on him as I saw many problems that led up to the defeat. I, as a master football coach of 4-6 year-old flag football, could write multiple paragraphs on that subject, but because this is a social media blog, I will get back on topic.

After last night’s “4th quarter of doom” that probably led to crazy nightmares for my sleeping kids (I may have been yelling loudly and often), I decided to open Twitter to see what everyone in the world thought about the game. I have to admit I was a little shocked at how many Cowboy haters are out in the wild. Of course the game was trending, and the conversation was … diverse: You had your die-hard Cowboy fans that were saying, “Shake it off, you weren’t supposed to win anyway.” You had your fair weather fans that were saying, “Great, another season opener loss, I guess I’ll follow the Texans instead.” You had the fans of other teams that were saying, “Haha, the Cowboys lost again – Go (Insert your team here)!” And, of course you had the pure Cowboy haters who were saying, “#$%^#$%^#$ the Cowboys they #$%#$% and #$%# and then #$%#$%. Eat it!” I would say most were Cowboy haters, and most of the tweets were not even close to being rated PG-13.

Stay with me now … I’m finally onto the real topic.

Social Media
What I saw on Twitter last night was real Social Media to me. It was current, real time, opinionated, cool and sad all at the same time. It encapsulated the thoughts and reactions of the public to something that was happening or just happened. Why is social media cool? A couple of weeks ago when the earthquake struck the northeast, people were saying that they received tweet updates of the ground shaking and notifications that an earthquake hit seconds before they felt the tremors in their area. Think about that and how many possible uses that has in lots of different industries. X happens, Y needs to know about it right away, Z tweets it or posts it on Facebook (or any of the 2000 other social apps out there), and like magic you have the information almost before you are supposed to. That’s viral social media.

Social Marketing
Social Marketing isn’t nearly as sexy. It’s only and exactly what it sounds like. We do it at SoftLayer: You see tweets from us talking about press releases, new products, our new website, our new international locations and some of the other value we provide to customers because we know how easy it is to miss some of the best stuff in the noisy social sphere. It helps us build our brand and helps with awareness by getting our name in front of people who may not have seen it otherwise. It drives traffic to our website and straight to our order form. It is significant to our bottom line.

The challenge with this kind of engagement is that the volume of content can seem overwhelming to some. Some customers only want to hear the viral social media kind of stuff with up to the minute news (which is our vision for @SoftLayerNotify), but it’s tough to abandon the social marketing piece because it’s been so measurably successful for us.

With that being said, we want to hear from you about what you like and don’t like about our social engagement. What you would like to see more of? What would you like to see less of? Do you like it? Do you hate it? We’re definitely listening … Well as long as we’re not busy getting ready for the next flash mob.

-@skinman454

Last week, I shared an early glimpse of our Singapore data center pods and office space. What a difference a week makes. A week after the first batch of pictures were taken, I made my way back through the facility to document some of the progress, and you’ll be amazed by how quickly everything is coming together.

You’d probably be even more amazed if you knew how many people (literally) around the world were working hard every day to keep the build-out moving forward so quickly … Some of the most visible folks in the process are the guys we have on the ground in Singapore:

We weren’t able to use SoftLayer’s fancy new truck to get our gear to the Singapore facility. I think it had something about having to travel over the Pacific Ocean … I guess there weren’t enough gas stations? We had all of our DC gear shipped down (literally) in ocean containers, and when the skids were all moved into the storage area, it was almost like Christmas.

I say “almost like Christmas” because we happened to know everything we’d be unwrapping, and if we were surprised by anything we opened, it probably wouldn’t be a good surprise. Luckily, we got exactly what we needed. Meanwhile, the Singapore data center pods have been coming along nicely. Here’s a look inside Pod 1.

And while we do our best to mirror the build-out of our data center pods regardless of their location, you can see that a few exceptions are made. In the pods we’re building in the United States, we have at least two fewer languages on signs like the ones you see here:

If we walk next door to Pod 1, you’ll see the progress we’re making in Pod 2. I know the pictures look similar … But that’s the point. Given the demand we’ve heard from customers, we’re building both pods at the same time, hoping to keep up with demand while we start building our next facilities.

While the pod progress is impressive, the progress on the office space is almost unbelievable. Where you previously saw ladders and cement, you now see desks, chairs and carpet. We’ve been hiring in Singapore for a few weeks now, and when we officially get the keys to move in, this place will be abuzz with new SLayers.

We’ve posted a few more pictures in our Singapore DC Construction Flickr photo album, enjoy them! Soon after these pictures were taken, the team started assembling the racks in the DC, so the next update you’ll see from me will probably include a lot more server goodness.

If you happen to live in Singapore and want to join our team, be sure to visit SoftLayer Careers for our current opportunities. As of right now, we have positions available in inventory, channel development, inside sales, enterprise account management, network engineering, sales engineering, systems administration and server building … And if you don’t fit in any of those positions, we can probably find another role for you to fill!

-@toddmitchell

Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read a guest blog from 3DCart Co-founder and CEO Gonazlo Gil. 3DCart is a technology partner with a robust eCommerce platform hosting thousands of merchants all over the world … And it’s clear they have an enduring drive for innovation and value. To learn more about 3DCart, visit http://www.3DCart.com/.

5 Must-Have Features in a Hosted Ecommerce Provider

In 1997, the concept that would eventually become 3DCart came into existence. I developed 3DCart with the idea of putting every single ecommerce tool and resource at the fingertips of web entrepreneurs so anyone with a computer could start their own online store. Today, we’re still going strong, and we pride ourselves on launching new ecommerce features before the competition has a chance.

The market for shopping carts has exploded over the past decade. If you’re considering the ecommerce business, choosing a shopping cart can get overwhelming. Because not all ecommerce software solutions are created equal, we’ve put together a list of five must-have features for aspiring entrepreneurs to consider when choosing a hosted ecommerce provider.

1. PCI Compliance to Protect Customer Information
You hear about it on the web, on the television, in the magazines: cyber-theft. Recent instances of online fraud (like the hack of Playstation’s network) have caused online shoppers to stiffen up when it comes to sharing financial information. For your sake and the sake of your customers, it’s important to put the minds of shoppers at ease as soon as they discover your brand.

Born from new rules created by the Payment Card Industry, PCI compliance standards are stringent guidelines for ensuring your online store is up to code in terms of security. The last thing you need as an online storeowner is responsibility for losing sensitive personal data to fraudsters. Beyond general culpability, you run the risk of losing trust in your brand, which could sink your business entirely.

The process for reaching PCI compliance is vigorous and expensive. That’s why most ecommerce software providers undergo PCI compliance measures on their own — so online stores can offer security to their customers. It offers a little more peace of mind on both sides of the business relationship and ensures your transactions go through smoothly.

2. 24/7 Phone Support for Peace of Mind
You’ve worked with software companies before, so the possibility of 24/7 phone support might seem like a laughable service. True: not many software companies are in the business of employing an onshore support staff to have the phones manned all hours of the day. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.

Not too long ago, 3DCart noticed a chance to further differentiate our company from the competition to offer 24/7/365 phone support for free to all of our customers. The idea behind the value-add was that your direct support lifeline shouldn’t end just because business hours are over. It’s been an extremely successful service for us, as well as for our customers.

Think about it: an online store doesn’t close when the lights go out — especially if you do international business. The ability to connect after hours with a support team in the most extreme cases (downtime, bugs, etc.) is a huge factor and one that many customers cite as a reason for choosing our company.

3. Scalability/Adaptability to Handle Growth
The most successful online stores will inevitably have to scale up their ecommerce offering. Therefore, scalability becomes a huge criterion for finding the right hosted ecommerce provider.

But the ability to scale hosting volume as the business grows organically isn’t the only important factor. If your store runs a promotion or gets a mention in a high-profile publication, it’ll need to handle heavy traffic spikes. After all, you wouldn’t want your store to crash right as it peaks in popularity.

A lot of hosted ecommerce solutions advertise scalability—but how do you know that they’re telling the truth? A good way to find proof is to run through the company’s case studies, usually hosted somewhere on the site. You’re bound to come across one that demonstrates a specific instance of on-demand scaling. If that’s not enough, contact the subject of the study directly for confirmation.

Customizability falls under this category as well. The more dynamic the shopping cart, the more control you have over your brand. Simple ways to manage your content are important and should be easy to manipulate with an intuitive CMS.

4. Comprehensive Feature Set for All-In-One Functionality
If you have a good business plan and know what you’re going to sell, you probably already have a good idea of what features are going to be most crucial to your business. But that doesn’t mean you won’t need other features — some of which you might not grasp the importance.

Below are a few features that make the ecommerce experience a much more efficient, connected experience:

• Autoresponders
  Setting and forgetting autoresponders is a great way to add some automation to your marketing plan. If you sell perishable goods for instance, you can set an automatic email to send to the customer when the lifespan of the product is up. It greatly increases the chances that they’ll replace the item through your store.
• Customer Relationship Manager
  Since you’re hosting all of your data in the cloud, a built-in CRM platform is an important part of collecting analytics on customer behavior. You probably won’t need all the functionality of Salesforce; a built-in CRM that has a lot of the same functionality automatically collects the data you need through your online store.
• Great Marketing Tools
  Outside the box marketing tools like “Daily Deals,” “Group Deals” and “Name Your Price” features greatly enhance conversion rates and make the selling process even more effective.
• More Ways to Pay
  If you offer more payment portal integrations than your typical shopping cart, you give customers the option to pay using a comfortable, familiar process that increases the likelihood they’ll make a purchase. Popular options include PayPal, Amazon Payments, Google Checkout and Authorize.net.
• Partner Integrations
  To make a store more efficient, some shopping carts offer integrations with shipping resources (FedEx, UPS), fulfillment services and tax software. A direct data feed reduces manual administration and helps your store stay as efficient as possible, saving you time and money. You might even get discounts for services booked through your ecommerce provider.

5. Low Fees for a Lower Overhead
The pricing for hosted shopping carts usually revolves around bandwidth and feature sets, but there’s a pitfall that some online store owners don’t notice until it’s too late: per-sale fees. There are some hosted shopping cart software platforms on the market that charge a percentage of every sale.

Another cost that new online storeowners run into is a setup fee. It’s usually unnecessary and a way for the vendor to collect extra revenue. Pricing should revolve around hosting costs, feature sets and extra services like storefront design, period. Remember to check for hidden fees if you’re evaluating an ecommerce software solution.

3DCart’s Foundation
The five criteria listed above form the foundation of 3DCart software. Over the years, we’ve found that our customers have some of the most influential voices in the ecommerce industry. We’ve built a community on those voices that plays a huge role in defining how we do business.

If you’re looking to break into the online retail industry and want a proprietary shopping cart that offers you the insights you need to keep your business growing smoothly, give us a shot for free.

-Gonzalo Gil, 3DCart

We love startups and entrepreneurship communities that help startups become successful. Startups are usually all about innovation and approaching existing problems in a new way … And if you’re familiar with SoftLayer’s “Innovate or Die” motto, you know that we’re cut from the same cloth. We’ve partnered with incubators like Tech Wildcatters to provide up-and-coming companies with a year of $1,000/mo hosting credits along with a little SoftLayer expertise sprinkled in for good measure, and we are happy to support community partners like non-profits and user groups where new ideas are born every day.

Given our commitment to the startup community, when we heard that a sponsorship opened up for the September 13 WebInnovatorsGroup quarterly meeting, we jumped on the chance to get involved. WebInno events are fueled by a long-standing community of Internet and mobile entrepreneurs founded by David Beisel, and while I could tell you everything I know about what they’re doing in Boston, the best person to hear from is David himself:

Boston + Entrepreneurs + Technology + Beer … It was a no-brainer for us to be a Gold Sponsor of WebInno31.

Visit WebInnovatorsGroup.com to learn more about the WebInno community or head straight to the WebInno31 registration form to reserve your spot at Royal Sonesta Cambridge on Tuesday, September 13, at 6:30pm.

-Kevin

P.S. If you have a startup community or an ongoing event like WebInno that SoftLayer can be involved with, leave a comment on this blog or let us know on Twitter: @SoftLayer

The Northeastern part of the United States saw two natural disasters within the span of five days of each other. The first was in the Washington, D.C. area: A 5.8 earthquake on August 23, 2011. On August 28, Hurricane Irene made her way up the east coast, leaving nearly 5.5 million people without power. We do everything we can to prepare our facilities for natural disasters (generator power backup, staffing, redundant bandwidth links and providers, etc.), and given the recent events, now might be a good time to start thinking about how your servers respond when something out of the ordinary happens … Let’s look at two relatively easy ways you can set your business up to scale and recover.

The first option you may consider would be to set up a multi-tiered environment by deploying multiple servers in various geographical locations. Your servers in each location could be accessed via load balancing or round robin DNS. In this kind of high-availability environment, your servers could handle the incoming requests more quickly with the load being split amongst the multiple data centers. The failover would be just a few seconds should you lose connectivity to one of the locations.

The second option to consider would be the private image repository for our CloudLayer Computing. This options allows you to save a private image template in different data centers, each ready for quick deployment without having to install and configure the same operating system and applications. Should you need additional resources or lose connectivity to your instance in one facility, you can deploy the saved image in another facility. The failover time would be only in the provisioning process of the Computer Instance … which doesn’t take too long.

Scalability makes sense no matter what situation you may be facing – from natural disaster to hitting the front page of Reddit. If you have any questions about these scalability options, “Click to Chat” on our site or give us a call and a sales rep can help you get prepared. Your infrastructure may have come through these recent events unscathed, but don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. The “It’s better to be safe than sorry” cliche is a cliche for a reason: It’s worth saying often.

-Greg

When people ask me what I do for a living these days, I tell them I provide emergency response services. With this answer, I usually get very surprised and intrigued looks as they probe for more details about the excitement of saving lives. For those that have known me for a while, they are especially shocked since my career until recently has always entailed sitting in a cubicle, crunching numbers and manipulating spreadsheets.

I don’t actually provide ERS, and I don’t “technically” save lives during my work days, but I do provide emergency services for our customers, and if you ask them, they’ll probably tell you I’m a little like a life saver. I tell people I’m an emergency responder as a bit of a joke, but it’s actually a great way to start explaining what I do at SoftLayer. When a customer’s service is disrupted (preventing them from conducting important business), we need to respond immediately and knowledgeably to get everything back online as quickly as possible.

As Server Build Technicians, we have to be alert and ready for situations where a server goes down and affects the availability of a customer’s site. Being offline can often translate to the loss of revenue and this I completely understand: If I wanted to buy something on a site and I find that the site is offline, I’ll probably fire up a search page and look for another vendor. The first store loses my sale because I’m so conditioned to everything being available right when I need it … And I’m not alone in this mentality.

When I started writing this article, we were gearing up for natural disaster to hit the Washington, D.C. area over the weekend (for the first time in my career). We had to plan what needed to be done at home and work … Because SoftLayer provides web hosting services that must be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so we have to do our best to minimize any service impact. We were lucky to have avoided much of the damage from Hurricane Irene, but we still treated it as though it was heading right toward us. In addition to the employees on site, everyone was on call to be ready to come in and help if needed. For those who have never experienced a hurricane, just think of a severe thunderstorm that lasts 8 to 12 hours, resulting in widespread power outages, flooding and wind damage.

A hurricane is scary for everyone in its path, and to a certain extent, all you can do is be safe and have a plan of response. Our data center has extremely reliable power generators and staff to handle these kinds of situations; we’re always prepared for the worst case scenarios for your servers so you don’t have to be.

-Danny

P.S. If you’ve never thought about becoming a “Server Emergency Responder,” I’d recommend swinging by the SoftLayer Careers page to learn more about becoming a Server Build Technician. As of right now, there are SBT positions available in Dallas, Seattle, Amsterdam, Singapore and Washington, D.C.

I have a new scientific paper coming out in the Astrophysical Journal that I am quite proud of having written. Even better, there is a chance that it might not even be wrong.

Back in something like seventh grade, I learned how science works. Scientists formulate a hypothesis and then they do experiments, and if enough experiments support the hypothesis, eventually the hypothesis becomes a

Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read a guest blog from Verecloud, a technology partner that makes it easier for small- and medium-sized businesses to shop for, select, purchase, manage and monitor the performance of their cloud services and related spending. To learn more about Verecloud, visit http://verecloud.com/.

Cloudwrangler from Verecloud

Ubiquitous Internet access and technological advances in virtualization and IT management have caused an explosion in the availability and adoption of cloud services. Just a few years ago, it would take hours – if not days – to activate a new cloud service for a customer. SoftLayer can now perform this feat with servers in minutes, and other providers of email, CRM and accounting solutions have equally fast turn-up times.

The cloud gives small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) access to enterprise grade technology so that they can compete more effectively with little, if any, capital investment, so those SMBs are prime consumers of cloud services. By moving to cloud services, their businesses gains flexibility and affordable scalability to throttle their infrastructure and services up and down as their business grows, changes, moves locations or becomes more mobile.

Even with all of those benefits, adding a little cloud here and a little cloud there ends up making it difficult for these SMBs to manage all of the disparate services. Who is paying for what? Are they accounted for in expense reports? How can you allocate the costs to your sales, marketing, operations or support departments? Is IT aware of all of the cloud services? What happens if someone leaves the company and you need to deactivate their access and reassign all of their data to other employees?

Verecloud’s answer to all of these questions is the Cloudwrangler app store for small businesses. Simply put, it is a single source for SMBs to discover, buy, use and manage their cloud services. This platform makes finance happy since they can properly track and manage costs. IT is happy because they are aware of all the services being used in the company and can manage them from a single control panel. HR is happy because they can monitor and regulate employee access when necessary. Everyone is happy.

Verecloud is proud to feature SoftLayer as a key partner and suppler in the Cloudwrangler marketplace (which also happens to be powered by SoftLayer’s CloudLayer Computing). In addition to the infrastructure piece, we offer business class email, backup and recovery, and collaboration capabilities that can be incorporated quickly, seamlessly and affordably into any business:

We’re staying busy building out more features and functionality to the Cloudwrangler marketplace, and we’re excited about the partnerships we’ll make as we keep the community growing. If you’re interested in learning more about Cloudwrangler, visit at Verecloud.com today.

-Russel Wurth, Verecloud