I’ve been on the hook for a 3 Bars | 3 Questions interview for a few weeks now, and I finally found a few minutes to chat with Kevin about what’s going on in the world of SoftLayer Community Development. In the past two months, we’ve cranked everything up to 11 with the unveiling of our Technology Incubator Program and the Technology Partners Marketplace. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about:

Over the past few weeks, we’ve posted video interviews and guest blogs from a few of our featured Technology Partner Marketplace participants, and you can expect to see more where that came from as we sign on new partners with killer applications and services that we can share with our customers. If you want to be one of those new partners, fill out our quick application, and we’ll get the ball rolling!

I’m looking forward to the next installment of “3 Bars | 3 Questions” because “The Mitch” – the man, the myth, the legend – will be in the hot seat.

-@teknowlogist

Giving a customer the ability to do something that they didn’t know they could (or even know was possible) can make for an exceptional customer experience.

I’ve had a season mini-pack of Dallas Mavericks tickets for a handful of years now and have always gotten the exact experience that I expected: The same seats every time, consistent food and drink, great entertainment, and a quality team on the court that wins considerably more often than not.

However, this year it’s been a little different. This year, they have thrown in several perks that cost them nothing or next to nothing but have made a huge difference in the overall experience.

One game in particular sticks out in my mind. A couple of weeks before a game against the Wizards, I got an email about a no cost chance for me and one other person to stand in a high five line to give fives to the players as they came out for warmups. I had no idea fans actually got to do this, so I gladly signed up and took my 5 year-old son to the game. I had also received an invite from the sales rep to choose a date to spend the first half of a game in one of the suites, so I made it the same night.

That night, we joined a small group of people down by the tunnel before the game, and we got to give all the players, Mark Cuban, the Mavs Maniacs and even a few security guards high fives. My son was over-the-moon to “meet” his favorite players – Dirk, Kidd, and Jet – could hardly contain himself.

This game also happened to be the week before the Super Bowl. I only mention it because on the way to our suite, I was blinded by the biggest ring I had ever seen. It turned out to be a Super Bowl ring and the guy wearing it was James Harrison (the linebacker for Steelers that lost a bunch of money to fines for helmet to helmet hits last season), so I got to meet him and wish him luck for the big game.

Oh, and and I can’t forget to mention the free hats, shirts, and Roddy B. bobblehead.

Long story short, I probably couldn’t tell you who won the other ten games I went to this year, but I don’t think I’ll forget anything about this particular game.

The thing I took away from this experience is when you give a customer something above and beyond what is expected, however seemingly insignificant, you can monumentally improve their customer experience.

To bring it back around to SoftLayer, we give customers a great API – a REST API at that. We give them VPN, a private network, IPv6, and a fully provisioned server in a couple of hours. Each of these differentiators enables us to provide products and services that our competitors can only hope to imitate.

The first time the customer uses the API to automatically create a new Cloud Instance from their own program, it’ll be a Maverick-game experience. When they transfer data from Washington, D.C., to San Jose, CA, on our private network with zero bandwidth charge, they’ll feel like they’re high-fiving Dirk Nowitski. When they access their server over the free KVM over IP, they’re walking up to the suite and meeting a Super Bowl champion. And all of that is on top of a stable, speedy server environment!

What can we do to improve your customer experience?

-Brad

A few weeks ago, SamF posted “Before They Were SoftLayer Data Centers,” a virtual scrapbook from the San Jose data center construction process, and based on the surge of traffic we saw to the post, our customers loved it. It’s incredible to see an open warehouse-looking space transformed into an enterprise data center environment, and there’s more amazingness where that came from.

In addition to the pre-”Truck Day” pictures we posted on the blog and in the San Jose DC Construction album on Flickr, we trained a video camera on a row in the data center to capture the cabling process.

What’s so interesting about plugging in cables?

Consider the fact that each of the network switches we use in a rack has at least 48 ports. Now consider that each rack has two public network switches, two private network switches and one out-of-band management network switch that need to be connected to every SoftLayer server in the rack. That’s 240 pre-measured network cables that need to be labeled and routed to specific heights in each rack … without getting tangled and knotted up (see: behind your TV or under your computer desk).

The cabling process is so precise that if a single cable is out of place, the zip-tie on an entire bundle will be cut, and the process is started from scratch. The process is time-consuming, but the results speak for themselves:

Without further ado, here’s the SJ data center team in action. The video is playing at 20x normal speed, and given the amount of time it takes to complete the cabling process for each rack, we enlisted the help of Spongebob SquarePants in our use of the “Two Hours Later” cut:

Impressed? Amazed?

Just wait until you see the time-lapse from Truck Day.

-Kevin

One of the things you expect when you merge two organizations in the same vertical space is for your talent pool to get deeper. SoftLayer had a seriously talented bunch of developers before the merger – I should know, I consider myself one of them – and as I was promised would be the case, after the merger, we were joined by an equally talented group of engineers from The Planet. Where we had two low-level developers, now we have four. Where we had a dozen guys with .NET experience, now we have twenty. It’s better for us employees, and better for our customers too.

What I didn’t expect as part of the merger was that our talent pool would get wider. No, I don’t mean we now employ an army of body builders and Siamese twins. I mean as result of the merger, we ended up with an entirely new group of folks here unlike any SL previously had on the payroll. This new and exotic breed of folks – new and exotic at least from my perspective – are collectively known as “user experience” engineers.

I admit (and I suspect most software engineers will concur) when I develop something, it becomes my baby. Each software engineer has his or her own method for inciting that spark of genius … I start out with some ideas on a yellow pad, refine them until I can whip up an actual spec, code some unit tests and wait to see if my baby takes its first step or falls flat on its digital face. Either way, over time with gentle nudging and TLC, eventually an application grows. And like any loving parent I’m certain that my application can do no wrong.

So when I was told a “usability study” would be done on one of my babies by the user experience, team you can imagine what went through my mind. After all, I was there when the first API call succeeded. I was the one who got up in the middle of the night when the application got cranky and decided to throw an unhandled exception. Who the heck are these user interface specialist and what do they know that I don’t?

In retrospect, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I am a professional coder with more than a decade of experience under my belt. But I’m often more interested in how I can squeeze a few more CPU cycles out of a sub-routine than how much easier it would be for the user if I rearranged the order of the GUI’s a little bit. The user interface review I received really got me thinking from a user’s perspective and excited about the application in a way I hadn’t been since the early days when I banged out those first few lines of code.

Two weeks ago, we released a new, radically different looking Android client. If you are a current user of the application, you’ve undoubtedly received an OTA update by now, and I hope you are as pleasantly surprised by the result as I am. For those of you with Android phones who have not installed the SoftLayer client, I encourage you to do so. You can get more info by visiting http://www.softlayer.com/resources/mobile-apps/.

Before I let you go, what kind of father would I be if I didn’t take out my wallet and bore you to tears with pictures of my children? Without further ado, I present to you the latest and greatest Android Mobile Client:

-William

In our first 3 Bars ? 3 Questions video interview, SoftLayer CTO Duke Skarda talked about Hybrid Hosting with Kevin, and last week, I tackled the topic in a session the Texas Technology Summit in Houston. If you have a few minutes and want to learn a little more about SoftLayer’s take on hybrid computing and hybrid hosting, you can pull up a virtual chair and see my presentation here:

Even though hybrid hosting is relatively young, it has a great deal of potential. Unlike some of the hyped technologies and developments we hear about all the time, hybrid hosting isn’t going to replace everything that came before it … On the contrary, hybrid hosting encompasses everything that came before it, allowing for flexibility and functionality that you can’t find in any of the individual component technologies.

We weren’t able to record all of the questions and answers at the end of the session, but one of the most surprising themes I noticed was a misunderstanding of what “Cloud Infrastructure” meant. Those questions reminded me of a fantastic BrightTALK Cloud Infrastructure Online Summit that featured several interesting and informative session about how cloud computing is changing the way businesses are thinking about deploying and managing their IT infrastructure. I know it seems like we’re preaching to the choir by posting this on the SoftLayer Blog, but take a look at the BrightTALK Summit’s webcast topics to see if any would be helpful to you as you talk about this mysterious “cloud” thing.

-@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

Follow the link below to read the guest blog from AppFirst, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in managing servers and applications with a SaaS-based monitoring solution. To learn more about AppFirst, visit AppFirst.com and if you like what you see, sign up for a Free Trial of AppFirst in the Technology Partners Marketplace.

How You Should Approach Monitoring in the Cloud

Monitoring in the cloud may sound like it’s easy, but there’s one important thing you need to know before you get started: traditional monitoring techniques simply don’t work when you’re in the cloud.

“But why?” you may ask. “Why can’t I use Polling and Byte Code Injection in my cloud infrastructure?”

With Polling, you miss incidents between intervals, you only get the data that you requested, and you can only monitor parts of the application but not the whole thing. If you choose to use Polling for your cloud monitoring, you’ll have to deal with missing important data you need.

And with Byte Code Injection, you only get data from within the language run-time, meaning you don’t have the real data of what is happening across your application stack. It is inferred.

Using our own product on our production systems, we have learned three lessons about running in the cloud.

Lesson #1: Visibility = Control
By definition, running in the cloud means you are running in a shared environment. You don’t have the CPU cycles your operating system reports you have, and sometimes, the hypervisor will throttle you. In our experience, some cloud vendors are much better at managing this than others. When running in some clouds, we’ve had huge variations in performance throughout the day, significantly impacting our end-users experience. One of the reasons we chose SoftLayer was because we didn’t see those kinds of variances.

The reality is until you have visibility into what your application truly needs in terms of resources, you don’t have control of your application and your user’s experience. According to an Aberdeen study, 68% of the time IT finds out about application issues from end users. Don’t let this be you!

Lesson #2: It’s Okay to Use Local Storage
The laws of physics reign, so the disk is always the slowest piece. No getting around the fact there are physical elements involved like spindles and disks spinning. And then when you share it, as you do in the cloud, there can be other issues … It all depends on the characteristics of your application. If it’s serving up lots of static data, then cloud-based storage can most likely work for you. However, if you have lots of dynamic, small chunks of data, you are probably best served by using local storage. This is the architecture we had to go with given the nature of our application.

With servers around the world streaming application behavior data to our production system all the time and needing to process it to make it available in a browser, we had to use local storage. In case you are interested in reading more on this and RAM based designs here are some posts:

• High Scalability – Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing?
• Thinking Out Cloud – Memory-Based Architectures and the Cloud
• AppFirst – A RAM Based Data Architecture

Lesson #3: Know the Profile of Your Subsystems
Knowing the profile of your subsystems and what they need in terms of resources is imperative to have the best performing application. A cloud-only deployment may not be right for you; hybrid (cloud and dedicated physical servers) might work better.

As we discussed in Lesson #2 you might need to have local, persistent storage. Again, some vendors do this better than others. SoftLayer, in our experience, has a very good, high bandwidth connection between their cloud and physical infrastructure. But you can’t make these decisions in a vacuum. You need the data to tell you what parts of your application are network heavy, CPU intensive, and require a lot of memory in certain circumstances. We have learned a lot from using our own application on our production system. It’s very quick and easy for you to start learning about the profile of your application too.

We are constantly learning more about deploying in the cloud, NoSQL databases, scalable architectures, and more. Check out the AppFirst blog regularly for the latest.

We’d like to give a special shout out thanks to SoftLayer! We’re honored to be one of your launch partners in the new Technology Partners Marketplace.

-AppFirst

Ever wonder what a SoftLayer data center looked like before it became a SoftLayer data center? Each one of our facilities is built from a “pod” concept: You can walk into any of our server rooms in any of our facilities around the country (soon to be “around the world”), and you’ll see same basic layout, control infrastructure and servers. By building our data center space in this way, we’re able to provide an unparalleled customer experience. Nearly every aspect of our business benefits from this practice, many in surprising ways.

From an operations perspective, our staff can work in any facility without having to be retrained and the data center construction process becomes a science that can be replicated quicker with each subsequent build-out. From a sales perspective, every product and technology can be made available from all of our locations. From a network perspective, the network architecture doesn’t deviate significantly from place to place. From a finance perspective, if we’re buying the same gear from the same vendors, we get better volume pricing. From a marketing perspective … I guess we have a lot of really pretty data center space to show off.

We try to keep our customers in the loop when it comes to our growth and expansion plans by posting pictures and updates as we build new pods, and with our newest facility in San Jose, CA, we’ve been snapping photos throughout the construction progress. If you’ve been patiently reading this part of the blog before scrolling down to the pictures, you get bonus points … If you looked at the pictures before coming back up to this content, you already know that I’ve included several snapshots that show some of the steps we take when outfitting new DC space.

The first look at our soon-to-be data center is not the flashiest, but it shows you how early we get involved in the build-out process. The San Jose facility is brand new, so we have a fresh canvas for our work of art. If I were to start talking your ear off about the specifics of the space, this post would probably go into next week, so I’ll just show you some of the most obvious steps in the evolution of the space.

The time gap between the first picture and the second picture is pretty evident, but the drastic change is pretty impressive. Raised floor, marked aisles, PDUs … But no racks.

Have no fear, the racks are being assembled.

They’re not going to do much good sitting in the facility’s office space, though. Something tells me the next picture will have them in a different setting.

Lucky guess, huh? You can see in this picture that the racks are installed in front of perforated tiles (on the cold aisle side) and on top of special tiles that allow for us to snake cabling from under the floor to the rack without leaving open space for the cold air to sneak out where it’s not needed.

The next step in the process requires five very expensive network switches in each rack. Two of the switches are for public network traffic, two are for private network traffic and one is for out-of-band management network traffic.

Those switches won’t do much good for the servers if the servers can’t be easily connected to them, so the next step is to attach and bind all of the network cable from the switches to where the servers will be. As you’ll see in the next pictures, the cabling and binding is done with extreme precision … If any of the bundles aren’t tightly wound, the zip ties are cut and the process has to be restarted.

While the cables are being installed, we also work to prepare our control row with servers, switches, routers and appliances that mirror the configurations we have in our other pods.

When the network cables are all installed, it’s a pretty amazing sight. When the cables are plugged into the servers, it’s even more impressive … Each cable is pre-measured and ready to be attached to its server with enough length to get it to the port but not too much to leave much slack.

One of the last steps before we actually get the servers installed is to install the server rails (which make installing the server a piece of cake).

The servers tend to need power, so the power strips are installed on each rack, and each power strip is fed from the row’s PDU.

Every network and power cable in the data center is labeled and positioned exactly where it needs to be. The numbers on the cables correspond with ports on our switches, spots in the rack and plugs on the power strip so we can immediately track down and replace any problem cables we find.

If you’ve hung around with me for this long, I want to introduce you to a few of the team members that have been working night and day to get this facility ready for you. While I’d like to say I could have done all of this stuff myself, that would be a tremendous lie, and without the tireless efforts of all of these amazing SoftLayer folks, this post would be a whole lot less interesting.

A funny realization you might come to is that in this entire “data center” post, there’s not a single picture of a customer server … Is it a data center if it doesn’t have data yet?

-SamF

I know you expected to see a video interview with Paul Ford the next time a 3 Bars | 3 Questions episode rolled across your desk, but I snuck past him for a chance in the spotlight this week. Kevin and I jumped on a quick video chat to talk about the Sales Engineering team, and because of our recent release of SoftLayer Managed Hosting, two of the three questions ended up being about that news:

You should be seeing a blog from Nathan in the next half hour or so with more detail about how we approached managed hosting, so you’ll have all the background you need to springboard into that post after you watch this video.

If you’ve heard everything you need to hear about managed hosting and want to start the process of adding it to servers on your account, visit http://www.softlayer.com/solutions/managed-hosting/ or chat with a sales rep, and they can help you get squared away. If you’re not sure whether it’s a good fit, ask for a sales engineer to consult … They’re a great group with a pretty awesome manager.

Paul, sorry for stealing your spot in the 3 Bars | 3 Questions rotation! I’m handing the baton back over to you to talk about TechWildcatters and the Technology Partners Marketplace in the next episode.

-Tam

One of SoftLayer’s driving principles is innovation — Our mantra is ‘Innovate or Die.’ We don’t focus on offering the lowest cost solutions; we strive to offer the most innovative solutions, which in turn brings customers the greatest value.

Take as an example SoftLayer Managed Hosting, a new service we’re launching this week.

A quick survey of the market tells us a number of key things about managed hosting in terms of the value proposition offered, as well as the challenges that it can present. The value proposition seems clear: Organizations that need their infrastructure managed and don’t have the internal resources to do so can either expand their IT capabilities or look externally to a service provider to take on the work. Many choose the second option because it is much faster and more cost effective than building an internal function. Elimination of infrastructure management responsibilities combined with a lower price would seem to deliver significant value.

So where’s the downside?

A typical managed services deal comes with a 3-5 year contract, often accompanied by an early termination fee. The end result: customer lock-in. If the service is not up to snuff, it is difficult to move to another provider.

This is great for the provider, but not so great for the customer. To make matters even less customer-centric, these deals tend to be “all or none” affairs. The service provider wants to add management fees to everything versus just those pieces that the customer wants managed. In addition to that, provisioning time can be horrendous. A managed environment typically takes anywhere from 10-15 business days before the customer can access the environment. That’s a painful length of time when you compare it with the five minutes it takes to provision a SoftLayer cloud instance and the 2-4 hours it takes to get a dedicated box online and ready for you.

Understanding the competitive landscape, we decided to take a different approach with our Managed Hosting: The innovative approach.

Instead of a 10-15 day provisioning window, we’ll have your managed environment up and running within one (1) business day of ordering.

From a contract perspective, we are confident enough in our service to offer a month-to-month terms. If you don’t like the service or if we can’t deliver, you should be free to find a provider that meets your needs — no penalties incurred. Isn’t it time to expect a provider to earn your business each month? This arrangement also makes managed hosting feasible for short-term needs and applications.

Additionally, SoftLayer Managed Hosting is not “all or none.” We’ll manage only the pieces of the solution that you want managed.

And to top everything off, it just so happens that we can deliver these solutions at a price point lower than anyone else in the market because of the platform’s flexibility.

In this case, innovation brings customers the greatest service value AND the best price!

CBNO

-Nathan

P.S. Neovise prepared a detailed report on our managed hosting offering: A New Breed of Managed Hosting for the Cloud Computing Age. If you like white papers (and who doesn’t?), it’ll be right up your alley.

Welcome to the next installment in a 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

This is a guest post from Dave Jilk of Standing Cloud, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in automating cloud application deployment and streamlining management. To learn more about Standing Cloud, visit StandingCloud.com and if you like what you see, get a Free Trial of Standing Cloud on SoftLayer.

Standing Cloud’s Application Layer for the SoftLayer Cloud

When we first came across the SoftLayer Cloud, we were impressed by the breadth of what it allowed the user to do through a web browser. Beyond the basic infrastructure capabilities of provisioning servers and storage (that you can find from other providers), the SoftLayer console and API allow full access to the networking, security, and server console capabilities of the system. It’s as though you can take over the mind of a network administrator and have him or her do your bidding.

A host of networking features that come with the offering with the offering were especially exciting to us (see the end of this post for details). Now, when I say “us,” I mean our Founding System Architect, Joel Wampler. Joel breathes network protocols, eats open source technology stacks for most of his meals and speaks in Linux command line. I, in contrast, wouldn’t have the first idea how to make good use of those network features, but his amazement was enough to be contagious. I’m a software developer by trade, not a systems or network architect, and increasingly I’m mostly a business user … And as I’ve transitioned to more of a business-centric focus, I’ve become the target demographic for Standing Cloud. The distinction between business users in a technical company and technical users in a business are why the Standing Cloud service is so powerful on the SoftLayer Cloud.

For business users and application developers, what we call the “dark cloud” (IaaS without an application layer) is not very useful and relatively intimidating. Business users primarily want SaaS – the ability to use applications without any consideration of the mechanics. Developers want APaaS or PaaS – the ability to customize existing applications or build them from scratch, without any (or much) consideration of the underlying technology stack or infrastructure.

Standing Cloud delivers all of this, the way it ought to be, on the SoftLayer Cloud. An end user can deploy a pre-packaged application in minutes with just a few clicks. We incorporate best practices so you take advantage of all the Standing Cloud and SoftLayer capabilities without having to know about them. As a developer, you can deploy one of these applications and then customize the code without having to think about system security configuration, memory parameters or other system administration issues. Just sync with your repository on Github or Subversion and the code will be uploaded and ready to run.

These “startup” benefits are just the beginning, though. Standing Cloud makes it easy to “move” your application – to a different server if you need more (or less) capacity, to a shared server if you are a solution provider and want to reduce the cost to your clients, or to a “test drive” if you want to experiment with an upgrade or code changes but don’t want to affect the production deployment. We monitor the application and its status 24×7, and you receive notifications if it is down or performing slowly – and optionally, we can automatically revive it on a new server if the situation warrants.

If you want to open the hood, you can. Because of the way Standing Cloud deploys and manages applications, an adventurous end-user can easily access the application code and the PaaS layer. And a developer who has a special need can dive into the infrastructure layer through our browser based terminal window. Unlike most SaaS and PaaS systems, Standing Cloud keeps these details out of your hair but does not prevent you from accessing and changing them.

If you are just getting started with the SoftLayer Cloud, and you are not a system administrator, I highly recommend that you explore the Standing Cloud Application Network. Instead of being faced with the “dark cloud,” you’ll have more than 80 application choices (and we take requests if your favorites aren’t included yet!). For developers, we offer language support for Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

If you are a system administrator and an existing SoftLayer customer, you may want to consider Standing Cloud as a time saver. There are so many powerful (and challenging!) capabilities to manage on SoftLayer for your complex, mission critical applications. Is deploying and locking down a server running Drupal or SugarCRM the best use of your time?

Finally, we would love to hear from you. Send an email to support@standingcloud.com, and tell us what you need, how you want to use the cloud, and what we could do better. Our users drive our product evolution, so please tell us what you think!

And for those of you who are curious about the network features I mentioned Joel salivating over at the start of the post, here are a few highlights:

• Up to Gigabit speeds both internally and to the Internet
• Private IP blocks are assigned as a VLAN so that other customers cannot access them
• IPv6 capable
• Free inbound bandwidth, and 1000GB of outbound bandwidth included
• Ability to share an IP address across multiple machines (excellent for high availability solutions)

-Dave Jilk, Standing Cloud

We recently announced a partnership with the Tech Wildcatters Incubator Program, a Dallas-based “microseed” fund and startup accelerator, and we couldn’t be happier with the results we’ve seen thus far. Much of the press coverage of the sponsorship focused on the $1,000/mo of cloud, dedicated or hybrid hosting solutions we offered the program’s startup companies, but the most exciting aspect of the relationship thus far has been getting to engage with the participating up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

Having been in their seats about six years ago when SoftLayer was born in a living room, the SoftLayer team is especially qualified to give insight about the struggles and successes of running a startup, and that aspect of our partnership is where we hope to provide the most value. Over the past few weeks, we’ve met with the current Tech Wildcatters participants and seen some of the amazing ideas they have in the works, and we’re pumped to see them succeed … By all accounts, we can’t really call SoftLayer a “startup” anymore, but our investment in this community reinvigorates the startup culture we’ve tried to maintain as the company has grown.

Recently, I had the chance to share a few “Keys to Success” with program participants, and since those thoughts might be interesting for other startups and small business users, I thought I’d share some of the highlights here. There are no “guaranteed win” formulas or “super-secret secrets to success” in business (regardless of what an infomercial at 3am on a Tuesday morning may tell you), but these ideas may help you position your business for success:

1. Hire people smarter than you.
Your goal should be to get people on your team who can handle specific responsibilities better than you can. Just because you’re running the business doesn’t mean you can’t learn from it, and the best people to learn from are brilliant people.

2. Hire a diverse group.
Different people think differently, and different perspectives lead to better conversations and better business decisions. Filling your organization with one kind of employee will lead to a lot of “That’s the best decision ever” moments, but whether or not that “best decision ever” decision is good for anyone else is a crap shoot.

3. Founders should put skin in the game.
With all of the startup company trials and tribulations, you want everyone on your team to have a vested interest in the business’s success. Clock-punchers and coasters need not apply.

4. Boot-strap the beginning.
Along the lines of the previous recommendation, if you’ve remortgaged your house or sold your car or maxed out your credit cards on a new business, you’re going to care a lot more if it fails. By boot-strapping your initial financing, you become even more accountable for your success.

5. Operate with financial sense, operational sense and common sense.
Balance your business responsibly. If you disregard any of those “senses,” your tenure as a small business owner may be relatively short-lived. When it comes to financial sense, I also recommend that you invest in professional accounting support and software to save you a ton of headache and heartache down the road when it’s time to go after “real money.”

6. CBNO – Challenging But Not Overwhelming
You can always do something more for the business. You and your team should be maximizing your efforts to grow the business but not at the expense of burning out. If you’ve got “skin in the game,” your threshold for what is overwhelming may increase, but you have to understand the need for balance.

7. Have fun and make money.
In that order. If you’re not having fun, it doesn’t matter how much money you make. Startups are run by passionate people, and the second you lose that passion, you lose a significant piece of what makes your business or idea great.

I touched on about a dozen more points when it comes to how to orient your business to your customers, but I’ll save that bit for later.

CBNO

-@lavosby

Welcome to the first installment in a new 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 them tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer’s VP of Community Development

This is a guest post from Eduardo Fernandez of MigrationBox, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in simplifying the process of transferring email and other types of data between services. To learn more about MigrationBox, visit MigrationBox.com.

Take Control of Your Cloud Data

Online services are great, but moving your data to the cloud and moving it between cloud services is very difficult and time-consuming. Think about all the data that you have online: email, contacts, calendars, documents … What happens when you want to switch to a different provider? Maybe your company changed names or is acquiring another company or you want to move to a cheaper or better email provider. It’s really difficult to move this data, especially when you’re talking about hundreds or thousands of accounts.

I first ran into this problem about a year ago. I was doing consulting work for a client, and he asked me to move their company email to Google Apps. I found out that it’s really hard to transfer email in bulk. I’m a hacker, so it didn’t take me too long to come up with a tool that did a pretty good job at transferring the accounts one-by-one. Then I thought I could just make a product out of this tool so that other people could use it as well.

At that point, I found it wasn’t that easy.

Processing email at scale is challenging. You see problems like buggy protocol implementations, unreliable network connections and bandwidth throttling. I had to bring people to the team like our Chief Architect Carlos Cabañero, and it took us several months to come up with an scalable migration platform. The good news is that we made this platform service-agnostic, so it’s not only able to transfer email, it also transfers any type of data – we only have to write connectors to deal with various services.

At the moment, we’re focusing on email and the Google Apps suite, but we will be expanding our offering to support popular business applications like Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, and consumer apps like Flickr and Delicious.

Vendor lock-in is a growing concern when companies move to the cloud. Our objective is to give you control of your data, so you are free to move it to another service. With MigrationBox, you are not locked in anymore.

When our customer base started to grow, we ran into scalability problems ourselves. Data migration is a bandwidth-intensive process that requires lots of RAM and computing power. Fortunately, with SoftLayer we have more raw server power and automation capabilities than we’ll ever need.

The wave of moving your data online is just getting started. The cloud is popular, but only 5% of enterprises have moved their email into the cloud so far. This is just the beginning, and email is just one service. Everything is moving to the cloud: CRM, storage, document management … Cloud migration problems are going to grow and grow over the next five years, and MigrationBox will be there to help.

-Eduardo Fernandez, MigrationBox

When spring is in the air, and the first breath of April showers blows across the plains, the mind turns to simple passions. Luckily, for the past three years, the first week in April has wrapped lovingly around the Lone Star Ukulele Festival in Dallas   happily just down the street from SoftLayer’s main office.

Now I know what half of you out there are thinking: “UKULELE festival?!? Isn’t the ukulele that kitschy instrument that every college kid in the 1930′s carried around in the pockets of their raccoon coat? Isn’t that the twangy noise maker that Tiny Tim crooned to on variety shows in the late 60′s and early 70′s?”

The answer, of course, is yes to both questions. Nevertheless, as attested to in the excellent documentary film Mighty Uke, the ukulele is enjoying something of a renaissance these days. From television commercials, to the Grammy award winning “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train, and across the globe the ukulele has plucked its way back into popular culture.

The other half of you are thinking, “Ukulele FESTIVAL?!? What the heck is a ‘Ukulele Festival’?”

A Ukulele festival is an opportunity for ukulele players of all levels to gather together and learn. The Lone Star Ukulele Festival featured nationally recognized talent like Kimo Hussey, Pops Bayless, Michelle Kiba, Ukulele Bart, Four Strings of Swing, and Texas’ own middle American good times band, The Wahooligans. These professionals taught seminars in topics ranging from basic music theory, to songwriting, to advanced blues and jazz chord structure, to performance skills. Such an event cannot be all work and no play, however, so the festival also hosted an Open Mic night, a Songwriter’s Contest, and not just one, but two concerts, one of which was dedicated to classical music interpreted on the Ukulele. Vendors had a forum to sell their instruments and books and there was no shortage of “Jam sessions” where participants gathered in the hotel lobby just to enjoy each other’s company and play songs together.

In short, a Ukulele Festival is a fun, relaxed atmosphere were like-minded people can revel in a common interest, share their favorite beverages, meet new friends and generally have a ball.

Now somewhere out there between the half of you that were wondering about the ukulele part, and the other half that were wondering about the festival part, I sense there is a cross section that is wondering what in the heck this has to do with SoftLayer and hosting. For those folks, I can only say this: At SoftLayer we work hard. We deal with large, complex systems and the difficult problems that arise from keeping those systems up and running. Sometimes the sailing is relatively smooth, and sometimes the waters can be a bit choppy, but we like to move forward and to do that we have to keep rowing.

Every once in a while though, when one has the chance, it’s nice to take a break: let the current carry you. When that time comes, for me anyway, I pick up my trusty ukulele. For me, the Lone Star Ukulele festival was a great place for me to rest and refresh.

My friends, we’ve all made it through winter and into spring. April’s showers bloom May flowers, ready for someone to stop and smell them. Hard work and dedication are important; get your work done! But equally important, be sure to set aside time to find your own simple passions, a place to indulge them, and friends to sit at your side once in a while. When you find your place, perhaps you could even pick up your own uke, and join them in a song.

-Scott

In the first quarter of 2011, SoftLayer presented in, exhibited at or sponsored at least thirty different conferences and events. We’ve globe-trotted to places like Orlando, San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas and Europa Park, Germany, to spread the word about who SoftLayer is and what we do. We’ve talked about data center pods over beers in Boston and showed some server skin at SxSW in Austin, and in the process, we got to share the SoftLayer story with literally thousands (if not tens of thousands) of people.

It turns out, there might be a few billion people on the planet that haven’t heard of SoftLayer (yet), so every event we attend give us an opportunity to meet more people and explain the value SoftLayer can bring to their business. Take this week’s Web 2.0 Expo for example: More than 500 people came by the our booth to learn more about us, get some cool swag or grab a beer during the booth crawl, and a hundred of them lined up to try their hand at the Server Challenge.

Of the attendees who made it to the front of the pack to chat with one of us, it’s remarkable to note how consistent some of the conversations were. Since we haven’t really done a refresh to catch everyone up on what it is SoftLayer does (and since this blog is being presented in the sponsor section of Techmeme), a reintroduction may be in order.

Since the conversations I had at Web 2.0 Expo are so fresh in my mind, I thought I’d frame this little post around the most common questions we were asked by attendees learning about us for the first time (Warning: The responses to these general questions are SoftLayer’s value statements, so they’ll come off as very salesy … Leading you to believe we’d answer any other way would be disingenuous, though):

“What does SoftLayer do?”
Simply put, SoftLayer is a hosting provider. That generalization doesn’t do our business justice, though. We have ten data center facilities in Houston, Dallas, Washington D.C. and Seattle, and we host more than 80,000 servers for more than 25,000 customers worldwide. We offer cloud, dedicated and hybrid environments and resources that allow businesses to outsource their IT, so they can focus on their core competencies and give their hosting infrastructure to the experts.

“How are you different from <Hosting Competitor>?”
SoftLayer was built with a focus on a few core values: Innovation, Empowerment, Integration and Automation. Our hosting platform offers a true hybrid experience – dedicated and cloud services are seamlessly integrated – that can be accessed and controlled by customers in a number of ways. Each SoftLayer server supports three different kinds of network traffic (public, private and out-of-band management), and customers have complete access to their server via free KVM over IP included with every server. Everything you can do in our portal can be done with our API, and we’re an industry leader in product innovation.

Oh, and you can also spin up a cloud server on our platform in under 15 minutes and a dedicated server with your specs and operating system in 2-4 hours.

“Do you support <XYZ Technology>?”
If <XYZ Technology> is current, legal and useful, you can probably use it on our platform. If we don’t directly offer software or services you need, we have droves of customers and partners who probably do, and we’re happy to refer you to them. Given the unparalleled access you get to your SoftLayer hosting environment, the world is your oyster.

“Impressive sales pitch, but how do I know it’s more than just a pitch?”
Our business is designed around making our customers happy. Our services are offered on month-to-month contracts, so we have to continue to provide great service to you or we lose your business. We can share customer success stories until we’re blue in the face, but what really matters is what your experience is when you try us out.

Somewhere in there, you might have written me off as just some public relations guy, but I believe every word in those responses (as I’m sure my 550+ coworkers do). I’m not trying to claim that if you host with SoftLayer you’ll never have another problem or that people don’t make mistakes on our end, but as a company, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more devoted group of people focused on providing the best experience in the business.

-@quigleymar

If you didn’t read the title to this post in the singsong seventh-inning stretch tune, the rest of this post probably won’t be for you. For those of you who just got to “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,” as the song kept playing in your head, you’re going to love the news we have to share. We’ll wait for you to finish belting out “At the old ball game!” first, though.

[Pausing here for everyone to finish the song.]

Now that everyone’s back together, I want you to make sure you don’t lose any of that late-inning adrenaline because you might need it at the end of this post.

SoftLayer is all about customer experience. Just ask Skinman. If you’re a SoftLayer employee and you don’t have “the customer” in the top slot of your “work priorities” list, you’ll either need to update that list quickly or update your résumé. This post isn’t about THE SoftLayer customer experience, though … It’s about A SoftLayer customer experience.

THE SoftLayer customer experience is all about automation, efficiency, service and innovation. A SoftLayer customer experience uses the term in a much more general sense: It’s any opportunity we have to give back to our customers in the form of events, contests, and in this case, baseball tickets! If you’re a SoftLayer customer, you’re entitled to more fun than our competitors’ customers … And if that’s not in our terms of service, it probably should be.

Throughout the 2011 Major League Baseball season, SoftLayer will be giving away tickets to Texas Rangers home games in Arlington, Texas! We’re going to keep you guessing about how/when/where we’ll be giving them away, but if you keep your eye on the SoftLayer Blog, follow @SoftLayer on Twitter, subscribe to SoftLayerTube on YouTube and “Like” us on Facebook, you’ll be the first to hear.

We’re pretty sure customers in the DFW area are going to be the most excited, since they can root for the home team, but as the season progresses, the net may be cast significantly wider … Reaching out to customers in other parts of the country (world?) who love SoftLayer and want to catch a game while they’re in town for a data center tour. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves just yet. Let’s give away our first set of tickets!

Texas Rangers v. Anaheim Angels

• Date: Monday, April 18, 2011
• Time: 7:05pm
• Location: Rangers Ballpark in Arlington
• Seats: 2 – Section 26 (Lower Level, behind Home Plate!)
• Transportation: You’re responsible for transportation to/from the park

How to Enter
Since our first giveaway doesn’t include transportation to/from the game, the primary pool of participants will be customers who live within driving distance (or happen to be in the DFW area on April 18). Entry into the competition is simple: Comment on this post about why you love SoftLayer.

When you’re entering your email, please use a contact address associated with your SoftLayer account. Submissions will be accepted from now until 10 a.m. CDT on Thursday, April 14, so get to writing! We’ll have a quick internal vote for all of the submissions after removing your contact information to obscure on which account goes with which response. If your submission wins, we’ll email you on Thursday to arrange for ticket delivery … You’ll have the whole weekend to get excited about the game!

Play Ball!

-@khazard

Deep in the depths of an ancient tomb of the great Abswalli, you and your team accidentally awaken the Terbshianaki ghost army. You’re disconnected from the supply caravan with the valuable resources that could not only sustain your journey but also save your team. As Zeliagh the Protesiann hunter fires his last arrow, you come to the sudden realization that continuing your quest is now hopeless. Alas, true terror was unknown before this moment as you come to the most surprising realization: The one thing you truly can’t live without is your trusty server that converts one type of media into another.

Fear not great adventurer, for I, Phil of the SLAPI, have come, and I bear the gifts of empowerment, automation and integration. Freedom from the horror of your epiphany can be found in our complementary media transcoding service.
Before we can begin, some preparation is required. First, you must venture to our customer portal and create a transcoding user: Private Network->Transcoding. As you know from the use of your other SoftLayer spoils, you shan’t be obligated to access this functionality from your web browser. You can summon the API wizardry bequeathed to you by coders of old in the the SLDN scroll: SoftLayer_Network_Media_Transcode_Account::createTranscodeAccount.*

*For the sake of this blog, we’ll abbreviate “SoftLayer_Network_Media_Transcode_Account” as “SNMTA” from here forward … Shortening it helps with blog formatting.

You must then construct an object to represent a SoftLayer Network Media Transcode Job, like our SoftLayer Network Media Transcode Job template object. This template object will be built with a number of properties. Your pursuit in relieving your aforementioned horror only necessitates the use of the required properties.

You will need to decide in which format the final treasure will take form. You may find this information with the SNMTA::getPresets method.

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$client = SoftLayer_SoapClient::getClient('SoftLayer_Network_Media_Transcode_Account', $trandcodeAccountId, $apiUsername, $apiKey);
$transcodePresets = $client->getPresets();
print_r($transcodePresets);
Array
(
    [0] => stdClass Object
        (
            [GUID] => {9C3716B9-C931-4873-9FD1-03A17B0D3350}
            [category] => Application Specific
            [description] => MPEG2, Roku playback, 1920 x 1080, Interlaced, 29.97fps, 25Mbps, used with Component/VGA connection.
            [name] => MPEG2 - Roku - 1080i
        )
 
    [1] => stdClass Object
        (
            [GUID] => {03E81152-2A74-4FF3-BAD9-D1FF29973032}
            [category] => Application Specific
            [description] => MPEG2, Roku playback, 720 x 480, 29.97fps, 6.9Mbps, used with Component/S-Video connection.
            [name] => MPEG2 - Roku - 480i
        )
 
    [2] => stdClass Object
        (
            [GUID] => {75A264DB-7FBD-4976-A422-14FBB7950BD1}
            [category] => Application Specific
            [description] => MPEG2, Roku playback, 720 x 480, Progressive, 29.97fps, 6.9Mbps, used with Component/VGA connection.
            [name] => MPEG2 - Roku - 480p
        )
.....

The freedom to use this power (the more you know!) is yours, in this instance, I scrolled through let my intuition find the option which just felt right:

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stdClass Object
	(
            [GUID] => {21A33980-5D78-4010-B4EB-6EF15F5CD69F}
            [category] => Web\Flash
            [description] =>
            [name] => FLV 1296kbps 640x480 4x3 29.97fps
        )

To decipher this language we must know the following:

1. The GUID is the unique identifier which we will use to reference our champion
2. The category section is used to group like presets together, this will be useful for those who’s journey leads down the path of GUI creation
3. A description of the preset, if one is available, will be listed under description
4. name is simply a human-readable name for our preset

You are nearly ready to restore your yearned for transcoding service as the ghostly horde presses the defensive perimeter. We have but one more task of preparation: We must provide the transcoding service a file! Using your Wand of File Transference +3, or your favorite FTP client, you enter the details for your transcode FTP account found on the Transcoding page of the IMS (or of course SNMTA::getFtpAttributes) and choose the “in” directory as the destination for your source file. Lacking no other option, you may call upon Sheshura, a fairy sprite, specializing in arcane documents for a source video file: Epic Battle

The battle rages around you, as the Wahwatarian mercenaries protect your flank. The clicking of your laptop keys twist and merge in the air around your ears only to transcend into a booming chorus of “The Flight of the Valkyries” as you near transcoding Utopia. You strike:

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<?php
//  Create a transcoding client
$client = SoftLayer_SoapClient::getClient('SoftLayer_Network_Media_Transcode_Job', null, $apiUsername, $apiKey);
 
// Define our preset GUID and filename
$presetGUID = '{95861D24-9DF5-405E-A130-A40C6637332D}';
$inputFile = 'video.mov';
 
/*
 * The transcoding service will append the new file extension to the output file
 * so we strip the extension here.
 */
$outputFile = substr($inputFile, 0, strrpos($inputFile, '.'));
 
try {
    // Create a SoftLayer_Network_Media_Transcode_Job template object with the required properties
    $transcodeJob = new stdClass();
    $transcodeJob->transcodePresetGuid = $presetGUID;
    $transcodeJob->inputFile = "/in/$inputFile";
    $transcodeJob->outputFile = "/out/$outputFile";
 
    // Call createObject() with our template object as a parameter
    $result = $client->createObject($transcodeJob);
    // $result will contain a SoftLayer_Network_Media_Transcode_Job object
    print_r($result);
} catch ( Exception $e) {
    die( $e->getMessage());
}

If your will did not waver nor did your focus break in the face of ever-closing ghouls pounding your resolve, your treasure will be waiting. Brandish your Wand of File Transference +3, or utilize your favorite FTP client to retrieve your reward: “out/video.flv”

If the gods be with thee, your resulting file should look like this: Epic Battle (in .flv)

With your victory fresh upon the tablets of history, you can now encode to any of our supported formats. Try using the process above to convert the video to .mp4 format so your resulting file output is Epic Battle (in .mp4)!

-Phil

P.S. If you’re going to take off your training wheels, the second example uses “[description] => MPEG4 file, 320x240, 15fps, 256kbps for download” for the bandwidth impaired.

In this week’s “3 Bars | 3 Questions” episode, I was nominated by Tom Blair to talk about SoftLayer’s Channel Sales team and the competitive advantages our three partner programs (strategic, referral and reseller) have over our competition.

As you’ll see in the video, we actually covered seven or eight questions, but the basic framework for the chat were these three:

1. How does SoftLayer define the channel?
2. What’s happening in the SoftLayer channel program?
3. How does SoftLayer’s referral program differ from the programs offered by competitors?

Because we had quite a bit of ground to cover, the video goes about 15 minutes, but I hope it’s entertaining and informative throughout. Be sure to stick around through the end of the video to hear the best analogy I can think of for SoftLayer’s program.

To learn more about the new referral partner program I mention, email referral@softlayer.com, and we can fill you in.

Since we recently announced an awesome partnership with TechWildcatters, I’m looking forward to hearing what SoftLayer VP of Community Development Paul Ford has to say about what else is coming up. Paul, enjoy the hot seat!

-Drew

This week, Lance and I hopped over the pond to attend WorldHostingDays 2011 at Europa-Park in Rust, Germany. If you haven’t heard of WorldHostingDays, you may be a little more familiar with WebhostingDays, its more narrowly focused predecessor. Because many of the sessions and discussions at the event have evolved and grown significantly from the pure-play “web hosting” market, the name change was a good one … And it didn’t even require tweaking the WHD abbreviation.

Given the ambitious scope of WorldHostingDays, we weren’t sure what to expect from the sessions, but we were excited to hear fresh perspectives on the European-centric hosting market. We walked away from the sessions with a few new ideas to implement into SoftLayer’s business, and it was interesting to hear the (regionally accented) conversations focus on the same problems and questions the US hosting industry is tackling: Public and private clouds, IPv6, scalability, stability and security.

Many European companies that are relatively new to the hosting scene are experiencing some phenomenal growth (similar to what we’ve seen at SoftLayer), and the opportunity is growing exponentially beyond their growth as new markets turn up with fresh needs for quality infrastructure. In these developing markets, local events in Europe like WHD will be invaluable to educate and relate how this relatively new industry might change the face of the local business environment … And when those efforts carry into Asia, the sky is the limit on the opportunity.

We have some pretty huge global plans on the horizon, and we’re excited to position ourselves for worldwide recognition. When WorldHostingDays 2012 rolls around, you’re going to see an even bigger, badder and better SoftLayer.

-@gkdog

Whether fact or fiction, in business, sports, politics or the arts, everyone loves a triumphant underdog story, and who could be more of an underdog than a bookish, socially awkward geek? You know … the ones that were overlooked and under-appreciated (until they made their first million dollars). The history of the Internet is littered with geeks changing the way nearly every person in the developed world interacts with the people around them. In honor of these stereotypically statistical underdogs, May 25 – the premiere date of the first Star Wars film (among other geeky holidays) – has come to be known as Geek Pride Day.

With more than 80,000 active servers and 550+ employees, SoftLayer is essentially a Geek Think Tank of employees and and proving ground of sorts for customers. As I’m writing this, the faint hum of our generators and cooling systems remind me that the next Facebook or Microsoft might be getting started in the data center pod right below my desk at our Dallas Alpha HQ.

Just considering that prospect reinforced to me that the geeks have really done it! The 2.0 millennium has been marked by the rise YouSpaceTwitterWikiMyTube sites spurred on by textbook-definition nerdy underdogs … It’s right in line with Lance’s theory of world domination. No longer are geeks merely the Steve Urkels of the business world.

They’re successful, smart, savvy, innovative early adopters.

Let’s take a moment and explore some of the more polarizing geeks of our day – Geeks who made being a geek cool:

• Steve Jobs – 500,000 iPads sold by the end of the first week of release. Apple’s market cap exceeds that of Microsoft for the first time since 1989. Open Source application development and support is a key part of its ongoing software strategy.
• Bill Gates – Windows, Microsoft Office, Xbox and their new “To the cloud” focus.
• Mark Zuckerberg – The Founder of Facebook:
  • More than 500 million active users
  • Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform
    • Many of whom use SoftLayer as their Infrastructure host
  • People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
• Peter Parker – Spider Man – Peter has a natural gift for the sciences and is considered by some genius. After being bit by a radioactive spider Peter develops super physical human strength and ability along with a sixth sense for danger.
• Dwight Schrute – Top salesman for the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. Winner of numerous sales awards. One-time Assistant to the Regional Manager and beet farmer extraordinaire

Alright … I might be getting carried away lumping fictional characters into the mix, but you get my point.

As a member of the SLales department, I am forever “geeking out” over new and exciting applications, products and tools the our customers are coming up with. Although I don’t believe I can truly claim my geek badge of honor yet, I aspire to reaching that rank.

-Arielle

PS: For the geeks out there, (without cheating) what year was the first Star Wars film released? Did you see it in the theater? If you weren’t alive when it was released, when did you first see it?

If you own a business, your goal is to be wildly successful. You might look at financial growth, operational efficiencies or customer satisfaction, but at the end of the day, you want to execute on your vision to continue it. With SoftLayer’s management team, company culture, innovative platform and focus on the customer experience, we’ve managed to become a phenomenally successful and fast-growing company.

I run the Market Intelligence group at SoftLayer, and my team is responsible for reviewing success metrics internally and in comparison with many of our competitors. We have a wealth of data at our fingertips, and one of the most interesting statistics I track is related to market switching data.

Today, I was looking closely at some of our most recent domain name data, and I came across some pretty amazing information. We have millions of data points instantly available for filtering and sorting, so we can produce some pretty insightful market intelligence that can help us make better business and customer decisions.

While reviewing that domain name information, I did a quick pivot exercise in Excel to see the number of domain names hosted by SoftLayer – not just DNS hosted by us, but a pretty comprehensive view of the number of domains hosted on our infrastructure. As of March 1, 2011, we had 19,164,117 domains. Yes, you read that correctly: More than 19 million domains are hosted by SoftLayer. To give that a little context, the total domain name pool was 282,602,796, so we hosts about 6.78% of all domain names on the Internet.

That’s impressive, but it’s not the end of the story.

The number of net new domains coming to SoftLayer on a monthly basis is even more remarkable … From October 2010 to March 2011 – a 6 month snapshot – the total number of domains hosted on SoftLayer infrastructure had compounded growth of 124%:

What will the next six months hold? You can bet I’ll be refreshing the data to keep an eye on it. Without extrapolating much other information, I’d say that the growth numbers are astounding and they’re indicative of an unwavering confidence from our customers.

-Todd