Business Posts

Whether you’re managing a SaaS solution for thousands of large clients around the world or you’re running a small mail server for a few mom-and-pop businesses in your neighborhood, you’re providing IT service for a fee — and your customers expect you to deliver. It’s easy to get caught up in focusing your attention and energy on day-to-day operations, and in doing so, you might neglect some of the looming risks that threaten the continuity of your business. You need to prioritize risk assessment and management.

Just reading that you need to invest in “Risk Management” probably makes you shudder. Admittedly, when a business owner has to start quantifying and qualifying potential areas of business risk, the process can seem daunting and full of questions … “What kinds of risks should I be concerned with?” “Once I find a potential risk, should I mitigate it? Avoid it? Accept it?” “How much do I need to spend on risk management?”

When it comes to risk management in hosting, the biggest topics are information security, backups and disaster recovery. While those general topics are common, each business’s needs will differ greatly in each area. Because risk management isn’t a very “cookie-cutter” process, it’s intimidating. It’s important to understand that protecting your business from risks isn’t a destination … it’s a journey, and whatever you do, you’ll be better off than you were before you did it.

Because there’s not a “100% Complete” moment in the process of risk management, some people think it’s futile — a gross waste of time and resources. History would suggest that risk management can save companies millions of dollars, and that’s just when you look at failures. You don’t see headlines when businesses effectively protect themselves from attempted hacks or when sites automatically fail over to a new server after a hardware failure.

It’s unfortunate how often confidential customer data is unintentionally released by employees or breached by malicious attackers. Especially because those instances are often so easily preventable. When you understand the potential risks of your business’s confidential data in the hands of the wrong people (whether malicious attackers or careless employees), you’ll usually take action to avoid quantifiable losses like monetary fines and unquantifiable ones like the loss of your reputation.

More and more, regulations are being put in place to holding companies accountable for protecting their sensitive information. In the healthcare industry businesses have to meet the strict Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. Sites that accept credit card payments online are required to operate in Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance. Data centers will spend hours (and hours and hours) achieving and maintaining their SSAE 16 certification. These rules and requirements are not arbitrarily designed to be restrictive (though they can feel that way sometimes) … They are based on best practices to ultimately protect businesses in those industries from risks that are common throughout the respective industry.

Over the coming months, I’ll discuss ways that you as a SoftLayer customer can mitigate and manage your risk. We’ll talk about security and backup plans that will incrementally protect your business and your customers. While we won’t get to the destination of 100% risk-mitigated operations, we’ll get you walking down the path of continuous risk assessment, identification and mitigation.

Stay tuned!

-Matthew

When SoftLayer began back in 2005, the term “cloud computing” was rarely used if at all. The founders of SoftLayer had an ambitious vision and plan to build a service platform that could easily automate, scale and meet the demands of the most sophisticated IT users. They were obviously onto something. Since then, we’ve emerged as the world’s largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, helping the next generation of web savvy entrepreneurs realize their dreams. But we didn’t do it alone. We had partnerships in place—including working with Parallels.

Today everyone is trying to scramble and figure out how this “new” IT shift will work itself out. Our friends over at Parallels had a similar ambitious undertaking—trying to automate and enable a complete gamut of hosting and cloud services. This created a framework for our partnership. We worked with their engineering and sales teams, starting back in 2005, which resulted in Parallels Plesk Panel being offered as an option on every SoftLayer server. That was just the beginning. We are now deploying Parallels Automation for hosting partners and have plans to integrate with their Application Packaging Standard offering. Plans to integrate with other products like Parallels Cloud Server are also on the horizon. It all comes down to helping hosting companies and other joint customers thrive and succeed.

To find out more about our partnership and how it can help streamline your entry into cloud computing click here. We are also the only “Diamond” sponsor at the Parallels Summit 2012 APAC in Singapore this year. We share a heritage and understanding with Parallels borne from a need to simplify and solve IT problems on a broad scale. Now that’s what I call a likeminded partnership.

-@gkdog

In January, we posted a series of blogs about legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate that would have had a serious impact on the hosting industry. We talked about SOPA and PIPA, and how those proposed laws would “break the Internet” as we know it. The hosting industry rallied together to oppose the passage of those bills, and in doing so, we proved to be a powerful collective force.

In the months that followed the shelving of SOPA and PIPA, many of the hosting companies that were active in the fight were invited to join a new coalition that would focus on proposed legislation that affects Internet infrastructure providers … The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (or “i2Coalition”) was born. i2Coalition co-founder and Board Chair Christian Dawson explains the basics:

SoftLayer is proud to be a Charter Member of i2Coalition, and we’re excited to see how many vendors, partners, peers and competitors have joined us. Scrolling the ranks of founding members is a veritable “Who’s who?” of the companies that make up the “nuts and bolts” of the Internet.

The goal of i2Coalition is to facilitate public policy education and advocacy, develop market-driven standards formed by consensus and give the industry a unified voice. On the i2Coalition’s Public Policy page, that larger goal is broken down into focused priorities, with the first being

“In all public policy initiatives of the i2Coalition will be to encourage the growth and development of the Internet infrastructure industry and to protect the interests of members of the Coalition consistent with this development.”

Another huge priority worth noting is the focus on enabling and promoting the free exercise of human rights — including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the protection of personal privacy. Those rights are essential to fostering effective Internet advancement and to maintain a free and open Internet, and SoftLayer is a strong supporter of that platform.

If you operate in the hosting or Internet infrastructure space and you want to be part of the i2Coalition, we encourage you to become a member and join the conversation. When policymakers are talking about getting “an Internet” from their staff members, we know that there are plenty of opportunities to educate and provide context on the technical requirements and challenges that would result from proposed legislation, and the Internet Infrastructure Coalition is well equipped to capitalize on those opportunities.

-@toddmitchell

If 80′s movies have taught me anything, it’s that any good story needs to have a video montage with Journey playing in the background. With that in mind, I’ll start this blog post with a glimpse of HostingCon 2012:

HostingCon brings the hosting industry together every year, and the conference winds up being surprisingly similar to classic 80′s “coming of age” movies:

• “Geeks” are among the main characters.
• There’s always a “funny guy.”
• At some point, the geeks attend a party.
• The characters learn more about themselves and others over the course of the movie.
• As the credits roll, everyone is inspired … Ready to take on the world.

With that in mind, HostingCon 2012 in Boston was a veritable John Hughes flick. There was no shortage of geeks, we hung out with one of the funniest people in the country, we threw a massive party, and we learned a ton. Without a doubt, attendees returned home with their intensity and enthusiasm cranked up to eleven (another 80′s reference).

The expo hall was abuzz with activity — albeit after a lull in the morning following the aptly named “Host Me All Night Long” party — and we enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with current partners and customers while meeting and speaking with soon-to-be partners and customers. While running a highly competitive Server Challenge, we were still able to dive deeper into partnerships, the build v. buy decision, branding, and launching a product when attendees visited our booth after hearing from our team in conference sessions and panels, and those conversations are what keep us coming back to HostingCon every year.

As a “veteran” of the hosting industry (assuming seven years of experience qualifies me), I’ve learned a great deal about the dynamics of the hosting industry from events like HostingCon over the years. On one hand, many of the attendees are “competitors,” and on the other hand, we’re all trying to make the industry better (since “a rising tide lifts all boats”). As a great example, look at the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2C), a trade association of companies with the shared goal and purpose of representing the industry in Washington, D.C., and beyond.

As it turns out, that unity flew out the door when attendees stood face-to-rack with the Server Challenge, though. Unlike our experiences at more general “technology” conferences, the components in our competition needed no introduction, and participants were particularly driven to best their peers … not only for the iPad, but for the pride of owning the Server Challenge title at HostingCon:

1. Darin Goldman – 0:59.28
2. Devon Hillard – 1:01.58
3. Ijan Kruizinga – 1:01.83
4. Jon Basha – 1:03.02
5. Sean Whitley – 1:03.06

As you saw in the video, Darin Goldman had the luxury of not needing his second attempt on the final day of the conference to secure a victory, but we were glad he let us record his “Breakfast Club” fist-pump to share with the world.

Don’t stop believing (in hosting).

-@khazard

P.S. I recorded the first few minutes of Ralphie May‘s set, but the adult language-ness of the content makes it a little more difficult to share with the world.

Last week, SoftLayer was featured on the NOS national news here in the Netherlands in a segment that allowed us to tell our story and share how we’re settling into our new Amsterdam home. I’ve only been a SLayer for about nine months now, and as I watched the video, I started to reflect on how far we’ve come in such a surprisingly short time. Take a second to check it out (don’t worry, it’s not all in Dutch):

To say that I had to “hit the ground running” when I started at SoftLayer would be an understatement. The day after I got the job, I was on a plane to SoftLayer’s Dallas headquarters to meet the team behind the company. To be honest, it was a pretty daunting task, but I was energized at the opportunity to learn about how SoftLayer became largest privately owned hosting company in the world from the people who started it. When I look back at the interview Kevin recorded with me, I’m surprised that I didn’t look like a deer in the headlights. At the time, AMS01 was still in the build-out phase, so my tours and meetings in DAL05 were both informative and awe-inspiring.

When I returned to Europe, I was energized to start playing my role in the company’s new pursuit of its global goals.

It didn’t take long before I started seeing the same awe-inspiring environment take place in our Amsterdam facility … So much so that I’m convinced that at least a few of the “Go Live Crew” members were superhuman. As it turns out, when you build identical data center pods in every location around the world, you optimize the process and figure out the best ways to efficiently use your time.

By the time the Go Live Crew started packing following the successful (and on-time) launch of AMS01, I started feeling the pressure. The first rows of server racks were already being filled by customers, but the massive data center space seemed impossibly large when I started thinking of how quickly we could fill it. Most of my contacts in Europe were not familiar with the SoftLayer name, and because my assigned region was Europe Middle East and Africa — a HUGE diverse region with many languages, cultures and currencies — I knew I had my work cut out for me.

I thought, “LET’S DO THIS!”

EMEA is home to some of the biggest hosting markets in the world, so my first-week whirlwind tour of Dallas actually set the stage quite nicely for what I’d be doing in the following months: Racking up air miles, jumping onto trains, attending countless trade shows, meeting with press, reaching out to developer communities and corresponding with my fellow SLayers in the US and Asia … All while managing the day-to-day operations of the Amsterdam office. As I look back at that list, I’m amazed how the team came together to make sure everything got done.

We have come a long way.

As I started writing this blog, BusinessReview Europe published a fantastic piece on SoftLayer in their July 2012 magazine (starting on page 172) that seems to succinctly summarize how we’ve gotten where we are today: “Innovation Never Sleeps.”

Our first pod is almost full of servers humming and flashing. When we go to tradeshows and conferences throughout Europe, people not only know SoftLayer, many of them are customers with servers in AMS01. That’s the kind of change we love.

The best part of my job right now is that our phenomenal success in the past nine months is just a glimmer of what the future holds. Come to think of it, we’re going to need some more people.

-@jpwisler

It’s that time of year again … HostingCon is upon us, and we’re faced with an interesting challenge: Go even bigger and badder in Boston than we did at HostingCon 2011 in San Diego. And that’s a tall order.

Given the fact that we’ve already sponsored and participated in dozens of conferences around the world this year, you might be surprised to learn that we’ve still got a surprises in our bag of tricks. Without giving too much away, I thought I’d share a few of the SoftLayer-specific highlights you make note of if you’re planning your HostingCon itinerary.

Conference Sessions

Want some hosting insight from the executive management team of one of the largest privately held hosting providers in the world? You might want to add these sessions to your calendar:

As more “non-traditional” hosters (telcos, cable companies & VARs) enter the cloud services market finding the right partner is a must. The opportunity is huge but this isn’t a situation where a rising tide will float all boats. Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer will explain how, in order to be successful, you’ll need to understand the following: 1) Building for Internet Scale, 2) Think platform first, and 3) How to automate. The session will include discussion of how SoftLayer leverages partners to drive business growth.

The finance, operations and administrative back office of a hosting company can be a complex animal. Some hosts have dedicated software development teams to build in-house solutions, others opt to buy as much as they can from 3rd party vendors. Hear three different approaches to tackling the problem, and learn how your product line can determine the optimal mix of open source, home grown and off-the-shelf solutions.

In a crowded marketplace it’s critical to establish a clear position and identity in the minds of your customers and prospects. SoftLayer CMO Simon West will discuss best practices for defining and articulating your brand position, illustrating with specific examples drawn from his experience in building some of the industry’s most notable brands.

Introducing value-added services around basic hosting can be the strategy that turns a hosting business into a winning venture for the host, and a truly valuable service for the customer. In this interactive session, a panel of product management experts from the hosting business will cover best practices for building (or integrating), launching and selling a new product to your customers, helping you to develop processes, procedures and strategies for seeing a new product launch through from start to finish.

The SoftLayer Booth: #413

When you step into the expo hall at the John B. Hynes Convention Center, you’re going to see SoftLayer. In our 20′ x 30′ space at booth 413, we’ll have a few of your favorite SLayers available to answer any and all of your questions about what’s new and what’s next for SoftLayer … And to pass out some always-popular SoftLayer swag.

By popular demand, the Server Challenge will be making its return to HostingCon, and if last year is any indication, the competition will be fierce. The pride of besting all HostingCon attendees in reassembling a server rack is arguably as valuable as the New iPad the winner receives. Though your pride doesn’t have a Retina Display.

Host Me All Night Long

Following the phenomenal success of “Geeks Gone Wild” last year (headlined by The Dan Band), we knew we had our work cut out for us when it came to planning a party for HostingCon in Boston. We’ve teamed up with cPanel and comcure to put together “Host Me All Night Long” at Royale Boston on Monday, July 16.

One of my favorite comedians, Ralphie May, is going hit the stage at 8pm, and you won’t want to miss a second of his set. Following Ralphie, Yellow Brick Road is bringing their award-winning Classic Rock tribute skills from Las Vegas to keep the night going. Given the name of the party, you shouldn’t be surprised when a little AC/DC “You Shook Me All Night Long” is played.

Like last year, the attendance is strictly limited, and when the number of tickets available at http://hostingconparty.com/ reaches zero, you’re out of luck. Even if you’re our best customer ever, you need a ticket to get in the door, so register while you can! If you show a little extra SoftLayer love on Twitter or Facebook, send me a link to it (khazard@softlayer.com), and I might be able to hook you up with a VIP code to get you priority access and into the VIP section at the venue.

Like the Dropkick Murphys, we’re “shipping up to Boston,” and we hope to see you there!

-@khazard

“Game Changers” in technology force a decision: Adapt or die. When repeating rifles gained popularity in the late 1800s, a business of manufacturing muzzle-loading or breech-loading rifles would have needed to find a way to produce a repeating rifle or it would have lost most (if not all) of it’s business to Winchester. If a fresh-faced independent musician is hitting it big on the coffee shop scene in 2012, she probably won’t be selling out arenas any time soon if she refuses to make her music available digitally. Just ask any of the old-timers in the print media industry … “Game Changers” in technology can be disastrous for an established business in an established industry.

That’s pretty intimidating … Even for tech businesses.

Shifts in technology don’t have to be as drastic and obvious as a “printed newspaper v. social news site” comparison for them to be disruptive. Even subtle advances can wind up making or breaking a business. In fact, many of today’s biggest and most successful tech companies are scrambling to adapt to two simple “game changers” that seem terribly significant:

• IPv6
• “The Cloud”

IPv6

A quick search of the SoftLayer Blog reminds me that Lance first brought up the importance of IPv6 adoption in October 2007:

ARIN has publically announced the need to shift to IPv6 and numerous articles have outlined the D-Day for IPv4 space. Most experts agree, its coming fast and that it will occur sometime in 2010 at the current pace (that’s about two years for those counting). IPv6 brings enough IP space for an infinite number of users along with improved security features and several other operational efficiencies that will make it very popular. The problem lies between getting from IPv4 to IPv6.

When IPv4 exhaustion was just a blip on the horizon, many businesses probably thought, “Oh, I’ll get around to it when I need to. It’s not a problem yet.” When IANA exhausted the IPv4 pool, they probably started picking up the phone and calling providers to ask what plans they had in place. When some of the Internet’s biggest websites completed a trial transition to IPv6 on World IPv6 Day last year, those businesses started feeling the urgency. With today’s World IPv6 Launch, they know something has to be done.

Regardless of how conservative providers get with IPv4 space, the 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses in existence will not last much longer. Soon, users will be accessing an IPv6 Internet, and IPv4-only websites will lose their opportunity to reach those users. That’s a “game changer.”

“The Cloud”

The other “game changer” many tech businesses are struggling with these days is the move toward “the cloud.” There are a two interesting perspectives in this transition: 1) The challenge many businesses face when choosing whether to adopt cloud computing, and 2) The challenges for businesses that find themselves severing as an integral (sometimes unintentional) part of “the cloud.” You’ve probably seen hundreds of blog posts and articles about the first, so I’ll share a little insight on the second.

When you hear all of the hype about cloud computing and cloud storage offering a hardware-agnostic Utopia of scalable, reliable power, it’s easy to forget that the building blocks of a cloud infrastructure will usually come from vendors that provided a traditional hosting resources. When a computing instance is abstracted from a hardware device, it’s opens up huge variations in usage. It’s possible to have dozens of public cloud instances using a single server’s multi-proc, multi-core resources at a given time. If a vendor prices a piece of software on a “per server” basis, how do they define a “server” when their users are in the cloud? It can be argued that a cloud computing instance with a single core of power is a “server,” and on the flip-side, it’s easy to define a “server” as the hardware object on which many cloud instances may run. I don’t know that there’s an easy way to answer that question, but what I do know is that applying “what used to work” to “what’s happening now” isn’t the right answer.

The hardware and software providers in the cloud space who are able to come up with new approaches unencumbered by the urge to continue “the way we’ve always done it” are going to be the ones that thrive when technology “game changers” emerge, and the providers who dig their heels in the dirt or try to put a square peg into a round hole will get the short end of the “adapt or die” stick.

We’ve tried to innovate and take a fresh look at every opportunity that has come our way, and we do our best to build relationships with agile companies that we see following suit.

I guess a better way to position the decision at the beginning of this post would be to add a little tweak: “Innovate, adapt or die.” How you approach technology “game changers” will define your business’s success.

-@gkdog

If you’ve been reading the SoftLayer Blog via an RSS feed or if you find yourself navigating directly to the portal to manage your SoftLayer account, you might not have noticed that the our main website has been updated again — and in dramatic fashion. Last fall we gave the site a slight refresh … This time, we did a total rework.

We took the site in a new visual direction, with graphics and messaging to complement our mantra of customers using our platform to create their vision — to build the future.

The new look — referred to as “SoftLayer at Night” by my fellow SoftLayer developer friend, Seth Thornberry — was designed to reflect our core identity, and it retires the faithful red, white and grey theme that has served us well for more than three years. The new style has received rave reviews from customers, partners and employees, and even if there has been some criticism — everyone has an opinion nowadays — we can generally chalk it up to people simply not liking change.

Highlights of the Redesign:

• A dramatic new home page design, including visually rich “hero images” (where you see “The InnerLayer” heading if you’re reading this on the SoftLayer Blog)
  
• Expanded main navigation menus at the top of each page
  
• A new lower-order navigation system on the left of all content pages



• [For typographically inclined] The new design also leverages web fonts functionality to incorporate “Benton Sans,” the corporate font used in print, interactive and other marketing communications.
  

The new design was executed in-house, and our workflow was pretty traditional … We like to roll up our sleeves. Page templates were created as PSD files and then hand-coded in HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS on top of the same framework we use for the SoftLayer Customer Portal.

During the development process, we used our new GIT code repository to facilitate the merging of all of our code onto our staging server. Since it was our first time to use GIT in a major way, there was a bit of a learning curve. The first few merges had to be reworked after finding a few errors in commit messages, but after we got a little practice, the subsequent merges went off without a hitch. The final staging merge was a breeze, and given the struggles we’ve had with SVN in past projects, this was a huge relief.

When it came time for the design’s official launch, we ran into a hiccup related to our automatic regression testing system and problems with cached CSS files, but these issues were quickly resolved, and the new-look SoftLayer.com went live.

It took a lot of hard work from (and a lot of caffeine for) a number of people to get the new site out the door, so I’d like to make sure credit goes where it’s due. Our lead designer Carlos (“Los”) Ruiz did a majority of the design work, and the implementation of that design fell to Dennis Dolliver (Website Developer), Charles King (SEO Manager) and me. I should also send a shout-out to the entire marketing team who jumped in to help to proof content, test pages and keep everyone sane.

What do you think of the new design? Stay tuned for more website improvements and additions!

-Brad

Last week, I had the privilege of attending Red Herring‘s Top 100 North America Tech Award ceremony in Santa Monica. If you’re not familiar with Red Herring, it harkens back to the headier days of the of the dot-com era in the late 90′s and early 00′s. While the markets have fluctuated quite a bit in the last dozen years, the startup scene has survived, and the optimism of the dot-com boom is still alive and well, albeit via more focused entrepreneurs that intentionally practice cold hard pragmatism and have bootstrap mentalities.

Today, the Red Herring Top 100 still serves as a great barometer for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. The publication’s editors are quick to point out that they were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube and eBay would change the way we live and work. That’s the start to a pretty nice little “alumni” list if you ask me.

How does a company make the cut?

The Top 100 were judged on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, IP creation, CAGR, execution of strategy, and disruption in their respective industries.

Before the Top 100 are selected, each finalist has an opportunity to pitch their business model and share why they think they should be included. I heard one entrepreneur say, “I have over a million dollars invested from my family and friends, so this can’t fail.” These businesses may have started as simple ideas, but they’re fueled by an entrepreneurial passion that have pushed them to become truly remarkable. Many of the finalists had already reached a certain level of success and were trying to build and scale-out their ideas — everything from new mobile apps, open source and storage offerings to cloud and big data optimized solutions.

While preparing a little bit of information for SoftLayer’s presentation, I was pleasantly surprised to see that more than 20 finalists for Red Herring’s Top 100 Americas Award were active SoftLayer customers!

After the editors made the tough decisions to narrow down the finalists to the Top 100 winners, SoftLayer was honored and excited to join 10gen, Backupify, Cloudera, CVision Technologies, MedAvante, PageFreezer Software, RingRevenue, VigLink and Zencoder. At least 10% of the 2012 Red Herring Americas Top 100 companies are using SoftLayer.

Early in my tenure at SoftLayer, a colleague told me, “We aren’t looking to be the next big thing, we are looking to enable it.” That’s probably not going to stop us from throwing our hat in the ring to be considered for the Global 100 this fall, though.

-Andre

A few years ago, I went through a nightmare trying to get to permanent resident status in the United States. My file sat in a box for over a year, was lost, re-submitted and FINALLY rushed through by Ted Kennedy’s office. And I was on a “fast track” due to a long record of published research and employment history. I had the means to pay lawyers and the time to repeat the filing and wait for a decision. If I didn’t have the means or the time to wait for the process to complete, I don’t know where I’d be, but in all likelihood, it wouldn’t be here. It’s no surprise that immigration reform is high on my list of priorities, and given SoftLayer’s involvement in the USCIS Entrepreneurs in Residence program along with Lance’s appointment to a Bloomberg committee focused on immigration reform, it’s clear I’m not alone.

The bi-partisan Partnership for a New American Economy recently published a very interesting report — Not Coming to America: Why the US is Falling Behind in the Global Race for Talent — that speaks to a lot of the challenges plaguing the current US immigration policy. Because of those challenges, “the future of America’s position as the global magnet for the world’s most talented and hardest-working is in jeopardy.” Here are a few of the projected economic realities of not reforming immigration laws to keep up with other countries:

SHORTAGE OF WORKERS IN INNOVATION INDUSTRIES: Jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (“STEM” fields) are increasing three times faster than jobs in the rest of the economy, but American students are not entering these innovative fields in sufficient numbers. As a result, by 2018, we face a projected shortfall of 230,000 qualified advanced-degree STEM workers.

SHORTAGE OF YOUNG WORKERS: The US population is aging, baby boomers are retiring en masse, and the growth in the US labor force has slowed to historic lows of less than 1 percent. We cannot continue to produce the GDP growth the nation has come to expect without dramatic increases in productivity or welcoming more working age immigrants.

A STALLED ECONOMY: The US has faced years of stunted economic growth. History shows that new businesses are the biggest drivers of job creation, yet the most recent US Census data show that the number of business startups has hit a record low.

This concern isn’t unique to the United States. With a global focus on innovation and technology, countries around the world are actively competing for the best and the brightest. In Canada, a report a few weeks ago spoke to Canada’s need to double in size in the next few decades or risk losing relevance and becoming just another resource-rich colony. The nation’s response? It’s ready to open its doors to more immigrants.

The same applies to the United States … It just may take longer.

Go back to how this country was built, and apply that to today. The biggest difference: The “skilled trades” we talk about in the most general sense are no longer carpenters like my grandfather but highly educated programmers, engineers and researchers. The idea isn’t to replace the programmers, engineers and researchers in the US, rather it’s to meet the existing unmet needs for programmers, engineers and researchers.

In all of SoftLayer’s efforts to affect change in the US immigration policy, we have to make clear that our goal is not to drop the walls simply to add more permanent residents. It’s about lowering many of the current artificial barriers that might prevent the next Fortune 500 founder from starting his or her business in the United States. If you don’t think that’s a serious concern, I’d point to a pretty surprising stat in the “Not Coming to America” report: “Today, more than 40 percent of America’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or a child of an immigrant.”

Immigration drives the economy. It’s not a drain on the economy. Every country needs more smart people because smart people create new ideas, new ideas become new businesses, and new businesses create new jobs.

Because this is a politically charged issue, it’s one I know many people don’t necessarily agree with. Along with immigration, we have to look at how the education system can empower young people like my son to become the programmers, engineers and researchers that the US will need, and we have to be intentional about not simply adding permanent residents for the sake of adding permanent residents. If you have any thoughts one way or the other, I’d encourage you to share them with us here in a blog comment or link us to any of the resources you’ve found interesting in researching and discussing the topic.

-@gkdog