Business Posts

What does it take to be a good leader? What kind of leader do you want to follow? Throughout my life, I’ve gravitated toward leadership positions. Even when I was young, I tended to take charge of a group to achieve a goal or accomplish a mission … though most of the “missions” in my younger days happened to be some sort of mischief. Having participated in the Boy Scouts and JROTC, I joined the Marine Corps where I served for seven years, and throughout my life, I’ve been fortunate to have more than my fair share of incredible mentors.

When my service in the Marine Corps concluded, I “enlisted” at SoftLayer as a data center technician. My primary responsibilities included building severs to order and installing software for our customers in four hours or less, and it was all pretty foreign to me. I had a lot to learn about the technical side of operating a data center, but based on my impression of the company, I was confident that I’d be in good hands.

Because I always find myself asking for more challenges and additional responsibility, I transitioned into a Customer Systems Administrator role. The CSA position required a lot more learning (at a breakneck pace), and in addition to the technical aspect of the job, I found myself learning just as much about the ‘soft skills’ required to provide the great customer service. Equipped with that knowledge (and a bit more experience), I pursued a leadership role on the team, and I made it my goal to use what I’d learned in the data center and in support to lead my team. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a challenge, but I’ve never backed down from one before.

I don’t mean to make this post all about me … my goal in sharing a little of my background is to give a little context for what I’ve learned about leadership. It goes without saying that I’ve been fortunate, both in the Marine Corps as well as with SoftLayer, to have some of the most intelligent, talented and sometimes downright enigmatic leaders. I’ve managed to pick up advice, tips and tricks for handling all of the curveballs that are thrown on a daily basis, and over my years as a leader, I’ve developed a few philosophies (an amalgam of some of the key points I absorbed from all of those who have led me in the past) that I try to abide by daily:

Lead by Example.

I make it a point to never ask someone to do something that I’ve never done or something that I’d never be willing to do. This is the keen avoidance of the “do as I say, not as I do” mentality. Failing to do this hands-down one of the easiest ways to lose your team.

Employ Your Team to Their Abilities. Empower Them to do Their Best Work.

It’s very important to know your team’s strengths and weaknesses and use those to make everyone better. Using the strengths of one team member, I can push another outside of his or her comfort zone to improve his or her overall skill set. I’ve also seen amazing results from providing freedom for my teams to make decisions. Not only does that freedom build trust, it also gives some real “ownership” to every person, and with that sense of ownership, each team member does better work. I’ve been a little surprised to notice this empowerment coming from the coffee juggernaut Starbucks: Starbucks baristas and store employees are encouraged to make real-time decisions in the interest of taking care of their customers.¹

Keep Learning.

Leading a team requires that you stay on top of what they’re doing. Always ask questions. Continue to research so you can be a resource for your team. Find opportunities to learn and take advantage of every one of them.

Most Importantly: Learn how to Have Fun.
I see this cliché often, so when you see, “Have Fun,” I wouldn’t be surprised if you just rolled your eyes. I’d be lying if I said that things were great all of the time … Realistically in any business, there’s going to be a time or two when the *&#@ is going to hit the fan. It’s important to find opportunities to cut loose and relax a bit. Cooking steaks for the group during a long overnight shift, grabbing a bite after work or a providing a happy hour once in a while builds a great deal of cohesion outside the office walls. Providing a relaxed environment does not prevent your team from doing stressful work … It actually builds camaraderie, and it will help the team get through those tough times. The brutal honesty is that if people aren’t enjoying where they’re at, they’ll look elsewhere – leaders have to help foster an environment that enables success.

At the end of the day, these tips may not work for everyone. There are a plethora of studies out there pertaining to the different leadership styles, the different types of leaders and how they influence teams. What’s important is that leaders need to be intentional about bettering their teams (and ultimately bettering their businesses).

Along the lines of continuous education, I’d love to hear the leadership philosophies you’ve learned in your experience as a leader. Leave a comment on this article to share what you think has made you successful.

-Matthew

¹This comes from both observation and talking to current and past employees. I’ve never worked for Starbucks, so I can’t cite a specific company policy to back this up, but that evident organic culture is probably worth more than a million company policies that would try to create that culture.

Last week, I explained SoftLayer’s stance against SOPA and mentioned that SOPA would essentially require service providers like SoftLayer to “break the Internet” in response to reports of “infringing sites.” The technical readers in our audience probably acknowledged the point and moved on, but our non-technical readers (and some representatives in Congress) might have gotten a little confused by the references to DNS, domains and IP addresses.

Given how pervasive the Internet is in our daily lives, you shouldn’t need to be “a techie” to understand the basics of what makes the Internet work … And given the significance of the SOPA legislation, you should understand where the bill would “break” the process. Let’s take a high level look at how the Internet works, and from there, we can contrast how it would work if SOPA were to pass.

The Internet: How Sites Are Delivered

1. You access a device connected in some way to the Internet. This device can be a cell phone, a computer or even a refrigerator. You are connected to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) which recognizes that you will be accessing various sites and services hosted remotely. Your ISP manages a network connected to the other networks around the globe (“inter” “network” … “Internet”).
2. You enter a domain name or click a URL (for this example, we’ll use http://www.softlayer.com since we’re biased to that site).

3. Your ISP will see that you want to access “www.softlayer.com” and will immediately try to find someone/something that knows what “www.softlayer.com” means … This search is known as an NS (name server) lookup. In this case, it will find that “www.softlayer.com” is associated with several name servers.

4. The first of these four name servers to respond with additional information about “softlayer.com” will be used. Domains are typically required to be associated with two or three name servers to ensure if one is unreachable, requests for that domain name can be processed by another.
5. The name server has Domain Name System (DNS) information that maps “www.softlayer.com” to an Internet Protocol (IP) address. When a domain name is purchased and provisioned, the owner will associate that domain name with an authoritative DNS name server, and a DNS record will be created with that name server linking the domain to a specific IP address. Think of DNS as a phone book that translates a name into a phone number for you.

6. When the IP address you reach sees that you requested “www.softlayer.com,” it will find the files/content associated with that request. Multiple domains can be hosted on the same IP address, just as multiple people can live at the same street address and answer the phone. Each IP address only exists in a single place at a given time. (There are some complex network tricks that can negate that statement, but in the interest of simplicity, we’ll ignore them.)
7. When the requested content is located (and generated by other servers if necessary), it is returned to your browser. Depending on what content you are accessing, the response from the server can be very simple or very complex. In some cases, the request will return a single HTML document. In other cases, the content you access may require additional information from other servers (database servers, storage servers, etc.) before the request can be completely fulfilled. In this case, we get HTML code in return.

8. Your browser takes that code and translates the formatting and content to be displayed on your screen. Often, formatting and styling of pages will be generated from a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) referenced in the HTML code. The purpose of the style sheet is to streamline a given page’s code and consolidate the formatting to be used and referenced by multiple pages of a given website.

9. The HTML code will reference sources for media that may be hosted on other servers, so the browser will perform the necessary additional requests to get all of the media the website is trying to show. In this case, the most noticeable image that will get pulled is the SoftLayer logo from this location: http://static2.softlayer.com/images/layout/logo.jpg

10. When the HTML is rendered and the media is loaded, your browser will probably note that it is “Done,” and you will have successfully navigated to SoftLayer’s homepage.

If SOPA were to pass, the process would look like this:

The Internet: Post-SOPA

1. You access a device connected in some way to the Internet.
2. You enter a domain name or click a URL (for this example, we’ll use http://www.softlayer.com since we’re biased to that site).

*The Change*

3. Before your ISP runs an NS lookup, it would have to determine whether the site you’re trying to access has been reported as an “infringing site.” If http://www.softlayer.com was reported (either legitimately or illegitimately) as an infringing site, your ISP would not process your request, and you’d proceed to an error page. If your ISP can’t find any reference to the domain an infringing site, it would start looking for the name server to deliver the IP address.
4. SOPA would also enforce filtering from all authoritative DNS provider. If an ISP sends a request for an infringing site to the name server for that site, the provider of that name server would be forced to prevent the IP address from being returned.
5. One additional method of screening domains would happen at the level of the operator of the domain’s gTLD. gTLDs (generic top-level domains) are the “.____” at the end of the domain (.com, .net, .biz, etc.). Each gTLD is managed by a large registry organization, and a gTLD’s operator would be required to prevent an infringing site’s domain from functioning properly.
6. If the gTLD registry operator, your ISP and the domain’s authoritative name server provider agree that the site you’re accessing has not been reported as an infringing site, the process would resume the pre-SOPA process.

*Back to the Pre-SOPA Process*

7. The domain’s name server responds.
8. The domain’s IP address is returned.
9. The IP address is reached to get the content for http://www.softlayer.com.
10. HTML is returned.
11. Your browser translates the HTML into a visual format.
12. External file references from the HTML are returned.
13. The site is loaded.

The proponents of SOPA are basically saying, “It’s difficult for us to keep up with and shut down all of the instances of counterfeiting and copyright infringement online, but it would be much easier to target the larger sites/providers ‘enabling’ users to access that (possible) infringement.” Right now, the DMCA process requires a formal copyright complaint to be filed for every instance of infringement, and the providers who are hosting the content on their network are responsible for having that content removed. That’s what our abuse team does full-time. It’s a relatively complex process, but it’s a process that guarantees us the ability to investigate claims for legitimacy and to hear from our customers (who hear from their customers) in response to the claims.

SOPA does not allow for due process to investigate concerns. If a site is reported to be an infringing site, service providers have to do everything in their power to prevent users from getting there.

-@toddmitchell

SoftLayer manages more than 100,000 servers in thirteen data centers around the world. We have more than 23,000 customers, and those customers are responsible for millions of websites (which get billions of pageviews every month). We’re one of the largest hosting providers in the world, and we want to talk a little about the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261 or “SOPA”).

Many in our industry have already commented (and in some cases, “changed their minds”) on SOPA and its equally evil twin, the PROTECT IP Act (“PIPA”) in the Senate, but we wanted to share our perspective on the legislation. Even with these Dudley-Do-Right, Goody-Two-Shoes titles and their ambitious goals, SoftLayer opposes these bills in their current forms because they expose innocent and law-abiding hosting companies to uncertain liabilities.

Because this legislation has gotten quite a bit of attention in the past few months, you’re probably already familiar with it, but if you haven’t paid much attention, we can give you a quick summary: As you can read in the name of the bill, SOPA is being proposed to “Stop Online Piracy.” SOPA is under consideration by the House Judiciary Committee, and its intent is to provide additional enforcement tools to combat foreign ‘rogue’ websites that are dedicated to copyright infringement or counterfeiting. That’s a great goal, and SoftLayer does not oppose the intent of the Act … As you saw from Kevin Hazard’s blog post a few weeks ago, we have a team of people working all the time to track down and immediately address any violations of our terms of service (including copyright infringement), so we wholeheartedly agree that copyright infringement and counterfeiting are bad.

The way SOPA tries to address the problem is where we disagree with the bill, so let’s talk about the most pertinent part of the bill for a service provider like SoftLayer. If SOPA were to pass, when a case of infringement is reported, we would have to “take such measures as [we determine] to be the least burdensome, technically feasible, and reasonable means designed to prevent access by [our] subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site that is subject to the order.”

What that means: We would be forced to turn off our customers’ access to a small piece of the Internet.

How are we to do that? Well the “least burdensome, technically feasible, and reasonable means designed to prevent access” are not made clear, but most of the discussions about the bill have focused on changing the way the Doman Name System (DNS) resolves to an “infringing site.” We’d be more or less ordered to break DNS … DNS was designed to simply, accurately and quickly match a domain name with the IP address that domain’s owner provides, and if SOPA were to pass, we’d have to tell DNS to behave correctly for every site EXCEPT the reported infringing sites. Again, that’s not spelled out in the legislation, so it’s like being given a job by someone who has no idea how to do the job nor whether the job is even possible to successfully complete.

And that’s all assuming that the order to suspend access to an “infringing site” is legitimate. Many of the organizations that oppose SOPA have explained possible scenarios where orders could be filed under the guise of preventing copyright infringement. A competing site/business could claim:

“the operator of the site operates the site with the object of promoting, or has promoted, its use to carry out acts that constitute a violation of section 501 or 1201 of title 17, United States Code, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster such violation.”

In another scenario, a copyright holder could pull the trigger on an order simply at the thought that a user could infringe on a copyright on/via the “infringing site.”

When the United States House of Representatives reconvenes after its winter recess, we will be watching intently with hopes that the Internet’s response to the bill has effectively derailed it in its current form. As SoftLayer General Council Suzy Fulton mentioned in her post about Texas House Bill 1841, we’ve been working with an industry group called TechAmerica which submitted a letter to Congress about SOPA and many of the issues that could negatively affect our industry. Additionally, we’ve gotten involved with SaveHosting.org to speak out against laws that can hurt our customers.

As discussions continue about SOPA, we’ll look for opportunities to share more of our insight with you here on our blog. Please let us know your thoughts about the legislation below.

-@toddmitchell

It’s a new year, and though only real change between on January 1 is the last digit in the year, that change presents a blank canvas for the year. In the past, I haven’t really made New Year’s resolutions, but because some old Mayan calendar says this is my last chance, I thought I’d take advantage of it. In reality, being inspired to do anything that promotes positive change is great, so in the spirit of New Year’s improvements, I thought I’d take a look at what hosting customers might want to make resolutions to do in 2012.

What in your work/hosting life would you like to change? It’s easy to ignore or look past small goals and improvements we can make on a daily basis, so let’s take advantage of the “clean slate” 2012 provides us to be intentional about making life easier. A few small changes can mean the difference between a great day in the office or a frantic overnight coffee binge (which we all know is so great for your health). Because these changes are relatively insignificant, you might not recognize anything in particular that needs to change right off the bat. You might want to answer a daunting question like, “What should you do to improve your work flow or reduce work related stress?” Luckily, any large goals like that can be broken down into smaller pieces that are much easier to manage.

Enough with the theoretical … let’s talk practical. In 2012, your hosting-related New Year’s resolutions should revolve around innovation, conservation, security and redundancy.

Innovation

When it comes to hosting, a customer’s experience and satisfaction is the most important focus of a successful business. There’s an old cliche that says, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten,” and that’s absolutely correct when it comes to building your business in the new year. What can you change or automate to make your business better? Are you intentionally “thinking outside the box?”

Conservation

The idea of “conservation” and “green hosting” has been written off as a marketing gimmick in the world of hosting, but there’s something to be said for looking at your utilization from that perspective. We could talk about the environmental impact of hosting, and finding a host that is intentional about finding greener ways to do business, but if you’re renting a server, you might feel a little disconnected from that process. When you’re looking at your infrastructure in the New Year, determine whether your infrastructure is being used efficiently by your workload. Are there tools you can take advantage of to track your infrastructure’s performance? Are you able to make changes quickly if/when you find inefficiencies?

Security

Another huge IT-related resolution you should make would be around security. Keeping your system tight and locked up can get forgotten when you’re pushing development changes or optimizing your networking, so the beginning of the year is a great time to address any possible flaws in your security. Try to start with simple changes in your normal security practices … Make sure your operating systems and software packages are regularly patched. Keep a strict password policy that requires regular password updates. Run system log checks regularly. Reevaluate your system firewall or ACL lists.

All of these safety nets may be set up, but they may not be functioning at their best. Even precautions as simple as locking your client or workstation when not in use can help stop attacks from local risks and prying eyes … And this practice is very important if you keep system backups on the same workstations that you use. Imagine if someone local to your workstation or client was able to retrieve your backup file and restore it … Your security measures would effectively be completely nullified.

Redundancy

Speaking of backups, when was your most recent backup? When is your next backup? How long would it take you to restore your site and/or data if your current server(s) were to disappear from the face of the Earth? These questions are easy to shrug off when you don’t need to answer them, but by the time you do need to answer them, it’s already too late. Create a backup and disaster recovery plan. Today. And automate it so you won’t have the ability to forget to execute on it.

Make your objectives clear, and set calendar reminders throughout the year to confirm that you’re executing on your goals. If some of these tasks are very daunting or difficult to implement in your current setup, don’t get discouraged … Set small goals and chip away at the bigger objective. Progress over time will speak for itself. Doing nothing won’t get you anywhere

Happy New Year!

-Jonathan

The government (FISMA), banks (PCI) and the healthcare industry are huge proponents of two-factor authentication, a security measure that requires two different kinds of evidence that you are who you say you are … or that you should have access to what you’re trying to access. In many cases, it involves using a combination of a physical device and a secure password, so those huge industries were early adopters of the practice. In our definition, two-factor authentication is providing “something you know, and something you have.” When you’re talking about national security, money or people’s lives, you don’t want someone with “password” as their password to unwittingly share his or her access to reams valuable information.

What is there not to like about two-factor identification?

That question is one of the biggest issues I’ve run into as we continue pursuing compliance and best practices in security … We can turn on two-factor authentication everywhere – the portal, the vpn, the PoPs, internal servers, desktops, wireless devices – and make the entire SoftLayer IS team hate us, or we can tell all the admins, auditors and security chiefs of the world to harden their infrastructure without it.

Regardless of which direction we go, someone isn’t going to like me when this decision is made.

There are definite pros and cons of implementing and requiring two-factor authentication everywhere, so I started a running list that I’ve copied below. At the end of this post, I’d love for you to weigh in with your thoughts on this subject. Any ideas and perspective you can provide as a customer will help us make informed decisions as we move forward.

Pros

• It’s secure. Really secure.
• It is a great deterrent. Why even try to hack an account when you know a secondary token is going to be needed (and only good for a few seconds)?
• It can keep you or your company from being in the news for all the wrong reasons!

Cons

• It’s slow and cumbersome … Let’s do some math, 700 employees, 6 logins per day on average means 4200 logins per day. Assume 4 seconds per two-factor login, and you’re looking at 16,800 extra seconds (4.66 hours) a day shifted from productivity to simply logging into your systems.
• Users have to “have” their “something you have” all the time … Whether that’s an iPhone, a keyfob or a credit card-sized token card.
• RSA SecureID was HACKED! I know of at least one financial firm that had to turn off two-factor authentication after this came up.
• People don’t like the extra typing.
• System Administrators hate the overhead on their systems and the extra points of failure.

As you can start to see, the volume of cons out weigh out the pros, but the comparison isn’t necessarily quantitative. If one point is qualitatively more significant than two hundred contrasting points, which do you pay attention to? If you say “the significant point,” then the question becomes how we quantify the qualitativeness … if that makes any sense.

I had been a long-time hater of two-factor authentication because of my history as a Windows sysadmin, but as I’ve progressed in my career, I hate to admit that I became a solid member of Team Two-Factor and support its merits. I think the qualitative significance of the pros out weigh the quantitative advantage the cons have, so as much as it hurts, I now get to try to sway our senior systems managers to the dark side as well.

If you support my push for further two-factor authentication implementation, wish me luck (’cause I will need it). If you’re on Team Anti-Two-Factor, let me know what they key points are when you’ve decided against it.

-@skinman454

On Tuesday, Summer posted “Giving: Better Than Receiving,” a blog about all of the organizations SoftLayer has supported in 2011, and I’m one of the lucky SLayers on the new Charity Committee. We recently began this initiative to oversee charitable donations at SoftLayer and (more importantly) to encourage all employees to step-up and make a DIFFERENCE. Whether by volunteering or financially supporting a local charity, the idea is that we all participate in our community and try and help in some way.

One of the best examples of an organization that does amazing things for communities and people who deserve a little extra love is the TV show, “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” I’ve always loved the show, and I’m only quasi-embarrassed that I’ve shed a tear or two when the crowd shouts, “Move that bus!” and the homeowners see their brand new home. If you aren’t familiar with the show, the EM:HE team finds deserving families who, for one reason or another, need a new home, and over the course of one week, the EM:HE crew and a slew of local volunteers set to work to rebuild or remodel the home.

You can imagine the amount of supplies, coordination and man-hours that go into building a new home or completely remodeling it in just one week. That’s where the community and local businesses get involved: Supplies are donated by companies, and the work force is made up of show employees, people from the sponsoring companies, and an average of 2,500 volunteers every episode.

With that generous involvement, the challenge becomes coordinating the massive amount of work, people and projects to get everything done in a short period of time. That’s where the Internet comes in. How can the show maintain an online presence for vendors, sponsors and fans of the show? Each of them plays an important part in the show’s success, so they need to be kept “in the know” with the most up-to-date information. And that’s where we come in.

This philanthropic show definitely meets the requirements of SoftLayer’s Charity Committee, and when the show was nominated as a prospective organization to support, we immediately set plans in motion to figure out how we could help support the show and the deserving families getting new homes.

We’ve donated $25,000 in free hosting services this season to support the show’s online presence. We’ll be providing a place for vendors who donate to gain some visibility and a place for fans to watch videos and keep up with the show … And that’s no small task: The site receives about 6.8 million monthly impressions.

As Summer mentioned in her post, this is just one of the many ways we’re reaching out to support organizations that are doing great work. Let us know what charities matter the most to you, and we’ll get them on our radar. We’re always looking for ways to get involved, and the first step is learning about who’s doing this kind of amazing work for such a great cause.

-@skinman454

Tech Wildcatters is a mentor-driven technology startup accelerator led by entrepreneurs in the Dallas area. The 12-week “boot camp” runs every spring and fall, providing experience and exposure to the 8-10 companies selected to participate in each class. Dennis Dayman, a Tech Wildcatters partner and mentor, explains what Tech Wildcatters is all about and why they chose to partner with SoftLayer:

In the coming weeks, you’ll meet a few of the startups that have benefited from the Tech Wildcatters program, and we’ll share some of their post-accelerator success with you.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can participate in the Tech Wildcatters startup accelerator, visit http://techwildcatters.com. If you already know you want to take advantage of the opportunities Tech Wildcatters can provide, their simple online application is the only thing between you and your soon-to-be-huge business!

As far back as I can remember, I hated homework. Homework was cutting into MY time as a kid, then teenager, then young adult … and since I am still a “young adult,” that’s where I have to stop my list. One of the unfortunate realizations that I’ve come to in my “young adult” life is that homework can be a good thing. I know that sounds crazy, so I’ve come prepared with a couple of examples:

The Growing Small Business Example
You run a small Internet business, and you’ve been slowly growing over the years until suddenly you get your product/service mix just right and a wave of customers are beating down the door … or in your case, they’re beating down your website. The excitement of the surge in business is quickly replaced by panic, and you find yourself searching for cheap web servers that can be provisioned quickly. You find one that looks legit and you buy a dozen new dedicated servers and some cloud storage.

You alert your customers of the maintenance window and spend the weekend migrating and your now-valuable site to the new infrastructure. On Monday, you get the new site tuned and ready, and you hit the “go” button. Your customers are back, flocking to the site again, and all is golden. As the site gains more traffic over the next couple of weeks, you start to see some network lag and some interesting issues with hardware. You see a thread or two in the social media world about your new shiny site becoming slow and cumbersome, and you look at the network graphs where you notice there are some capacity issues with your provider.

Frustrated, you do a little “homework,” and you find out that the cheap service provider you chose has a sketchy history and many complaints about the quality of their network. As a result, you go on a new search for a hosting provider with good reviews, and you have to hang another maintenance sign while you do all the hard work behind the scenes once again. Not doing your homework before making the switch in this case probably cost you a good amount of sleep, some valuable business, and the quality of service you wanted to provide your customers.

The Compliance-Focused Example
I still live, eat, and breathe compliance for SoftLayer, and we had an eye-opening experience when sorting through the many compliance differences. As you probably recall (Skinson 1634AR15), I feel like everyone should agree to an all-inclusive compliance model and stick to just that one, but that feeling hasn’t caught on anywhere outside of our office.

In 2011, SoftLayer ramped up some of our compliance efforts and started planning for 2012. With all the differences in how compliance processes for things like FISMA, HIPAA, PCI Level 1 – 4, SSAE16, SOC 1 and SOC2 are measured, it was tough to work on one without affecting another. We were working with a few different vendors, if we flipped “Switch A,” Auditor #1 was happy. When we told Auditor #2 that we flipped “Switch A,” they hated it so much they almost started crying. It started to become the good ol’ “our way is not just the better way, it’s the only way” scenario.

So what did we do? Homework! We spent the last six months looking at all the compliances and mapping them against each other. Surprisingly enough, we started noticing a lot of similarities. From there, we started interviewing auditing and compliance firms and finally found one that was ahead of us in the similarity game and already had a matrix of similarities and best practices that affect most (if not all) of the compliances we wanted to focus on.

Not only did a little homework save us a ton of cash in the long run, it saved the small trees and bushes under the offices of our compliance department from the bodies that would inevitably crash down on them when we all scampered away from the chaos and confusion seemingly inherent in pursuing multiple difference compliances at the same time.

The moral of the story: Kiddos, do your homework. It really is good for something, we promise.

-@Skinman454

In less than six years, SoftLayer has grown pretty drastically. We started as a small company with ten people crammed into a living room, brainstorming how to build one innovative data center in Dallas. Now we have more than six hundred employees managing thirteen data centers on three different continents. It’s insane to see how far we’ve come when you read those two sentences, and as I think back, I remember the sacrifices employees have made to help our business get where it is today.

In the early days, we were taking out loans and tapping our bank accounts to buy servers. When customers started asking for more features and functionality in the portal, developers coded non-stop to make it happen. A lot of those sacrifices aren’t very obvious from the outside, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without them. One of the biggest sacrifices SLayers make is when we need to build new data centers to accommodate customer demand … A “Go Live Crew” of employees moves away from their friends and family to those facilities to make sure the new SoftLayer data center meets our high expectations.

In the military, a soldier will “earn his/her stripes” by doing something that shows that he or she deserves a particular rank or position. The more stripes on the sleeve of your uniform, the higher your rank. As you’ve probably gathered from pictures and videos around the office, SoftLayer employees don’t wear uniforms, but SLayers love to wear SoftLayer swag, and this “mechanic” shirt has been one of the most popular sellers in our company store:

We wanted to recognize the employees that have given weeks (and sometimes months) of their time to join a Go Live Crew for a data center build-out, so we took that popular shirt and added a little flair. Following the “earn your stripes” idea, these employees have “earned their bars” for each data center they help build.

Every employee who was on a Go Live Crew in Seattle, Washington, D.C., San Jose, Singapore or Amsterdam will get shirts with location-specific graphics to recognize their contribution, and their most recent shirt will have the “bars” you see in the picture above.

As a bit of added recognition, here are the shirt recipients for each data center location:

Seattle Go Live Crew
John E., Edmund G., Robert G., Joe H., Brad L., Charles P., Joshua R., William S., Zane W.

Washington, D.C. Go Live Crew
Troy D., John E., Reed F., Edmund G., Robert G., Brad L., Charles P., Joshua R., Zane W.

San Jose Go Live Crew
Kalin D., John E., Chris F., Hector F., Edmund G., Robert G., Tim L., Russ M., Edward R., Brent R., Brandon S., Joshua Z.

Singapore Go Live Crew
Chris F., Joshua F.. Ryan G., Robert G., Hao H., Tim L., Russ M., Todd M., Kyle S., Eric V.

Amsterdam Go Live Crew
Raul A., Brian C., Elijah F., Hector F., Edmund G., Robert G., Sydney M., Stephen M., Michael P., Goran P., Mark Q., Edward R., Jason R., Brandon S., Sopheara S., Joshua Z.

And if you happened to compare the names between all five teams, you’ll notice that Robert Guerra was on every crew. You know what that means?

He has a brand new wardrobe.

CBNO.

-@lavosby

We are closing down 2011 and beginning to prepare for a new year that is bound to be full of exciting changes and growth for our company, and in the midst of the calendar change, I’m reminded that my two-year anniversary of becoming a SLayer will be here soon too. Has time flown?! So many things have changed in the past two years, so I thought it would be fun to think about some things that have changed since my first day on the job.

To give you an idea of how things have changed in our office alone:

• Our last office had two kitchens and two microwaves. At our Alpha headquarters, we have six kitchens with twelve microwaves. It’s so nice that I don’t have to wait in line to heat up my lunches anymore.
• In the Alpha office’s main kitchen, we have a Sonic ice machine … if you aren’t from the southern part of the US, you might not know why this is so cool, but if you’ve had a Cherry Limeade delivered to your car, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
• Previously, we had to share a bathroom with a few other companies. Now we’re the only company in our building, and there are three sets bathrooms just for us.
• When I started we had four conference rooms. Now we have sixteen … Not even counting the conference rooms in our other locations!

Speaking of “other locations,” it’d probably be worthwhile to talk about about a few of bigger changes that happened outside of the walls of the Dallas office.

• When I started, SoftLayer was run by around 160 SLayers. Now we’re over 650!
• In January 2010, we were on one continent. Now we’ve added Asia and Europe presences to our foundation in North America.
• Those international presences have helped us expand our data center footprint. We had three data centers (Dallas, Seattle and Washington, D.C.) when I started. Now we have thirteen data centers around the world, and in addition to those three markets, we now have SLayers in Houston, San Jose, Singapore and Amsterdam!
• On my first day, our marketing team consisted of three people. Now we have more than fifteen people … and looking to hire more.
• Two years ago, we had around 6,000 customers. Today we have more than 25,000 customers located in over 110 countries!

I’ve been through a headquarter move, a merger, a huge network expansion and multiple product additions, but one thing that remains the same is our dedication to providing our customers with the best on-demand hosting solution in the world… and of course having fun while we are at it!

-Summer