In my last blog about mentorship and meaningfulness, you heard from George Karidis and Paul Ford about the vision to make Catalyst a part of the startup ecosystem, committing to helping participating teams with more than just their hosting needs. While we attended SXSW Interactive, I ran into a few of our phenomenal customers and had the opportunity to sit down with them and talk about their businesses, their connection to SoftLayer and what the future holds:

Over the next few weeks, we’ll add video interviews to that YouTube playlist to show off all of the startups that stopped by the Catalyst Startup Lounge at SXSW 2013. When a new video is published, it’ll be added to the embedded playlist above, and we’ll send some social media shout-outs via Twitter and Facebook.

With SoftLayer’s 7th birthday coming up on May 5, we still feel like a startup, and a lot of that has to do with how closely we work with our customers … Their energy is contagious, and it only encourages us to keep innovating and building our platform for the future. That’s why entrepreneurs like the ones you meet in these videos choose SoftLayer. The fact that we have better technology and provide a more powerful cloud infrastructure winds up being a fringe benefit.

A big “Thanks!” goes out to the folks from Epic Playground, Flowmio, Medved, Urbane, YouNoodle, KeenIO, Cloudability and Preferred Return for taking time out of their busy SXSW schedules to chat with me. We love you guys!

-@JoshuaKrammes

For the fifth annual Global Game Jam, more than 16,000 participants committed a weekend to learning from and collaborating with their peers in a worldwide game development hackathon. I was lucky enough to get to sit in on the action in Vancouver, and I thought I’d give you a glimpse into how participants make game development magic happen in such a short period of time.

Day 1 (Friday Night): The Brainstorm
More than 260 participants poured into an open study area of the Life Sciences building at the Univerity of British Columbia to build the next best distraction … er, video game. The event kicked off with a keynote from Brian Proviciano, a game development prodigy, who shared his history and offered sage advice for those interested in the industry. Following a comical 20-second idea pitch session, the caffeine began to flow and the brainstorm commenced.

Inspiration could come from anywhere, and a perfect example is the “Poseidon” game I mentioned above: GGJVancouver organizer Kimberly Voll had sprinklers rain on her office a few days prior to the event, so someone decided to make a game out of that situation. This year, the Global Game Jam introduced an interesting twist that they called “diversifiers.” Diversifiers are side-challenges for extra credit, and two of my favorites were “Atari Age” — the game has to be smaller than 4kb — and “May the (Web) Force be With You” — the game has to run in a browser.

Fast-forward two hours, and as you look around, you see storyboards and scripts being written, characters being born, and a few intrepid developers starting to experiment with APIs, game engines , and external controllers to find some additional flair for their final products. You wouldn’t expect a game made in 48 hours to incorporate an iOS Eye Tracking API or the Leap Motion gesture controller, but these developers are ambitious!

As the concepts are finalized, team members rotate in and out for sleep, and some even go home to get some rest — a good idea on the first night since everyone usually pulls an all-nighter on Saturday.

Day 2 (Saturday): Laying the Foundation
It was cool to walk the aisles and peer over peoples’ shoulders as musical scores, wrangled code and character models were coming together. However, the scene wasn’t all smiles and hugs; a few groups were wrestling quirky bugs and integration issues, and in some cases, they ended up having to completely reboot their approach. Day 2 set the course for all of the teams. A few teams disbanded due to disagreements or unfixable bugs, and some developers peeled off from their teams to follow an untamed passion. In the Global Game Jam, there are no rules … only games.

Day 3 (Sunday): Sleep, What’s That?
By Day 3, the building starts feeling like a college dorm during finals week when everyone is staying up all night to study or finish their comp-sci assignments (I know it wasn’t just me…). Running on various vehicles of caffeine, teams worked heads-down all day to meet their 3pm deadline. Sighs of relief and high fives were exchanged when the games were submitted, and the event concluded with a pizza party and demo session where everyone could see and share the fruits of their labor.

As I left the conference, teams were given the opportunity to showcase their games on the big screen to a chorus of laughter and applause. It was an awesome experience, and I’m glad SoftLayer sponsored it so that I could attend, take it all in and meet a ton of outstanding up-and-coming game developers. If you’re into making games (or you’ve thought about it), check out the Global Game Jam one of these years.

Just don’t forget to bring deodorant … for your neighbor’s sake.

-@andy_mui

Photo Credit Shout-Outs: Alex Larente, Ligia Brosch, Naz Madani. Great shots!

Over the past few years, we’ve built a great reputation at OSCON as not only a great hosting provider, but also as the operator of one of the best booths on the expo hall floor. As usual, the switchballs were crowd pleasers, and we sponsored the show’s Massage Booth, so we had great traffic through our booth all conference. When attendees left our booth, they were considerably more relaxed, they had the coolest swag at the show, and they had a better understanding of where SoftLayer fits in the open source space.

In addition to the conversations on the expo hall floor, we got to share a little expertise in a conference session. Senior Software Architect Harold Hannon presented an engaging educational session about how we implemented elasticsearch, Apache-based code that allows for scalable search for all kinds of documents in near real-time. At the moment, SoftLayer uses elasticsearch internally for hardware and ticketing, and we hope to extend this feature-rich scalable searching to our customers in an upcoming release of the customer portal. Because SoftLayer has built a great reputation for executing scalability well, Harold ended up presenting to a packed house (which you can see in the last few pictures of the slide show above).

SoftLayer’s significant investment in open source platforms like OpenStack Swift Object Storage and CloudStack-based Private Clouds wound up being a big topic of discussion throughout the conference. Harold’s elasticsearch presentation was a great conversation bridge to talk about the incredible search-and-retrieve functionality we implemented in our Object Storage service, and we were able to share and demonstrate how that functionality helps our customers manage large quantities of static data in cloud environments in an automated way.

The open source community has matured significantly over the past few years, and it’s exciting to see that evolution. We aren’t just talking about the incredibly popular open source operating systems like CentOS, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD and Ubuntu that customers can get on a dedicated or cloud server … We’re talking about game-changing, innovative platforms that are redefining how the Internet works.

We want to thank the OSCON team for another phenomenal show, and if you attended the show but didn’t get a switchball from us, I’m sure you’ll have another chance at OSCON 2013. If you don’t think you can wait that long, come find us at one of our other upcoming events!

-Summer

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.

If you didn’t catch my last blog post about the event, Pink Soles in Motion is a Dallas-based team that has set out to raise $200,000 this year for the Susan G. Komen foundation. For the past two years, they’ve been the top fundraising team in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and we want to help them make get a threepeat. In addition to participating in the BBQ cook-off, we set an internal goal to raise $5,000 to fund breast cancer education, research, treatment and awareness.

Because we only had two weeks to raise the money, we thought we’d have to throw in an extra incentive to help inspire donations to meet our goal: If we raised $5,000, the 3Bars BBQ team would have to professionally dye their hair pink.

When the dust settled and all the numbers were counted … We had to make a trip to the salon:

We reached our goal of $5,000, and Technology Support matched our contributions. To sweeten the pot even further, SoftLayer donated an additional $4,000, amounting to $14,000 in donations to the Susan G. Komen foundation via the Pink Soles in Motion team! I should send a shout out to ‘Sparky,’ ‘Skinman,’ John, Don and Raleigh for following through with their end of the bargain … And I should probably apologize in advance for giving that picture a permanent residence on the SoftLayer Blog.\

If you live in Texas, you’re probably familiar with the saying, “Go big or go home.” Our SLayers went big. Given the fact that the SoftLayer community came through with so much support, an avant-garde 3Bars logo even made it into one of the hairstyles:

The SoftLayer 3Bars BBQ flag was displayed proudly (with a little bit of its own pink flair), and we couldn’t have been happier with how well the event turned out … And it should certainly put a dent in Pink Soles in Motion‘s $200K fundraising goal this year.

Thank you to everyone who donated to help us reach our goal, and Technology Support, you guys rock for matching our contributions! We hope you keep some of the pink-hair pictures close at hand for the next time you see any of these SLayers. I’m sure they’d love to autograph a copy just for you.

-Natalie

Over the past six years this team has raised approximately $700,000 for the Susan G. Komen foundation, and for the past two years, they’ve been the top fundraising team in the Dallas/Fort Worth area! One of the many fundraising events the team puts on every year is a BBQ Cook-off, and when we were given the opportunity to sponsor the event, we jumped on it … If there’s one thing the SoftLayer team loves as much as hosting, it’s barbeque.

On June 2, we’ll be loading up the infamous 3 Bars BBQ grills with the SoftLayer crew’s legendary BBQ and selling it to help raise money for Pink Soles in Motion. I have to tell you, if you haven’t tried 3 Bars BBQ yet, you don’t want to miss your chance.

Beyond the event sponsorship and our BBQ team’s participation, we wanted to go a little further, so we pledged to raise an additional $5,000 with the help of our SLayers and SoftLayer fanatics to help Pink Soles in Motion get back to the top fundraising spot in DFW. While the cause is certainly worth a tax-deductible donation by itself, we came up with a unique idea to inspire contributions: If we reach our $5,000 fundraising goal, a few of your favorite SoftLayer employees will dye their hair pink. And we don’t mean temporary spray-in dye. They will get a professionally dyed pink hairdo.

Anyone can wear a pink shirt … We’re making our SLayers step it up a notch.

As we started organizing this little fundraiser, we told a few of our friends at Technology Support about the goal (and the incentive), and they immediately jumped on board to help sweeten the deal even more … They’ll match every dollar we raise in support of Pink Soles in Motion and the Susan G. Komen foundation. We also heard that they’re looking forward to taking as many pictures as possible of our pink-haired employees.

If you want to see a few SoftLayer employees with pink hair, DONATE and help us reach our goal! Every little bit counts, and donations are tax deductible, so give generously to help Susan G. Komen for the Cure in their quest to eradicate breast cancer.

Oh, and if you’re in the DFW area and would like to see the ‘results’ in person, bring your appetite (and your camera) out to Harley-Davidson of North Texas at 1845 N. I-35E in Carrollton.

-Natalie

The new crop of games showcased at GDC is more resource-intensive — it’s almost like watching an IT arms race; they’re upping the ante for all online gaming companies. The appetite from the public remains relentless, and the pay-off can be huge. Consider that gaming industry research firm DFC Intelligence predicts that worldwide market revenue generated solely from online games is set to reach $26.4 billion in 2015, more than double the $11.9 achieved in 2009.

That’s where SoftLayer comes in. We understand the high stakes in the gaming world and have tailored our IaaS offerings for an optimal end-user experience that stretches from initial release to everyday play. Take a look at what game developer OMGPOP (a SoftLayer customer) achieved with Draw Something: Almost overnight it became the #1 application in Apple’s App Store, tallying more than 26 million downloads in just a few weeks. To put the volume of gameplay into perspective, the game itself is generating more than 30 hours of drawings per second. That’s what what we refer to as “Internet Scale.” When YouTube hit one hour of video uploads per second, they came up with a pretty impressive presentation to talk about that scale … and that’s only one hour per second.

Gamers require a high-performance, always on, graphically attractive and quick-responding experience. If they don’t get that experience, they move on to the next game that can give it to them. With our core strengths of automation and extensive network reach, game developers come to us to easily enable that experience, and in return, they get a platform where they can develop, test, deploy and yes, play their latest games. True “Internet Scale” with easy consumptive billing … Get in and out quickly, and use only what you need.

Some of the most interesting and innovative use cases of how customers take advantage of our platform come from the gaming industry. Because we make it easy to rapidly provision resources (deploy dedicated servers in less than two hours and cloud servers in as few as five minutes) in an automated way (our API), many developers have started incorporating cloud-like functions into their games and applications that add dedicated resources to their infrastructure on-demand as you’d only expect to see in a virtual environment. Now that Flex Images are available, we’re expecting to see a lot more of that.

As I was speaking with a few customers on the show floor, I was amazed to hear how passionate they were about what one called the “secret ingredient” at SoftLayer: Our network. He talked about his trials and tribulations in delivering global reach and performance before he transitioned his infrastructure to SoftLayer, and hearing what our high-bandwidth and low-latency architecture has meant for his games was an affirmation for all of the work we’ve put into creating (and continuing to build) the network.

The rapid pace of innovation and change that keeps the gaming industry going is almost electric … When you walk into a room filled with game developers, their energy is contagious. We ended GDC with an opportunity to do just that. We were proud to sponsor a launch party for our friends at East Side Game Studios as the celebrated the release of two new games — Zombinis and Ruby Skies. Since their NomNom Combo puzzle game is one of the most addicting games on my iPhone, it was a no-brainer to hook up with them at GDC. If you want a peek into the party, check out our GDC photo album on Facebook.

To give you an idea of how much the gaming culture permeates the SoftLayer offices, I need only point out a graffiti mural on one of the walls in our HQ office in Dallas. Because we sometimes get nostalgic for the days of misspent youth in video arcades playing Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Super Mario, we incorporated those iconic games in a piece of artwork in our office:

If you are an aspiring game developer, we’d like to hear from you and help enable the next Internet gaming sensation … Having a good amount of experience with our existing customer base should assure you that we know what we’re talking about. For now, though, it’s my turn to go “Draw Something.”

-@gkdog

You might be surprised how many attendees at Cloud Expo Europe expressed that sentiment in one way or another when SoftLayer showed up in London with the infamous Server Challenge last week. Based on many of the conversations I had with attendees, some of the most basic distinctions and characteristics of physical and virtual environments are widely misunderstood. Luckily, we had a nice little server rack to use as a visual while talking about how SoftLayer fits in (and stands out) when it comes to “the cloud.”

When we didn’t have a line of participants waiting to try their hand at our in-booth competition, we were able to use it to “show and tell” what a cloud hardware architecture might look like and what distinguishes SoftLayer from some of the other infrastructure providers in the industry. We’re able to show our network-within-a-newtork topology, we explain the pod concept of our data centers and how that streamlines our operations, and we talk about our system automation and how that speeds up the provisioning of both physical and virtual environments. Long-term memory is aided by the use of multiple senses, so when each attendee can see and touch what they’re hearing about in our booth, they have a much better chance to remember the conversation in the midst of dozens (if not hundreds) they have before and after they talk to us.

And by the time we finish using the Server Challenge as a visual, the attendee is usually ready to compete. As you probably noticed if you caught the Cloud Expo Europe album at Facebook.com/SoftLayer, the competition was pretty intense. In fact, the winning time of 1:08.16 was set just about twenty minutes before the conference ended … In the short video below, Phil presents the winner of the Cloud Expo Europe Server Challenge with his iPad 2 and asks for some insight about how he was able to pull off the victory:

Being the international debut of the Server Challenge, we were a bit nervous that the competition wouldn’t have as much appeal as we’ve seen in the past, but given the response we received from attendees, it’s pretty safe to say it’s not the last time you’ll see the Server Challenge abroad.

To all of the participants who competed last week, thanks for stopping by our booth, and we hope you’re enjoying your “torch” (if you beat the 2:00.00 flashlight-winning time)!

-@khazard

In a HUGE upset, the Mustangs beat the Horned Frogs 40-33 in overtime to break a four-year losing streak. The past four years have been “rebuilding” years under June Jones, so this win over a quality, ranked opponent was even more significant … Which is clear since I’m still talking about this game in particular a few weeks later. But this lingering buzz is nothing compared to the roar of attention to SoftLayer’s international expansion.

We’re not exactly the “underdog” anymore, but October marked a huge step in the growth of our company when our Singapore data center and network points of presence in Tokyo and Hong Kong went live. The SoftLayer passport is starting to fill its pages with stamps.

As we put the finishing touches on Amsterdam, we have Softlayer staff on three continents, so day-to-day operations get a little more complex in some areas of the business. As a member of the social media team, I’ve been watching the clock a lot more these days … And that’s not to suggest that I’m counting down every day until 5pm (which isn’t really a “stop time” for me anyway since social media doesn’t turn off at the end of our time zone’s business day). What I mean by “watching the clock” is that I’ve had to start thinking about reaching customers on the other side of the world with relevant SoftLayer messages. I feel like I need five clocks above my desk like what you usually see in newsrooms.

When engaging in the world of social media, timing is everything. Whether it’s a matter of coordinating with a press release, trying to reach people in a completely different time zone, or just responding to issues, being where you need to be when you need to be there is 90% of the battle. When you think about it, everything in life comes down to that!

Sometimes events can be planned like SoftLayer’s global domination. Others catch you by surprise … like the SMU Mustang victory. As I get close to my three-month mark as a SLayer, I’m glad I was in the right place at the right time to join the SoftLayer team. I’m excited to see how our business is going to grow, and I’m looking forward to having to invest in more time zone clocks to keep track of the local times in all of our new data center markets.

Oh, and GO MUSTANGS!!

-Rachel

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

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

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

-PHIL