Posts Tagged ‘global expansion’

I’m SoftLayer’s director of international operations, so I have the unique pleasure of spending a lot of time on airplanes and in hotels as I travel between Dallas, Amsterdam, Singapore and wherever else our event schedule dictates. In the past six months, I’ve spent most of my time in Asia, and I’ve tried to take advantage of the opportunity relearn the culture to help shape SoftLayer Asia’s business.

To really get a sense the geographic distance between Dallas and Singapore, find a globe and put one index finger on Dallas and put your other index finger on Singapore. To travel from one location to the other, you fly to the other side of the planet. Given the space considerations, our network map uses a scaled-down representative topology to show our points of presence in a single view, and you get a sense of how much artistic license was used when you actually make the trip to Singapore.

The longest currently scheduled commercial flight on the planet takes you from Singapore to Newark in a cool 19 hours, but I choose to maintain my sanity rather than set world records for amount of time spent in a metal tube. I usually hop from Dallas to Tokyo (a mere 14 hours away) where I spend a few days, and I get on another plane down to Singapore.

The break between the two legs of the trip serves a few different purposes … I get a much needed escape from the confines of an airplane, I’m able to spend time in an amazing city (where I lived 15 years ago), and I can use the opportunity to explore the market for SoftLayer. Proximity and headcount dictated that we spend most of our direct marketing and sales time focusing on the opportunities radiating from Singapore, so we haven’t been able to spend as much time as we’d like in Japan. Fortunately, we’ve been able organically grow our efforts in the country through community-based partnerships and sponsorships, and we owe a great deal of our success to our partners in the region and our new-found friends. I’ve observed from our experience in Japan that the culture breeds two contrasting business realities that create challenges and opportunities for companies like SoftLayer: Japan is insular and Japan is global.

When I say that Japan is insular, I mean that IT purchases are generally made in the realm of either Japanese firms or foreign firms that have spent decades building reputation in market. Becoming a trusted part of that market is a time-consuming (and expensive) endeavor, and it’s easy for a business to be dissuaded as an outsider. The contrasting reality that Japanese businesses also have a huge need for global reach is where SoftLayer can make an immediate impact.

Consider the Japanese electronics and the automobile industries. Both were built internally before making the leap to other geographies, and over the course of decades, they have established successful brands worldwide. Japanese gaming companies, social media companies and vibrant start-up communities follow a similar trend … only faster. The capital investment required to go global is negligible compared to their forebears because they don’t need to build factories or put elaborate logistics operations in place anymore. Today, a Japanese company with a SaaS solution, a game or a social media experience can successfully share it with the world in a matter minutes or hours at minimal cost, and that’s where SoftLayer is able to immediately serve the Japanese market.

The process of building the SoftLayer brand in Asia has been accelerated by the market’s needs, and we don’t take that for granted. We plan to continue investing in local communities and working with our partners to become a trusted and respected resource in the market, and we are grateful for the opportunities those relationships have opened for us … Or as Styx would say, “Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto.”

-@quigleymar

In October, SoftLayer’s data center in Singapore (SNG01) celebrated its first birthday, and our data center in Amsterdam (AMS01) turned one year old this week as well. In twelve short months, SoftLayer has completely transformed into a truly global operation with data centers and staff around the world. Our customer base has always had an international flavor to it, and our physical extension into Europe and Asia was a no-brainer.

At the end of 2011, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of our revenue was generated by companies outside of North America. Since then, both facilities have been fully staffed, and we’ve ratcheted up support in local startup communities through the Catalyst program. We’ve also aggressively promoted SoftLayer’s global IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) platform on the trade show circuit, and the unanimous response has been that our decision to go global has been a boon to both our existing and new customers.

This blog is filled with posts about SoftLayer’s culture and our SLayers’ perspectives on what we’re doing as a company, and that kind of openness is one of the biggest reasons we’ve been successful. SoftLayer’s plans for global domination included driving that company culture deep into the heart of Europe and Asia, and we’re extremely proud of how both of our international locations show the same SLayer passion and spirit. In Amsterdam, our office is truly pan-European — staffed by employees who hail from the US, Croatia, Greece, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Ireland and England. In Singapore, the SoftLayer melting pot is filled with employees from the US, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and New Zealand. The SoftLayer culture has flourished in the midst of that diversity, and we’re a better company for it.

All of this is not to say the last year has not been without challenges … We’ve logged hundreds of thousands of air miles, spent far too many nights in hotels and juggled 13-hour and 6-hour time zone difference to make things work. Beyond these personal challenges, we’ve worked through professional challenges of how to make things happen outside of North America. It seems like everything is different — from dealing with local vendors to adjusting to the markedly different work cultures that put bounds around how and when we work (I wish I was Dutch and had as many vacation days…) — and while some adjustments have been more difficult than others, our team has pulled through and gotten stronger as a result.

As we celebrate our first anniversary of global operations, I reflect on a few of the funny “light bulb” moments I’ve experienced. From seeing switch balls get the same awed looks at trade shows on three different continents to realizing how to effectively complete simple tasks in the Asian business culture, I’m ecstatic about how far we’ve come … And how far we’re going to go.

To infinity and beyond?

-@quigleymar

At times, the meticulous planning, logistics and execution around the SoftLayer Amsterdam data center launch has felt like a clandestine military operation. Today, the wait is over! We’re finally ready to go “LIVE” with our new state-of-the-art facility, along with network Points of Presence (PoPs) in Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt.

Having a European presence not only gives us proximity to customers but a foothold into the entire continent to help drive more innovation and deliver a better end-user experience. Currently more than 50 percent of our business is done outside North America, so our continued expansion into international markets is so vital to long-term growth.

Amsterdam is our “digital gateway” into Europe, extending our capabilities so customers can deploy, scale and manage their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions based on SoftLayer’s private network. Here’s a quick glimpse into what the new data center offers:

• Capacity for more than 16,000 servers
• Redundant network infrastructure
• Fully-automated platform
• Unique pod design concept

And here’s an actual glimpse into the data center (taken last week as we were putting the final touches on the racks … as you can see by the unbound cables at the backs of the server and the reference labels in the front):

We now have 13 data centers and 16 PoPs worldwide. Each data center functions independently, with distinct and redundant resources, while still being fully integrated into SoftLayer’s existing facilities. The end result for our customers is maximum accessibility, security, and control.

Our goal for Europe is to deliver the BEST cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions on the continent … just like we do in North America and Asia. Ten months of painstaking research, work and preparation are done, and now our customers will get to reap the rewards.

What are you waiting for? Get your first server in Amsterdam! To celebrate the launch of the new facility, we’re offering our Triple Double special on servers provisioned in AMS01 for a limited time: Free double bandwidth, double RAM and double HDD!

Now it’s time to send our clandestine military operation’s “Go Live Crew” to an undisclosed location to start preparing for our next strategic infiltration …

-@quigleymar

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

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

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

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

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

-@toddmitchell

Based on the blog’s traffic analytics, customers are very interested in SoftLayer’s global expansion, and in my update from Tokyo, I promised a few sneak peeks into the progress of building out the Singapore data center. We’ve been talking about our move into Asia for a while now, but we haven’t showed much of the progress. The cynics in the audience will say, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” and to them, I say:

These pictures were actually taken a few weeks ago before our Server Build Technicians came on site, and it looks even more amazing now … But you’ll have to check back with us in the coming weeks to see that progress for yourself. Both the Singapore and Amsterdam facilities are on track to go live by the middle of Q4 2011, and we’re already starting to hear buzz from our customers as they prepare to snatch up their first SoftLayer server in Asia.

If you want to have a little fun, you should compare these build-out pictures with the ones we’ve posted from the completed San Jose facility and the under-construction Amsterdam data center. As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, SoftLayer uses a data center pod concept to create identical hosting environments in each of our locations. Even with the data centers’ varying floor plan layouts and sizes, the server room similarities are pretty remarkable.

Stay tuned for updates on the build-out process and for information about when you can start provisioning new servers in Singapore. If you have any questions about the build-out process, leave a comment below or hit us up on Twitter: @SoftLayer.

-@toddmitchell