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Going Global: How to Approach Expansion into Asia

Daryl Webb — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:00:39 +0000

Asia is an amazing place for business, but companies from outside the region often consider it mysterious and prohibitive. I find myself discussing Asian business customs and practices with business owners from other regions on an almost daily basis, so I feel like I’ve become an informal resource when it comes to helping SoftLayer customers better understand and enter the Asian markets. As the general manager for SoftLayer’s APAC operations, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about what companies outside of Asia should consider when approaching new business in the region.

Before we get too far into the weeds, it’s important to take a step back and understand the Asian culture and how it differs from the business cultures in the West. The Asian market is much more relational than the market in the United States or Europe; significant value is placed on the time you spend in the region building new networks and interacting with other your prospective customers and suppliers. Even for small purchases, businesses in Asia are much more comfortable with face-to-face agreements than they are with phone calls or emails. Many of the executives I speak to about entering Asia argue they don’t have time to spend weeks and months in the region, and they make whistle-stop trips in various countries to get a snapshot of what they need to know to make informed decisions. Their businesses often fail at breaching the market because they don’t invest the time and resources they need to create the relationships required to succeed. Books, blogs (even this one), consultants and occasional visits aren’t nearly as important to your success as investing yourself in the culture. Even if you can’t physically travel to your target market for some reason, find ways to plug into the community online and become a resource.

Asia is not homogenous. There are 20 distinct countries and cultures, dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects. There are distinct legal systems, currencies, regulatory frameworks and cultural norms. From a business perspective, that means that what you do to appeal to an audience in Singapore won’t be as effective for an audience in Japan … This is not the United States of Asia nor is there an Asian Union. Having partners in Hong Kong does not get you into China; if you want to access markets in China, you need to build relationships with partners and customers in China. One of the biggest reasons for this in-country presence to understand and avoid a “death by a thousand cuts” situation where minor, seemingly insignificant questions and problems cumulatively prevent a business from successfully entering the market. Take these questions from customers as an example:

When I buy from your office in Bangkok, where is the contract jurisdiction?
I’m in Hong Kong. Can I pay in Hong Kong Dollars? Who takes the currency risk?
Corporate credit cards aren’t common in Vietnam. Can I pay for my online purchase in cash?
If I sign up for a webinar, is it at a time convenient for me (i.e. repeated for other time zones), or do I have to be at my PC at 3am?
If you invite me to a meeting on 12/4, is that April 12th, or December 4th?
When I print whitepapers from your website, do I need to resize to a different paper size?

The way you handle currencies, time zones and how you present information are barometers of how approachable your business is for users and businesses in a particular market. Most users won’t reach out to you to ask those kinds of questions; they’ll just move on to a competitor who answers their questions without them asking. You learn about these sticking points by having people on the ground and talking to potential customers and partners. Since globalization is “flattening” the World Wide Web, the mechanics of hosting a site, application or game in a data center in Singapore are identical to hosting the same content in Dallas. It’s easy to make your data locally available and have infrastructure available in your target market, but that’s only a start. You need to approach Asian countries as unique opportunities to redefine your business in a way that fits the culture of your potential customers and partners.

In my next blog, I plan to share a few best practices about management, responsiveness and responsibility, positioning, operations and marketing in Asia. These posts are intended to get you thinking about how your business can approach expanding into Asia smartly, and if you have any questions or want any advice about your business in particular, please feel free to email me directly: dwebb@softlayer.com.

-@darylwebb

Big Data at SoftLayer: MongoDB

Duke Skarda — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 15:25:56 +0000

In one day, Facebook’s databases ingest more than 500 terabytes of data, Twitter processes 500 million Tweets and Tumblr users publish more than 75 million posts. With such an unprecedented volume of information, developers face significant challenges when it comes to building an application’s architecture and choosing its infrastructure. As a result, demand has exploded for “big data” solutions — resources that make it possible to process, store, analyze, search and deliver data from large, complex data sets. In light of that demand, SoftLayer has been working in strategic partnership with 10gen — the creators of MongoDB — to develop a high-performance, on-demand, big data solution. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of specialized MongoDB servers at SoftLayer.

If you’ve configured an infrastructure to accommodate big data, you know how much of a pain it can be: You choose your hardware, you configure it to run NoSQL, you install an open source NoSQL project that you think will meet your needs, and you keep tweaking your environment to optimize its performance. Assuming you have the resources (and patience) to get everything running efficiently, you’ll wind up with the horizontally scalable database infrastructure you need to handle the volume of content you and your users create and consume. SoftLayer and 10gen are making that process a whole lot easier.

Our new MongoDB solutions take the time and guesswork out of configuring a big data environment. We give you an easy-to-use system for designing and ordering everything you need. You can start with a single server or roll out multiple servers in a single replica set across multiple data centers, and in under two hours, an optimized MongoDB environment is provisioned and ready to be used. I stress that it’s an “optimized” environment because that’s been our key focus. We collaborated with 10gen engineers on hardware and software configurations that provide the most robust performance for MongoDB, and we incorporated many of their MongoDB best practices. The resulting “engineered servers” are big data powerhouses:

From each engineered server base configuration, you can customize your MongoDB server to meet your application’s needs, and as you choose your upgrades from the base configuration, you’ll see the thresholds at which you should consider upgrading other components. As your data set’s size and the number of indexes in your database increase, you’ll need additional RAM, CPU, and storage resources, but you won’t need them in the same proportions — certain components become bottlenecks before others. Sure, you could upgrade all of the components in a given database server at the same rate, but if, say, you update everything when you only need to upgrade RAM, you’d be adding (and paying for) unnecessary CPU and storage capacity.

Using our new Solution Designer, it’s very easy to graphically design a complex multi-site replica set. Once you finalize your locations and server configurations, you’ll click “Order,” and our automated provisioning system will kick into high gear. It deploys your server hardware, installs CentOS (with OS optimizations to provide MongoDB performance enhancements), installs MongoDB, installs MMS (MongoDB Monitoring Service) and configures the network connection on each server to cluster it with the other servers in your environment. A process that may have taken days of work and months of tweaking is completed in less than four hours. And because everything is standardized and automated, you run much less risk of human error.

One of the other massive benefits of working so closely with 10gen is that we’ve been able to integrate 10gen’s MongoDB Cloud Subscriptions into our offering. Customers who opt for a MongoDB Cloud Subscription get additional MongoDB features (like SSL and SNMP support) and support direct from the MongoDB authority. As an added bonus, since the 10gen team has an intimate understanding of the SoftLayer environment, they’ll be able to provide even better support to SoftLayer customers!

You shouldn’t have to sacrifice agility for performance, and you shouldn’t have to sacrifice performance for agility. Most of the “big data” offerings in the market today are built on virtual servers that can be provisioned quickly but offer meager performance levels relative to running the same database on bare metal infrastructure. To get the performance benefits of dedicated hardware, many users have chosen to build, roll out and tweak their own configurations. With our MongoDB offering, you get the on-demand availability and flexibility of a cloud infrastructure with the raw power and full control of dedicated hardware.

If you’ve been toying with the idea of rolling out your own big data infrastructure, life just got a lot better for you.

-Duke

Going Global: Domo Arigato, Japan

Mark Quigley — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 20:15:39 +0000

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

Bandwidth Utilization: Managing a Global Network

Dani Roisman — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 20:30:55 +0000

SoftLayer has over 1,750 Gbit/s of network capacity. In each of our data centers and points of presence, we have an extensive library of peering relationships and multiple 10 Gbit/s connections to independent Tier 1 carriers. We operate one of the fastest, most reliable networks on the planet, and our customers love it:

Wow these new Softlayer servers are amazingly fast! No more lag in EU!

— ChadTheDJ (@MCChadTheDJ) July 1, 2012

From a network operations standpoint, that means we have our work cut out for us to keep everything running smoothly while continuing to build the network to accommodate a steady increase in customer demand. It might be easier to rest on our laurels to simply maintain what we already have in place, but when you look at the trend of bandwidth usage over the past 18 months, you’ll see why we need to be proactive about expanding our network:

The purple line above plots the 95th percentile of weekly outbound bandwidth utilization on the SoftLayer network, and the red line shows the linear trend of that consumption over time. From week to week, the total usage appears relatively consistent, growing at a steady rate, but when you look a little deeper, you get a better picture of how dynamic our network actually is:

The animated gif above shows the 2-hour average of bandwidth usage on our entire network over a seven-week period (times in CDT). As you can see, on a day-to-day basis, consumption fluctuates pretty significantly. The NOC (Network Operations Center) needs to be able to accommodate every spike of usage at any time of day, and our network engineering and strategy teams have to stay ahead of the game when it comes to planning points of presence and increasing bandwidth capacity to accommodate our customers’ ever-expanding needs.

But wait. There’s more.

Let’s go one level deeper and look a graph of the 95th percentile bandwidth usage on 5-minute intervals from one week in a single data center:

The variations in usage are even more dramatic. Because we have thirteen data centers geographically dispersed around the world with an international customer base, the variations you see in total bandwidth utilization understate the complexity of our network’s bandwidth usage. Customers targeting the Asian market might host content in SNG01, and the peaks in bandwidth consumption from Singapore will counterbalance the valleys of consumption at the same time in the United States and Europe.

With that in mind, here’s a challenge for you: Looking at the graph above, if the times listed are in CDT, which data center do you think that data came from?

It would be interesting to look at weekly usage trends, how those trends are changing and what those trends tell us about our customer base, but that assessment would probably be “information overload” in this post, so I’ll save that for another day.

-Dani

P.S. If you came to this post expecting to see “a big truck” or “a series of tubes,” I’m sorry I let you down.

Go, Tell it on the Mountain

Natalie Burch — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 16:03:42 +0000

Because SoftLayer is now a global hosting company and the holidays are upon us, I thought I’d tweak another Christmas classic with some SoftLayer-specific content … We’re going to need a few more tracks to add to SoftLayer is Coming to Town if we hope to compile an album that’ll compete with Justin Bieber.

Go, Tell it on the Mountain

While SLayers kept their watching
O’er customer servers by night,
Another DC opened,
and SoftLayer’s now worldwide.