Posts Tagged ‘international’

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

Bill Gates once told a journalist that everyone should care about developments in India because the world’s largest democracy (of 1.2 billion people) and tenth-largest economy is quickly catching up with us. I recently had the opportunity to see those developments first-hand, and I wholeheartedly agree with Bill’s sentiment. Innovation and technology breakthroughs are not owned by or limited to the United States, and as international markets mature, we’re going to see more and more entrepreneurship and startup activity overseas. Now I don’t mean to imply that the demise of Silicon Valley is imminent, but its influence will be greatly diminished in the future, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I just returned from a round-the-world trip that included nearly two weeks in India as part of a 500 Startups-sponsored market exploration tour called Geeks on a Plane. The tour stopped through Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi, with meetups for local entrepreneurs, startups, investors and some of the most influential companies in India’s technology ecosystem. While in India, I had the chance to meet several SoftLayer customers — including Zoomin, PowerWeave, and Vidya Mantra — and their insight into the growing technology culture in the region was eye-opening.

One of the most interesting characteristics shared by many of the entrepreneurs I spoke with was that they were building businesses with a “hyper-local” focus: Unique business models that are specifically geared toward serving local communities while leveraging the latest technologies in mobility and e-commerce. This distinction is particularly noteworthy because they didn’t assume that they’d need to succeed in the US market or compete with companies in the US to build their businesses … And they’re absolutely right. The opportunities that exist for hyper-local entrepreneurs in these emerging markets are staggering.

FlipKart is known as “The Amazon of India.” It’s very similar to the online shopping giant most of us know and use regularly, but with some unique regional twists. For example, because credit card and electronic payments in India are not as prevalent or reliable as they are in much of the world, orders are taken via both an online ordering system and through FlipKart call centers. Once processed, a highly developed network of “scooters” delivers about 50 percent of FlipKart’s orders, and the payment is provided at the customer’s door — IN CASH. While that might seem simplistic, each courier has a smartphone that allows them to become a geo-located, connected, data sharing entity. Hundreds of millions of dollars in FlipKart orders are delivered each year with very few issues, despite the fact that most of us can’t even imagine how the company could operate that way in the US.

Another great example of how innovators are using technology to redefine businesses is redBus, India’s largest bus ticketing company. A huge percentage of travel in India is done very inexpensively by bus, and before redBus came on the scene, travelers took their chances by buying tickets through middlemen and ticket brokers, often getting ripped off or becoming victims of double-booking. By centralizing the ticketing process, redBus is able to provide a reliable way to book a seat on any of India’s vast system of buses via phone, online or in person. redBus offers the largest selection of bus seats in the country with over 350 bus operators and a flexible network of boarding points, timing and bus types. It’s an incredibly simple service that meets a clear need for a hyper-local audience by leveraging the technologies being built and improved around the world.

If my two weeks in India taught me one thing, it was that the startups don’t need to conquer international markets … They can strive to service their local communities and interests, and they’ll be just as successful (if not more). Our Catalyst program has just begun its international expansion into India, and the future certainly looks bright. In fact, I’m proud to announce that we’ve already signed up our first Catalyst program member in India with many more to come!

As we continue working with startup communities around the globe, I learn more and more about how the world is changing, and I get a stronger appreciation for the cultural and economic ties that bind us all together.

Stay tuned!

-@gkdog

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

I was born and raised in Brockville, Ontario, and I’ve always been a proud Canadian. In 2000, I decided to leave my homeland to pursue career options south of the 49th parallel, so I became an active participant in Canada’s so-called “brain drain.” It’s never easy starting over, but I felt that my options were limited in Canada and that I wouldn’t find many opportunities to make an impact on a global stage.

Fast-forward to 2012. Early in the year, we were introduced to GrowLab — a leading Vancouver based accelerator — by our friends at East Side Games Studio. They seemed to have a lot of incredible stuff going on, so I planned an exploratory mission of sorts … In June, I’d visit a few Canadian cities with an open mind to see what, if anything, had changed. With the Catalyst Program‘s amazing success in the US, I hoped we could hunt down one or two Canadian startups and accelerators to help out.

I was very pleasantly surprised at what I found: A vibrant, thriving Canadian community of entrepreneurs that seemed to match or exceed the startup activity I’ve seen in Silicon Valley, Boulder, Boston, New York, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Dubai. How times have changed! Investing in the Canadian startup scene was a no-brainer.

The Catalyst team hit the ground running and immediately started working with GrowLab and several other incredible organizations like Communitech, Ryerson University Digital Media Zone (DMZ), Innovation Factory, Extreme Startups and the Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE).

We’ll enroll startups participating in those organizations into the Catalyst Program, and we’ll provide infrastructure credits (for servers, storage and networking), executive mentoring, engineering resources and limited financial support. SoftLayer wants to become the de facto Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider for Canadian startups and startups worldwide, so this is a huge first step onto the international stage. More importantly — and on a personal level — I’m excited that we get to help new companies in Canada make a global impact with us.

As a Canadian expat, having the opportunity to give something back means a great deal to me. I see an incredible opportunity to nurture and help some of these Canadian startups take flight. SoftLayer is still an entrepreneurial company at heart, and we have a unique perspective on what it takes to build and scale the next killer app or game, so we feel especially suited to the task.

One of the Canadian entrepreneurs we’ve been working with sent us this great video produced by the Vancouver-based GROW Conference about entrepreneurship, and it immediately resonated with me, so I wanted to be sure to include it in this post:

We’ve already started working with dozens entrepreneurs in Vancouver, Toronto, Hamilton and Waterloo who embody that video and have kindred spirits to my own. SoftLayer has a few Canadian ex-pats on our team, and as Catalyst moves into Canada officially, we’re all extremely proud of our heritage and the opportunity we have to help.

Some have called our foray into the Canadian market an “international expansion” of sorts, I think of it more as a “coming home party.”

-@gkdog

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

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

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

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

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

I thought, “LET’S DO THIS!”

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

We have come a long way.

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

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

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

-@jpwisler

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.

The last few months have been extremely busy for SoftLayer Asia. SLayers from our Singapore office have been participating in all kinds of events — from small developer group meetups to massive conferences like CommunicAsia 2012 that brought in 35,000+ attendees from the APAC region’s major markets, and our goal has been the same throughout: SoftLayer has the platform on which our customers can build the future.

Web Hosting Days 2012 – Bangkok, Thailand

While our goal to help our customers “build the future” might seem like a tall order, the market in Asia needs the capabilities that only SoftLayer is able to provide. With the recent boom in smartphones and the growth of the region’s huge network of connectivity infrastructure, Asian companies with global customer bases are facing an exciting market with a great deal of promise. In 2012 alone, analyst group Canalys forecasts:

• An estimated 253.57 million smartphones in APAC in 2012 alone (compared to 224.08 million in North America).
• APAC smartphone penetration is expected to exceed that of North America by 13%.

While that technology market is attractive, many business owners find that it can be equally intimidating. That sentiment is one the biggest reasons our customers share when we ask why they chose to to trust SoftLayer’s SNG01 data center with their data. They need a platform that provides stability and on-demand scalability at an affordable price point, and they’ve seen SoftLayer deliver on all of those needs.

SoftLayer CMO Simon West presenting at Cloud Asia 2012

You might think that having a foundation of the best technology platform in a technology-focused market guarantees success when it comes to launching social and Internet-based businesses, but that’s only part of the story. The most important aspect of our customers’ successes have been the creative, innovative solutions that they’ve been able to build because they’re not worried about whether their infrastructure can keep up with their ideas. In Asia’s crowded technology-centric market, a company’s primary concern should be continuously meeting the needs of its rapidly evolving and growing customer base, and that’s what we want to empower. Here are a few examples of SoftLayer customers we’ve seen that embody that mentality:

• Tandif is an Indonesian based company that provides accurate and efficient auto-moderation of any web property connected to the Internet. Tandif’s service is available in English and Bahasa Indonesia, one of the most vibrant internet and social media growth markets on a regional and global scale.
• Wildby is a start up from the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator (regional affiliate of the Techstars program) that launched an application to addresses a region’s unique technology need. Many parents are “guilty” of handing over their tablets or smartphones to entertain their kids in the car as they sit out the many crazy traffic jams in our major cities. Wildby’s “edu-tainment” app allows children aged 3 to 7 yrs visually interact and learn new words and concepts anywhere they have access to the app.
• Qyro — another JFDI graduate — was founded by an international team of entrepreneurs to build a patent-pending enterprise-based solution called Stubb, which provides users full-featured virtual document sharing and controls over both hard and soft copies.

Each of these companies has been very successful in their respective markets, and they’re looking to SoftLayer to help them expand their business footprint in Asia to reach customers in North America and Europe. They absolutely love what our private network means for those goals: Geographic boundaries are blurred. Why is that important? Just how global is the Asian market?

Southeast Asia alone takes center stage when it comes to global adoption of the world’s most popular Internet properties:

• Indonesia, India and Philippines are part of the top 10 markets for Facebook users’ growth, with Indonesia ranking #2 worldwide.
• 21% of Indonesian online users visited Twitter.com in January 2011, making it the fourth highest country in terms of Twitter reach.
• Malaysia is the #1 country in Southeast Asia when it comes to Foursquare user base (the USA is 167 positions lower)!

Needless to say, given the opportunity here and the passionate entrepreneurs trying to take advantage of it, SoftLayer Asia is going to be extremely busy for a long time.

-Dionne

We hosted our first quarterly networking event in Singapore yesterday, and as I spoke with the partners, prospects, customers and SLayers in attendance, I heard some incredible stories about struggles with scaling infrastructure and how SoftLayer has revolutionized the way our customers look at their physical and virtual infrastructure. As we talked about our experiences, one of my own “war stories” came to mind, and I got to share it:

10 years later, I can’t believe how much things have changed.

SoftLayer automates almost all of the manual processes, and we’re able to provision a dedicated servers in 2-4 hours. While that’s a pretty impressive feat, it’s even more amazing when you consider that we can bring up 20, 50 or 100 dedicated servers in the same time frame. Just look at what OMGPOP was able to do when their “Draw Something” app was downloaded 36 million times. That’s what automation is all about. Anything that we can automate, we automate, and that makes for an unbeatable user experience.

If someone came to us today with the an urgent order similar to the one I dealt with in 2002, the entire interaction above would boil down to, “What specs do you need? *typing* Here’s your order number. You can expect the machines to be provisioned within 4 hours.” We’d be off the phone by about 7:20am, and by noon, all of the servers would be online and hosting the game. The craziest part is that we’re not even satisfied with that turnaround time yet. Our commitment is to continue to innovate, automate and empower our customers through our customer portal and APIs, and because our goals are to get better and serve our customers faster, the carrot will always be in front of us … the same way UPS has a philosophy of “constructive dissatisfaction.”

I want to thank everyone who came to our networking event yesterday. I hope you learned a little something about SoftLayer because I certainly learned a lot about our customers in the dozens of conversations I had. If you weren’t able to attend and want to see what you missed, we posted a few pictures on Flickr: SoftLayer Singapore – Quarterly Networking Event – March 28, 2012

Do you have any infrastructure horror stories from the past like mine?

-Michael

It’s been a long time since I put fingers to keyboard to write a blog, so I reckoned it was about time that I resurfaced on the interwebs. While this post won’t announce any huge news like my last post about SoftLayer going live in Amsterdam, it might provide an interesting insight into what it’s like to work for a dynamic, growing company.

My time at SoftLayer has been marked by change at rapid pace — more revolution than evolution, I suppose. This has been true both in terms of my professional development and the trajectory the company has taken in the past 18 months: I have gone through a merger that more than tripled the size of the company, watched the expansion of our footprint in the United States (a new data center in San Jose and new pods in Washington, D.C. and Dallas) and participated in our expansion overseas when I worked on the Amsterdam launch … And if that list wasn’t action-packed enough, I’ve been a part of some fantastic product launches (Flex Images and Object Storage being the two most recent examples).

When I joined SoftLayer, I kicked off fledgling analyst relations program, transitioned to corporate communications, and then seized the opportunity to serve as SoftLayer’s EMEA general manager (temporarily until I found Jonathan Wisler to run the ship). Today, I’m responsible for driving our international operations in Amsterdam and Singapore, and so far, the work has gone according to the plan. Both facilities are up and running, and we have in-region folks in place to run the data centers and drive the region’s business. As with every other DC under the SoftLayer hood, the Ops teams continue to knock it out of the park, and our business teams are just getting wound up.

Our early success in the new international markets speaks volumes about the support our customer base has given us as we’ve expanded, and now that we’ve got fully fledged dedicated teams to run in-region sales and marketing in Amsterdam and Singapore, we’re expecting the result to be akin to throwing gasoline on an already-roaring fire. Users in Europe and Asia can look forward to seeing a lot more from SoftLayer over the coming months as we ramp up our events schedule and start to push the SoftLayer message throughout both geographies.

Suffice it to say, I am very excited about what lies ahead … I suspect our competitors might not share the same enthusiasm.

-@quigleymar