Posts Tagged ‘interview’

This is a guest blog from Verecloud, a technology partner that makes it easier for small- and medium-sized businesses to shop for, select, purchase, manage and monitor the performance of their cloud services and related spending.

Cloudwrangler from Verecloud

Ubiquitous Internet access and technological advances in virtualization and IT management have caused an explosion in the availability and adoption of cloud services. Just a few years ago, it would take hours – if not days – to activate a new cloud service for a customer. SoftLayer can now perform this feat with servers in minutes, and other providers of email, CRM and accounting solutions have equally fast turn-up times.

The cloud gives small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) access to enterprise grade technology so that they can compete more effectively with little, if any, capital investment, so those SMBs are prime consumers of cloud services. By moving to cloud services, their businesses gains flexibility and affordable scalability to throttle their infrastructure and services up and down as their business grows, changes, moves locations or becomes more mobile.

Even with all of those benefits, adding a little cloud here and a little cloud there ends up making it difficult for these SMBs to manage all of the disparate services. Who is paying for what? Are they accounted for in expense reports? How can you allocate the costs to your sales, marketing, operations or support departments? Is IT aware of all of the cloud services? What happens if someone leaves the company and you need to deactivate their access and reassign all of their data to other employees?

Read the rest of Verecloud’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Mike Genstil of Visualize ROI, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner providing a flexible platform for enabling sales and marketing professionals to place ROI models on the web in an engaging format.

Don’t Tell Me … SHOW Me the Numbers

We are living in a new world of increased corporate accountability and frugality. Thanks to unpredictable markets and unscrupulous leaders, the stakes have been raised in corporate decision-making. We have entered an “ROI revolution,” where CFOs, CMOs, and CIOs are demanding detailed business cases before they will make a purchase. Questions asked of vendors by executives are, “What is the Return on Investment?” and, “What is my Total Cost of Ownership?”

Read the rest of Visualize ROI’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog with David Lifson from our partner Postling. Postling is an ideal social media management tool for small businesses. Postling’s dashboard allows the user to take control of their online presence by aggregating all of their social media accounts in one place. David will be sharing some social media tips and tricks in a separate blog in the near future.

In the first 7 episodes of the 3 Bars | 3 Questions series, you’ve had the chance to meet some interesting people who work for SoftLayer. In the last installment, Paul Ford chose “The Mitch” as the next participant, and that’s a bit of a curve ball. “The Mitch” isn’t exactly a SoftLayer employee, but he is a character born out of the Softlayer culture, so he qualifies for an interview:

Given our company culture and the time our team spends together in the office, these kinds of jokes are pretty common, and works is a lot more fun as a result. If you want to join the “tens” of fans referenced in the video, find “The Mitch” on Facebook and “Like” accordingly.

If you want to get your very own (extremely rare and valuable) personalized copy of “The Mitch,” mail your head shot to “The Mitch” c/o SoftLayer Technologies, 4849 Alpha Road, Dallas, TX 75244. And yes, employees who haven’t been lucky enough to receive a print are eligible to participate as well.

-@toddmitchell

EDIT: “The Mitch” is in high demand at the cPanel office: http://sftlyr.com/a9. They might need a limited-edition cPanel-specific run.

In my 3 Bars 3 Questions interview with Kevin a few weeks ago, I touched on the Community Development groups goals as we work with startups, incubators and customers in our Technology Partners Marketplace, and last week I had the chance to visit a young, up-and-coming incubator in the Bay Area: Teens in Tech Labs. Among some of their other projects, Teens in Tech is launching the Teens in Tech Incubator – a program built on the idea that entrepreneurship doesn’t have a start age.

The incubator program lasts a little over eight weeks and is very hands on, in terms of mentor and adviser involvement. Each team invited to participate will be paired up with a group of mentors and advisers that will help during the process.

At the end of each week of the eight week program, the Teens in Tech staff will meet with each company to go over how their week went and what they think will help further build their business. Every other week, Teens in Tech will organize a dinner and have a guest speaker present to the teams … And it gives the teams a chance to interact with each other outside of building their product.

At the end of the eight weeks, the teams will present their startups to a group of Venture Capitalists, influencers, members of the press and others at an event called “Demo Day.”

Teens in Tech CEO Daniel Brusilovsky invited me to join him on a quick tour of their brand new office space in Mountain View, CA, and I made sure to grab my camera to capture the environment before the team and the incubator participants moved their stuff in:

We’re happy to support Teens in Tech, and we’re looking forward to seeing some of the amazing companies that’ll come from the best and brightest entrepreneurs under 18 years old!

-@PaulFord

This is a guest blog from Jason Abate of Panopta, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in monitoring your servers and managing outages with tools and resources designed to help minimize the impact of outages to your online business.

5 Server Monitoring Best Practices

Prior to starting Panopta, I was responsible for the technology and operations side of a major international hosting company and worked with a number of large online businesses. During this time, I saw my share of major disasters and near catastrophes and had a chance to study what works and what doesn’t when Murphy’s Law inevitably hits.

Monitoring is a key component of any serious online infrastructure, and there are a wide range of options when it comes to monitoring tools — from commercial and open-source software that you install and manage locally to monitoring services like Panopta. The best solution depends on a number of criteria, but there are five major factors to consider when making this decision.

Read the rest of Panopta’s Guest Blog! »

I’ve been on the hook for a 3 Bars | 3 Questions interview for a few weeks now, and I finally found a few minutes to chat with Kevin about what’s going on in the world of SoftLayer Community Development. In the past two months, we’ve cranked everything up to 11 with the unveiling of our Technology Incubator Program and the Technology Partners Marketplace. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about:

Over the past few weeks, we’ve posted video interviews and guest blogs from a few of our featured Technology Partner Marketplace participants, and you can expect to see more where that came from as we sign on new partners with killer applications and services that we can share with our customers. If you want to be one of those new partners, fill out our quick application, and we’ll get the ball rolling!

I’m looking forward to the next installment of “3 Bars | 3 Questions” because “The Mitch” – the man, the myth, the legend – will be in the hot seat.

-@PaulFord

This is a guest blog from AppFirst, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in managing servers and applications with a SaaS-based monitoring solution.

How You Should Approach Monitoring in the Cloud

Monitoring in the cloud may sound like it’s easy, but there’s one important thing you need to know before you get started: traditional monitoring techniques simply don’t work when you’re in the cloud.

“But why?” you may ask. “Why can’t I use Polling and Byte Code Injection in my cloud infrastructure?”

Read the rest of AppFirst’s Guest Blog! »

Will Charnock put me in the hot seat at the end of his 3 Bars | 3 Questions interview last week, so I welcomed Kevin into my office virtually to have a quick chat. He came equipped with three good questions about my experience with SoftLayer SLales, and I did my best to give three good answers. Here were the questions:

1. What makes SoftLayer different from any of the other companies you’ve worked for?
2. When you’re hiring a new sales representative, what do you look for in that person?
3. What are you most excited about when it comes to the next few months at SoftLayer from a sales perspective?

This week, we used a High Definition video chat, and the quality is pretty impressive. We’re still working to improve and tweak the format and quality of these videos, so you might notice a few blips in the audio recording, but we’ll get those ironed out soon.

All in all, the video chat was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to watching Drew Jenkins enjoy it in the next episode!

-Tom

Thanks to Marc’s vote, I had the distinct honor of being the third guest on our “3 Bars | 3 Questions” series. The topic of conversation: IPv6.

Are we in a “The sky is falling!” situation yet? How can customers put pressure on their ISPs and software providers to add IPv6 support? How long with ARIN and SoftLayer have IPv4 addresses to give out now that IANA has released their entire free pool? Here’s my take:

This video was recorded while Kevin was standing outside the Moscone Center in San Francisco at GDC 2011 over a mobile hotspot connection, so the video quality suffered a little. To silence the street noise, Kevin muted his side of the conversation as I spoke.

-Will