Posts Tagged ‘partner’

This is a guest blog from Troy Davis of Papertrail, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner that helps customers detect, resolve and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages.

Receive DB Slow Query Logs in Your Inbox

Want to wake up to important database and syslog messages with your bagel and coffee? Here’s how. It’s free and takes about 5 minutes.

Most of us run a database somewhere on our SoftLayer servers. Whether it’s MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or another relational or NoSQL sibling, a responsive data store is critical to happy users. That’s why databases send slow queries to a log file. It’s much better than no logging at all, but as an engineer, I’d wanted more. I wanted to:

• View all my query logs in one place, without SSHing to each server for tail and grep. My workload shouldn’t scale linearly as I add systems
• Share log visibility with employees who don’t have server access or command-line knowledge (and email links to specific log messages to my developers and DBAs)
• Receive log messages in my inbox – or send them to my team or monitoring service – when I know they need attention
• Examine logs for related HTTP requests, daemon output, API invocations, and other parts of our stack — I can troubleshoot faster with start-to-finish logs on a single screen.

That’s where Papertrail was born. We built Papertrail to make log aggregation and log management effortless and usable. It’s the hosted log management service that we wanted as developers, systems engineers and tech entrepreneurs.

We know the hesitation you might have when approaching this kind of service, so our goal was to enable users to have Papertrail deliver those SQL slow query logs – or any other logs – to your inbox every morning for free:

Read the rest of Papertrail’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! »

We invite each of our featured SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partners to contribute a guest post to the SoftLayer Blog, and this week, we’re happy to welcome Dmitri Eroshenko from Relenta. In his guest post, Dmitri explains Relenta’s inspiration and history to help you better understand how Relenta’s online app can benefit your business.

Relenta: Get Things Done with One Click

We’re all suffocating from information clutter. Our customer data and communications are scattered all over the place — multiple email accounts, social networks, CRMs and contact managers, instant messengers and chats, spreadsheets, various productivity and collaboration apps, calendars, and so on. We enter and re-enter data in different apps, which we endlessly cross-reference to reconcile discrepancies. We worry constantly that we’re missing something.

At some point, we reach the threshold where pain becomes unbearable, stop and say, “There must be a better way!”

Our small software development team started working on Relenta six years ago with these very words. The idea was to take several apps our team used regularly — including email, of course — and distill them into one single program. Soon after we started building the program, we realized that by storing different types of customer records in the same backend database, we’d actually only begun the process of consolidating the information … And that’s where we started building Relenta’s interface to truly streamline the process.

Instead of displaying various bits of customer information on separate screens, we created an interface that aggregated ALL data in one single activity stream. These “news feeds” provide at-a-glance views on the history of each of the customer relationships being tracked by the system. The feeds also put you in a one-click zone, from which no information is more than a single click away and no activity takes more than a single click to perform.

The rest is history. Today, Relenta is an elegant online application that lets you organize your entire customer-related life so that nothing is more than one click away.

The idea of building our platform around the one-click zone became our mantra and guiding principle. To put you into a one-click zone,
Relenta offers:

• A unified inbox for all customer communications, including email and social network messages from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter
• A centralized platform for contact management, shared calendar, internal messaging, workflow management and document management
• A built-in email marketing and email-autoresponder solution
• A product philosophy that emphasizes disciplined process management and minimizes the number of steps it takes to get things done
• A framework that enables asynchronous and geographically dispersed collaboration by keeping everyone and everything on the same page

As a result of this streamlined workflow, your data isn’t fragmented or unnecessarily duplicated across your systems and you can be more efficient in your operations. By interlinking all communication activity between our team and each customer, we found ourselves getting twice as much work done in half the time.

If you find yourself bouncing between platforms to manage your customer relationships, Relenta might be a great fit for you. While I can talk about the value Relenta can provide and send you as many customer testimonials as you want to read, what matters is whether the app meets your needs. Check out our Live Demo and sign up for a Free Trial to put us to the test.

-Dmitri Eroshenko, Relenta

Join the one-click revolution at www.relenta.com!

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.

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! »

This is a guest blog from Gleb Arshinov of Acunote, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in online project management and Scrum software.

Implementing Project Management in Your Business

Project management has a bit of a stigma for being a little boring. In its simplest form, project management involves monitoring and reporting progress on a given initiative, and while it sounds simple, it’s often an afterthought … if it’s ever a thought at all. Acunote is in the business of making project management easy and accessible for businesses of all sizes.

I’ve been in and around project management for years now, and while I could talk your ear off about Acunote, I’d rather share a few “Best Practices” for incorporating project management in your business. As you begin to understand how project management principles can be incorporated into your day-to-day activities, you’ll be in a better position to understand the value proposition of tools like Acunote.

Read the rest of Acunote’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 Dave Jilk of Standing Cloud, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in automating cloud application deployment and streamlining management.

Standing Cloud’s Application Layer for the SoftLayer Cloud

When we first came across the SoftLayer Cloud, we were impressed by the breadth of what it allowed the user to do through a web browser. Beyond the basic infrastructure capabilities of provisioning servers and storage (that you can find from other providers), the SoftLayer console and API allow full access to the networking, security, and server console capabilities of the system. It’s as though you can take over the mind of a network administrator and have him or her do your bidding.

Read the rest of Dave’s Guest Blog! »

In this week’s “3 Bars | 3 Questions” episode, I was nominated by Tom Blair to talk about SoftLayer’s Channel Sales team and the competitive advantages our three partner programs (strategic, referral and reseller) have over our competition.

As you’ll see in the video, we actually covered seven or eight questions, but the basic framework for the chat were these three:

1. How does SoftLayer define the channel?
2. What’s happening in the SoftLayer channel program?
3. How does SoftLayer’s referral program differ from the programs offered by competitors?

Because we had quite a bit of ground to cover, the video goes about 15 minutes, but I hope it’s entertaining and informative throughout. Be sure to stick around through the end of the video to hear the best analogy I can think of for SoftLayer’s program.

To learn more about the new referral partner program I mention, email referral@softlayer.com, and we can fill you in.

Since we recently announced an awesome partnership with TechWildcatters, I’m looking forward to hearing what SoftLayer VP of Community Development Paul Ford has to say about what else is coming up. Paul, enjoy the hot seat!

-Drew