A few weeks ago, about 18,000 customers officially became SoftLayer customers. Over the past decade, they joined the fold under the banners of The Planet, EV1Servers, RackShack, ServerMatrix and maybe a half-dozen other brands. Each of those brands was positioned to appeal to specific market segments, but they shared the same pursuit of “value” to offer customers the biggest bang for their buck. There are two approaches to providing that kind of value:

• More bang.
• Less buck.

In many cases, the “less buck” strategy was adopted. SoftLayer takes the contrary approach by maximizing the “more bang.”

If I were to put it more presidentially, I’d say, “The ‘less buck’ stops here.”

I get to chat with customers on Twitter, Facebook, the blog and the forums, and a lot of my interactions have been about pricing: “I used to get X server for Y, but now it costs Z.” The trouble is that it’s tough to compare many of the offerings apples-to-apples.

If you were to create an apples-to-apples server comparison, you’d see that a SoftLayer server is the equivalent of a server from The Planet with a KVM, a private network, additional geographic network points of presence, increased network capacity, the ability to select where you want your server provisioned, faster provisioning, seamless integration with cloud solutions, and a lot more automation… And these are just the differences that came to me as I was writing.

As a customer of The Planet, you could choose to omit many of the features above. As a customer of SoftLayer, we want you to be able to take advantage of the platform that was designed holistically to making growing and maintaining your hosted environment easier. The platform’s architecture was dreamt up in garages and living rooms by folks that live and breathe technology:

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.” – Steve Jobs

The reactions I get when I talk about the features included in a SoftLayer server range from, “”Wow. I had no idea,” to, “I don’t care. I don’t need any of that stuff,” and as you’re reading this post, you may have already decided your stance. If you don’t see value in the SoftLayer platform, we might not get your next server-worth of business, but if you have just been looking at the dollars and cents, I’d encourage you to investigate some of the features of the platform and ask questions about how it might make your environment easier to manage.

Along the lines of the platform being built for the future, I have a question for you: What would you change about the SoftLayer platform? What is it missing? What do you want it to do that it doesn’t do yet?

-@khazard