Vote for Your All-Star Hosting Team!

For our October 2009 issue, we're looking for your input to help us identify an "all star team" of notable hosting personalities, divided into specific disciplines. It's not award, per se, but the person chosen in each category will be profiled in WHIR magazine. To have your say, please fill out a ballot, selecting (or writing in) one person in each category. We'll keep you posted on the results.

View poll results live!

THE MARKETER

Someone who is taking hosting marketing in an interesting direction, or taking on a particularly interesting challenge, or even seeing noticeable success with an old-fashioned idea.

	Bob Parsons	Say what you will about the tone and content of his ads, Go Daddy's marketing - and its success in playing with the controversy it generated - was a major reason for its rise to the top of hosting's mass market.
	Steve Renda	A 2008 addition to Verio as vice president of sales and marketing, Renda announced at the hosting company's partner conference in early 2009 that Verio had rebuilt its entire sales and marketing practice around channel partners, with the express goal of taking the company as close as possible to 100 percent channel sales by the end of the year.
	Steve Kahan	The Planet's vice president of marketing, Kahan has led several unusual marketing projects this year, including a series of customer-showcasing video profiles, and the IT Effectiveness Index, a collaborative research project to evaluate IT processes at small businesses.
	Aaron Phillips	Now director of operations at cPanel, Phillips was instrumental in the quick rise to prominence of FastServers, building that company's brand through inventive pricing and products, eventually leading to its acquisition by Layered Tech.
	Sean Charnock	Founded in 2005, SoftLayer has grown in just a few years into one of the most high-profile and highly regarded companies in the hosting business, to a large extent through personal marketing strategies developed by Charnock.
	Write-in	limit 40 chars.

THE CUSTOMER SERVANT

Somebody who is introducing exciting/interesting ideas to the customer service side of hosting, or taking their company's customer service to a new level - this is meant to recognize someone involved in support strategy or planning more than someone answering phones.

	John Lionato	SVP of customer care at Rackspace. Obviously Rackspace has ownership of the idea of support in hosting. And of course, that is more a long-standing facet of the company's culture than it is the work of a given person. But Lionato is the person in whose hands this key facet of this company's brand lies.
	Jim Picone	VP of customer care at The Planet. Following the Planet/EV1 merger, the company really went full-bore into building a new organization. A big part of that was its sales/service organization. Picone put a lot of work into building a department that was improving customer retention, satisfaction and care along all kinds of metrics.
	Amarjyoti Krishnan	director and founder of BobCares, the outsourced customer service organization focused on the web hosting business. Krishnan is a departure from the other folks on this list, but the BobCares model of outsourced support, many of the company's customers would argue, has raised the bar for support across the hosting business by putting round the clock support within reach of even very small hosting providers.
	Lou Honick	While Honick is no longer CEO of HostMySite (now Hosting.com), after selling to its current owners last year, he remains a fine example of customer service having built a hosting company with a somewhat standard product into an industry leader through a real company-wide commitment to customer service.
	Write-in	limit 40 chars.

THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

Someone at a web hosting company who is driving green hosting ideas, either philosophically or through technology. Or someone at an organization that is driving green ideas industry-wide.

	Phil Nail	founder of AISO, a hosting company that is most interesting for its epitomizing green hosting, in every facet, including the sources of the power it uses (and produces), the details of its data center's design and - perhaps most importantly - its ethical approach to green hosting.
	Sharon Nunes	VP of technology at IBM. She heads up the "Project Big Green" work, which is interesting, partly in that IBM is really waving the "green IT" flag, but also in that the company is pursuing business opportunities in all kinds of environmentally significant technologies in areas like carbon and water management.
	S. Richard Fedrizzi	President & CEO of US Green Building Council. A group that has a scope that stretches well outside the hosting world, but has been active in developing standards around data centers, to the point that LEED certification is regularly held up by data center builders as the de facto standard for green building in IT.
	John Tuccillo	Chairman of the board, president at The Green Grid (and VP of global industry and legislative initiatives at APC). The Green Grid seems to be a really collaborative industry organization, but they're doing a lot of stuff specifically related to the hosting industry, and a lot of it is around creating standards that everyone can use.
	Con Zwinkels	managing director of LeaseWeb. Amsterdam-based web host LeaseWeb has made several eco-friendly upgrades to its EvoSwitch data center. LeaseWeb is also an active member of The Green Grid, and has been greatly involved in the recent Dutch Hosting Providers Association's drafting of green regulations for Dutch data centers.
	Write-in	limit 40 chars.

THE CLOUD INNOVATOR

Obviously there's a technology aspect to the cloud computing stuff. However, we want to recognize somebody who's working on this big-picture. Cloud as an architecture. But also cloud as a [hosting] business model. Cloud as a [hosting] product set. Let's look at some of the important companies.

	Lew Moorman	A longtime Rackspace executive and the company's CTO, Moorman became Rackspace's president of cloud computing just this year. Rackspace is an interesting position to define what a cloud computing product set looks for a provider that doesn't have the scale of a Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.
	Carl Eschenbach	Executive vice president of worldwide field operations at VMware. Obviously an organization with an incredibly influential role in how virtualization technology is applied to cloud computing, and how clouds are architected. Eschenbach is the guy who heads the channel programs at VMware, which would seem to include the development of the company's partner program, which has done a lot of work to focus its products for the hosting space in the last year or two.
	Andy Jassy	Senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, has been involved throughout the development of Amazon's cloud computing offering, a market-leading cloud computing product, and one of the projects that did much to define what a cloud computing business model would be. Parts of the AWS platform have been imitated by other providers, and it is almost always mentioned as a reference point when describing a cloud computing offering.
	Dave Wright	As Microsoft's industry director of SaaS ISVs for the communications sector, Wright is one of the people most responsible for communicating the company's intentions around Azure, the much-anticipated Microsoft cloud computing product - that it's not a competing product, or a reseller product per se, but another resource in a hosting provider's arsenal.
	Write-in	limit 40 chars.

DATA CENTER DESIGNER

I think it bears rewarding the person that is doing a lot for data center design, taking on and completing a particularly interesting/difficult project, or introducing important new ideas - as I mentioned before, this could probably cover the green category as well.

	Rob Roy	CEO and founder of Switch Communications is the formerly secretive force behind the SuperNAP in Las Vegas, a 407,000 square-foot facility promising 100 percent uptime through a tremendous investment in infrastructure and design.
	Jordan Jacobs	Director of operations for PhoenixNAP, an interesting project particularly because, according to Jacobs, they set out to build a facility that could provide top end, super-redundant colocation at a price within the means of smaller customers (including hosting providers).
	Olivier Sanche	The former eBay senior director of data center services and strategy was recruited last week by Apple to be its director of global data center operations. He's taking on a role that will have him involved in Apple's under-construction $1 billion data center in North Carolina, obviously a very significant facility, if just in terms of the investment, but probably in terms of how it will be employed.
	Michael Manos	Senior vice president of technical services at data center company Digital Realty Trust, Manos joined the company earlier this year after previously leading the design, construction and operation of data centers at Microsoft.
	Dean Nelson	founded the influential Data Center Pulse community. He very recently left Sun Microsystems to become eBay's senior director of global data center strategy, architecture and operations. He is also the co-author the Sun Blueprint, "Energy Efficient Datacenters: The Role of Modularity in Datacenter Design," and won Sun's 2008 Innovation Award.
	Write-in	limit 40 chars.

THE ADVOCATE

Somebody who does a lot to communicate the principles/interests/ideas of the hosting community to folks outside the industry, whether they be investors or policy makers, etc. The people in this role might include analysts or advocates of another kind.

	Dan Golding	Research director at Tier 1 research, Golding heads up the research organization with the sharpest focus on web hosting, particularly considering the fact that Tier 1 deals exclusively with the hosting business. Golding's understanding and ideas inform a lot of outsiders about the business.
	Melanie Posey	Research director for IDC's web hosting and telecom services vertical views programs, Posey has been representing the web hosting business to the investment community for longer than the WHIR has been in business, and has always been a reliable source of perspective on the hosting business.
	Mike Prettejohn	The founder of the venerable Internet research group Netcraft has been mining the web for data since 1994, and has been analyzing hosting providers as the source of that information all along. The company also provides an anti-phishing toolbar.
	Joshua Beil	Formerly VP of research and development at Tier 1 research, Biel led that company's mass market hosting research discipline. He has since joined hosting software company Parallels and is building a research practice within that company, as a service to Parallels customers and partners.
	James Staten	Analyst at Forrester Research. James advises IT infrastructure and operations professionals on the transformation of the server and data center into more efficient, business-focused ecosystems. He is an expert on cloud computing, IT infrastructure consolidation, data center futures, x86 servers, server infrastructures, and application-specific infrastructure solutions.
	Andy Schroepfer	For years the go-to analyst for the hosting business, Schroepfer founded the analyst Tier 1 Research, which he eventually sold to the 451 Group. He recently joined Rackspace as that company's VP of strategy.
	Write-in	limit 40 chars.

THE DEAL BROKER

Here we want to recognize the role that advisors play in the acquisitions of smaller hosting companies, either by larger hosting companies or by institutional investors. They often play a really critical role for the smaller sell-side clients, who usually really need the help.

	Hillary Stiff	Part, along with Frank Stiff, of the Cheval Capital Group, facilitating some of the largest M&A transactions in the hosting business, representing such companies like Nextel, NTT/Verio and Endurance International. Hillary is a regular presenter at hosting industry conferences.
	Eric Furlow	President of Furlow Consulting, M. Eric Furlow is a long time M&A consultant to the web hosting and related businesses. Regularly brokering deals for dozens of smaller hosts and ISPs.
	Paul Stapleton	Along with Dean Mann, is a managing director at DH Capital, dealing specifically with the hosting business, and has advised some of the biggest recent sellers in hosting, including HostMySite, and arranged financing for a broad range of companies.
	Bill Stewart	of Brampton Capital, is one of the more active M&A consultants in the hosting business, having recently advised UK2 Group in its acquisition of both WestHost and MidPhase, along with other companies in other transactions.
	Write-in	limit 40 chars.

THE EMPIRE BUILDER

We want to recognize somebody at a big hosting company who is driving consolidation in the hosting market through acquisitions. Most of these deals represent interesting shifts of assets in the business.

	Steve Sydness	CEO of Endurance International, which has been among the most active acquirers in the hosting space during the last few years. Among its noticeable acquisitions have been providers IPower and Fat Cow. Endurance is one of several hosting vehicles for institutional investors, having been partly acquired by ACCEL-KKR in 2008.
	Ditlev Bredahl	CEO of UK2, which has been extremely active in acquiring smaller hosting providers - WestHost, Virtual Internet and MidPhase being the most recent - and taking it a step further by launching its "webuywebhosts.com" site to cast the widest possible net.
	Colin Campbell	CEO of Hostopia. While technically working from a position of having been acquired, Hostopia appears to be more or less intact as a management team, and continue to exist as a platform for hosting services that is being expanded upon.
	Art Zeile	CEO of Hosting.com, the new post-acquisition brand of the former HostMySite. Backed by Wachovia, and formerly of Inflow (also backed by Wachovia). Zeile and his collaborators acquired Hosting.com (and adopted the brand), and are looking to keep going forward with more.
	Write-in	limit 40 chars.

THE SAAS STRATEGIST

Here we point to a leader at an organization helping to drive the adoption of the SaaS software model among software customers, but also to develop the model for how applications are distributed and sold (and hosted).

	John Zanni	Microsoft's general manager of the worldwide S+S industry. John's a pretty well known face/presence in the hosting business, and is directly involved in developing the "spark" programs, through which Microsoft is helping to connect software developers with hosting providers, and provide them with the tools to get their software off the ground.
	Serguei Beloussov	CEO of Parallels, which has built its whole business around the sort of ecosystem of the hosting business. The company has really done as much as anyone else at this point to create the sort of value chain that associates ISVs with hosting providers and to advocate software as a service business models.
	Mark Benioff	Founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, the company that makes the strongest argument for the effectiveness of the software as a service business model, and has become the standard-bearer for the principle, as well as one of the leading developers of the cloud platform, from which it operates its service and its Force.com development platform.
	Isaac Garcia	Founder and CEO of CentralDesktop, an extremely well-received collaboration platform, Garcia has been involved as a founder in three SaaS-type companies, and a committed adherent of that business model, dating back to 1996.
	Write-in	limit 40 chars.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA STAR

Hosts are appointing bloggers and twitterers along with the rest of the business world, but this industry is also home to some of the real early adopters of social media - particularly as a business practice. Here we recognize one of the folks who set the bar early for the use of social media in the hosting business.

	Robert Scoble	The celebrity blogger, formerly of Microsoft, PodTech and Fast Company, joined with Rackspace earlier this year to work on Building43, a social media site intended to foster collaboration between technology makers, businesses and entrepreneurs.
	Josh Jones	CEO of DreamHost, one of the first, and most effective, hosting providers to embrace the transparency and personal connection afforded by social media like blogging and Twitter. The company has had several public mishaps, but throughout, customers have appreciated the forthright approach.
	Scott Beale	Founder of the enigmatic Laughing Squid - email list, arts community and Web hosting company. His enthusiasm for Social Media, in particular his presence as a blogger and on Twitter makes him something of a pied piper of social networking, and puts him in a position to advise other companies.
	Write-in	limit 40 chars.