After reading this recent SoftLayer press release, I emailed VP Marketing Steve Canale to give him a hard time. I looked everywhere on SoftLayer’s website, but I saw no signs of the grid computing solutions or Web 2.0 customers in his announcement. What’s he talking about??
Jon Price agrees that it sounds like a mix of buzzwords. He thinks we’ll be seeing lots of press releases with “utility” and “grid”, while Web 2.0, Ruby and SaaS may no longer be attention-getters given their over-use.
But we hadn’t gotten the full story. SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby explained that put in very simple terms, grid computing involves connecting multiple commodity machines via a private backbone. (As a point of reference, 3tera elaborates on the hardware config behind its grids here.)
SoftLayer is unique in its ability to bring grid computing to its customers – instead of bringing customers to a grid: 100% of its servers are already on a gigabit private network (“the SoftLayer”)! So while Lance doesn’t *yet* offer grid hosting, he’s been building the foundation for this upcoming service for months. Even now, Lance said:
Payment processors have dropped gateways into the SoftLayer for customer use. Customers have nailed connections VPN to VPN to the SoftLayer and run their office domain controllers and file servers offsite. Most recently an equipment rental company retooled their infrastructure to include a server for each franchise and all connect over VPN to the SoftLayer (i.e. no public facing servers).
Wow – this is cool stuff! Except none of these examples appear on SoftLayer.com.
This is a bigger problem than you know. I’ve just read on ZDNet writer Russell Shaw’s blog that he thinks the eBay+Skype combination is a bust:
“Case histories are an extremely useful tool. They describe problems, challenges or opportunities customers were facing, then include real-world insights on why implementing the service/product was a good idea. But I can’t find any! Listen, seriously. If I am an eBay seller, don’t you think I would want useful, empirical, actionable information to help me decide whether I should use Skype and how that would help me?”
Russell concludes that maybe this info doesn’t exist because eBay doesn’t have any success stories of Skype use among auction owners. Yikes. Might your customers be thinking the same thing when they visit your site?
Earlier Len Padilla from NTT Europe Online and I talked about the state of web host marketing. He agrees that “you’d think by now we’d have reached the point of technical excellence being a commodity; it’s only the starting point for enabling customer success.”
Lance says he is on board as well. 2007 will be Year of the Customer at SoftLayer. And it’d better be yours, too! Given Lance’s grid-ready infrastructure, he’s already a step ahead. You wouldn’t want him to gain a marketing advantage as well, would you??
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