On Thursday we checked out the first day of Layered Technologies’ second annual partner event LT Pact 2007, held at the schwanky Caesar’s Palace in the city that never sleeps, Las Vegas, Nevada. Despite having heard some mixed reviews from organizers and attendees at HostingCon 2007 about holding an event in Vegas due to obvious distractions, the event today seemed to stay focused with a surprising attendance at all the sessions and a high-touch environment between the host and its customers.
The event kicked off with a brief presentation by Michael Platner, the CEO of Layered Technologies and Todd Abrams, the president and COO, laying down the groundwork for what people could expect throughout the event, some of the themes the speakers would touch upon and an invitation to check out some of the hands-on labs that were going on throughout the day in the next room.
Andy Schroefper from Tier 1 Research started off the show with his keynote titled, “Hosting Used to be an Iceberg. Now it’s a Volcano. (Are you ready to Erupt?)” He discussed how models like colocation, consumer hosting, application hosting, e-commerce hosting and enterprise hosting were changing or being replaced in the market and brought utility computing and its increasing demand to the forefront due to its unlimited scalability, especially in a world where every application now has a Software-as-a-Service alternative and Web 2.0 sites like MySpace and Facebook, which can grow large fast, are in a sense replacing what used to be shared hosting.
He ended off by saying that the big thing Web hosts should aim for is delivering availability. Take care of customers and have an infrastructure that is scalable with a click. Don’t build data centers, simply take advantage of what’s already out there. Blog and promote the creation of “how to” videos to help customers help their customers. And, create and launch a virtual hosting service, but only if you’ll relentlessly promote it.
Immediately after, Layered Technologies took the opportunity to announce their latest collaborative effort with 3Tera, the industry’s largest virtual private data center for Web applications. You can read more about it here.
Next Jessie Stricchiola from Alchemist Media discussed strategies on how to tap into the true powers of search engine optimization through organic and PPC tactics. She examined a cautious yet comprehensive approach to SEO and explored some tactics that would result in a better, more relevant Web site for both end users and search engines.
The first panel of the day was titled “Permission Based Messaging: DOs, DON’Ts and Everything in Between,” where Jared Reitzen and Greg Kraios from MobileStorm and Todd Abrams from Layered Tech, along with Dennis Dayman from StrongMail acting as moderator, discussed tactics on how to get better results from e-marketing campaigns. They discussed the latest best practices, technologies and issues from authentication and delivery to deep analytics reporting and how to optimize emails for higher deliverability rates.
Following that Michael Riolo from SWsoft took the stage to discuss something SWsoft has been pushing quite aggressively, as seen in its recent partner summit: Virtualization. Riolo discussed tips on how to use virtualization to deliver SaaS, various types of VPS plans and shared hosting services. One message he stressed, which was a theme that was repeated throughout the day was the idea that solution hosting was a concept that was undoubtedly growing and if hosting providers weren’t tapped into it yet, they should be.
Lunch provided the opportunity for a light-hearted break with some good food and a comedic magic performance by Spike and Hammer, apparently Vegas’ most requested comedy magic team.
After lunch, we heard Byron Garvey from HP discuss the diverse set of services HP caters towards and how businesses today could benefit from them.
HP was followed by another panel discussion led by John McCarrick from ModernBill titled, “Eliminating the Dark Side: Fraud Chargebacks, Abuse and More” where Jeremy Suo-Anttila from Layered Technologies, Ryan Jochim from PayPal and Web hosting legal expert David Snead debated how hosting providers could set up their defenses against fraud, which countries they should avoid transactions from (specifically those subject to US Embargo) and a heated debate about how hosting providers should deal with the FBI while unknowingly hosting elicit content, in this case child pornography, on their servers.
Michael Scherotter from Microsoft followed that up with his presentation on Expression Design, Expression Blend and MS’s new cross-platform toolset for rich Internet applications, Silverlight and how businesses could use these tools to enhance their Web development workflow, streamlining the handoff of information between information architects, graphic designers, interaction designers and Web developers.
Final presentation of the day was a panel titled, “SaaS and Your Profit Future,” where Jeff Hagins from Mural Ventures along with Ravi Agarual from groupSPARK, Chris Samson from Microsoft, Siamak Farah from Infostreet, Mark Spilotro from iKnowWare.com and William Toll from Intermedia.net (also a fellow WHIR blogger) discussed an overview of the SaaS environment today and helped attendees understand the infrastructure required to deliver a SaaS solution and its importance in positioning their companies for success.
LT Pact 2007 continues on Friday and wraps up with a dinner gala and in true Vegas fashion, a Texas Hold’em Poker Tournament.
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