What a great idea to have the readers of the WHIR pick a Web Hosting Dream Team – http://www.thewhir.com/Poll/vote . I wanted to share with you my ballot and the process I used to make the decisions. Additionally, I added a couple of categories the WHIR missed. Should make for an interesting read…
The Marketer – This was a hard one, Aaron Phillips is a friend who has done great things in his career especially at Fast Servers. Bob Parson is a born marketer, who has wisely surrounded himself with supermodels. Ultimately my vote went to Sean Charnock, SoftLayer’s results are incredible and Sean deserves a lot of credit. If Sean surrounded himself with supermodels, I would have added him as a write-in candidate for every other category on this list.
The Customer Servant – Lou Honick end of story, he is my friend and mentor (I’m not impartial). I have seen him work 80 hours a week to make sure customers are happy. Lou would wake up in the middle of the night to call support to make sure they answered in 3 rings or less.
The Environmentalist – This was a tough category for me, I don’t know the players and most of them were not from mainstream hosting companies. Based purely on their bio’s I picked John Tuccillo from Green Grid. It says something bad about our industry that not one person from a mainstream US host (IBM isn’t primarily a hosting company) is nominated in this category.
The Cloud Innovator – This was a tight race between Andy, Carl and Lew. Ultimately I picked Andy Jassy as I think Amazon has been more innovative in this space then Rackspace. I docked Carl some points because they were late to develop a good partnership methodology with hosting companies (SPLA).
Data Center Designer – In another tight race my vote went to Rob Roy, 34 data centers plus he shares a name with Scottish folk hero and a tasty cocktail.
The Advocate – This boiled down to Andy and Dan, with Dan Golding ultimately getting my vote.
The Deal Broker – Paul Stapleton edged out Hillary Stiff base on my friendship with Dean Mann, I have spent a lot of time with Dean over the last couple of years.
The Empire Builder – My vote went to Art Zeile, this is his second act, building Inflow from two guys in a basement to one of the largest colocation companies of it time and now building Hosting.com into a national platform.
The SaaS Strategist – John Zanni over Marc Beinoff based on John’s involvement with the hosting industry and that fact that he looking to add SaaS to an entire portfolio of MS products vs. just one primary product at SalesForce.
Social Media Star –Robert Scobel’s 96,000 Twitter followers dwarf, Scott Beale’s 45,000 so Scobleizer over the Squid.
Now for my other categories, I took the liberty of selecting the winners along with the categories…
The Lawyer – David Snead, I am not sure there are any other lawyers in hosting; David seems to have litigated the others into submission. Smart, reasonable and imminently knowledgeable of all things hosting, David is the go to attorney for our industry.
The Product Manager – William Toll from NaviSite, William’s best work was turning Intermedia from a Coldfusion hosting company into one of the largest sellers of Hosted Exchange. He has been up to his old tricks since his arrival at Navisite.
The CTO – Dominic Foster from MaximumASP (Full disclosure – I work at MaximumASP and I have never claimed to be impartial). Dominic, and his team, invented a cloud platform based on HyperV for which Maximum was named the Microsoft Hosting Partner of the Year and a PCI certified shared plan both in the last twelve months. Most hosting companies struggle to launch one major product a year, two homeruns in a year deserve to be on this list. Additionally with a blue mohawk and an encyclopedic knowledge of beer – he is defiantly the kind of person you want on any team, particularly a dream team.
About Stacy Griggs
Stacy Griggs is Sr. Director of Customer Experience for Cbeyond Cloud Services , previously Stacy was the Vice President of Sales for MaximumASP which was acquired by Cbeyond in 2011. Cbeyond (NASD-CBEY) is a publicly traded provider of telecommunication and cloud services, which has been recognized by Microsoft at its 2009 Worldwide Hosting Partner of the Year and 2010 Hyper-V Cloud Provider of the Year. Prior to Cbeyond Stacy held a series of positions at Hosting.com including Chief Sales Officer, Chief Service Officer and General Manager for their flagship Delaware data center.
Stacy has led several information technology services companies over the last 15 years. He was a Managing Director for KForce a $1 Billion publicly traded professional services firm. At KForce Stacy managed 5 business units that collectively generated $18 Million in revenue and had 140 employees. Prior to KForce Stacy was a Vice President and part-owner of Diamond Technologies, an 80 employee custom software development firm. Previously Stacy held management positions at TMP Worldwide, the University of Pennsylvania, and Humana.
Through his theWHIR blog, Stacy will touch upon sales and service in the Web hosting space, web hosting events, cloud computing and industry trends.
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