"RFP 2.0" from WordPress Gets Responses from Amazon and Sun; What About LayeredTech?

Matt Mullenweg from WordPress caused quite a stir last week when he vented on his blog about his frustrating experience with Sun's Startup Essentials Program. He wrapped up the post by saying he's "far more excited about what Amazon is doing these days."

Within 23 minutes, Amazon evangelist Jeff Barr - who was recovering from surgery - commented on Matt's blog that he would love to talk. And about a day later, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz posted an apology on his blog:

"All I can say is... I'm really sorry, Matt. That's not the way Startup Essentials is supposed to work. We screwed up, and you're completely right to suggest if that's the norm, we should kiss goodbye our aspirations of reestablishing our business in the startup community. If there's anything I can do to win a second chance, I'd like to know."

I totally agree with Red Monk analyst James Governor's assessment of the situation: "the sales battle for contracts, from major to minor, is increasingly being fought out in the blogosphere. If you don't play then you may miss out on a pay day... Go read Matt's blog again. As an RFP." (RFP = request for proposal.)

Now that Amazon and Sun have responded to Matt's RFP, another company that I wish Matt had heard from is LayeredTech. Back in November, Matt mentioned that WordPress has 50+ servers at Layered. Considering (a) the existing relationship, (b) Matt's interest in Amazon's S3 and EC2 services, and (c) Layered's new on-demand, pay-as-you-grow computing service, I'm disappointed that Todd from Layered hasn't joined in the conversation. Especially since both Matt and Stephen O'Grady, James' Red Monk colleague, are both getting interested in Media Temple's GRID platform

Speaking of which, Media Temple's recent blog post really helped spread the world. Along with Matt and Stephen and dozens of others, Scott Yang over at HostingFu is talking about it too. Unfortunately, Media Temple hasn't followed up on these threads either - at least not publicly.

I know that every web hosting CEO is overwhelmingly busy - but I'm sure Jonathan Schwartz' to do list isn't any shorter than yours?? PLEASE... do a Google Blogsearch for your company - then subscribe to the RSS feed for new search results, and keep on top of these discussions. Publicly.

The last company I'm going to pick on in this post is ServerBeach. Kevin Burton wrote last November that "while I like Serverbeach they need to get their act together fast or I might just switch to EC2." I've forwarded this post to at least 3 different people at Peer 1, but the only public response Kevin's gotten has been from... Jeff Barr over at Amazon.