by WHIR TV - Wednesday, July 28, 2010

May 20, 2010 – the big homecoming party.

Our 2010 Toronto networking event was a very significant one for the WHIR, partly because the city is home base for the Web Host Industry Review (and also for OpenSRS, the title sponsor of all our 2010 Networking Events), but because it doubled as a 10th anniversary party for the Web Host Industry Review.

It was also, thankfully, the first really great day weather-wise of 2010 in Toronto.

Our WHIR tv video clip from the event captures some of the action from C Lounge, where WHIR editor Liam Eagle caught up with representatives from our sponsors, including David Gallo of SevenL Networks, Michael Goldstein of OpenSRS, John Kane of Afilias and Roosbeh Hashemiha of Ravand Cybertech.

The event was great fun, with free food and drinks flowing until late in the evening. Also, there was cake. As always, it was made possible by the generous support of our sponsors, which included the companies mentioned above, as well as regular WHIR event sponsors Attracta and R1Soft.

Photos from our 2010 Toronto WHIR Networking Event are available on the event’s page (click the thumbnails), or by visiting the WHIR’s photo set on Flickr.

More info on WHIR events is available on the WHIR Events section of the website from which you can also RSVP to upcoming events.

by WHIR TV - Wednesday, July 28, 2010

On Thursday, April 22, 2010, the WHIR took its Networking events to Chicago again, this time to the stylish lounge Martini Park, for an evening of good times and great networking opportunities (not to mention excitement – the Blackhawks beat the Predators that particular evening, on their way to the Cup).

Our WHIR tv video clip from the event includes some very cool footage of the party, as well as WHIR editor Liam Eagle interviewing representatives from each of the event’s sponsors, including Shauna Kolodkin of Continuum Data Centers, Solomon Amoako of OpenSRS, Dan Marfione of Trustwave, Mark Mercado of Latisys and Troy McCasland of Attracta.

The event was a blast. Of course there was free food and drinks throughout and things kept going until late in the evening. As always, the event was made possible by the generous support of our sponsors, all the companies mentioned above.

Photos from the 2010 Chicago WHIR Networking Event are available on the event’s page (click the thumbnails), or by visiting the WHIR’s photo set on Flickr.

More info on WHIR events is available on the WHIR Events section of the website from which you can also RSVP to upcoming events.

by WHIR TV - Wednesday, July 28, 2010

On Thursday, March 25, the WHIR took its WHIR Networking Events back to New York City – back, in fact, to The Park, where we hosted our event in 2009 – for an evening of great fun and good business networking opportunities.

Our WHIR tv video clip from the event includes some fun footage of the party, as well as WHIR editor Liam Eagle interviewing representatives from each of the event’s sponsors, including Troy McCasland from Attracta, Phillip Koblence from New York Internet, John Monnett from Secure128, Dan Marfione from Trustwave and Dave Woroch from OpenSRS.

The event was a great time – free food and drinks kept the group happy and the party hopping until late. Of course, the event wouldn’t have been possible without the generous support of our sponsors, which included the companies mentioned above, as well as R1soft, which unfortunately could not have someone in attendance (which is why they don’t appear in the interviews).

Photos from our 2010 New York WHIR event are available on the event’s page (click the thumbnails), or by visiting the WHIR’s photoset on Flickr.

More info on WHIR events is available on the WHIR Events section of the website from which you can also RSVP to upcoming events.

by pjhile - Wednesday, July 28, 2010

July 28, 2010 — On March 25, 2010, the WHIR’s series of networking events arrived in New York city for an excellent evening at nightclub The Park.

by pjhile - Tuesday, July 27, 2010

July 28, 2010 — On April 22, the WHIR’s networking events series stopped in at Chicago’s Martini Park for an evening of networking and fun.

by Liam Eagle - Monday, July 26, 2010

Anybody who attended HostingCon last week probably had – or heard – at least a couple of conversations about the big rumor that was making the rounds.

I heard the same thing from a half-dozen knowledgeable people (but nothing like an official source): that GI Partners is buying SoftLayer; that the deal is more or less complete; and that it’s worth more than $300 million.

While any or all of that may be true, nothing has been officially stated. And, given that it lacks any official confirmation, this post certainly shouldn’t be taken as a “news story,” per se. It’s just an acknowledgement that folks are talking, as evidenced by a lengthy (14 pages, as of Monday) discussion on WebHosting Talk.

A WebHosting Talk thread isn’t news either. But it includes some interesting input, including comments from UK2Group CEO Ditlev Bredahl, whose 100TB.com brand is a major customer at SoftLayer, and who expresses a lot of confidence that whatever is in the works will not be disruptive to that business.

 A few things are patently true:

- GI Partners has a ton of capital under management, and a definite interest in the hosting business. It owns The Planet, and a controlling interest in Telx (though that company is set to go public sometime this year).

- SoftLayer has quickly become one of the largest competitors of The Planet, and has a reputation for being one of the better-run companies in the hosting business. Many of the key members of the SoftLayer executive team left The Planet before that company was acquired by GI partners.

- Softlayer announced on Friday that it earned $60 million from January 1 through June 30 of this year, and is on track to earn $125 million in 2010. The same release says the company is now hosting 30,000 servers.

- GI Partners merged EV1 Servers and The Planet after acquiring those two companies in 2006.

Assuming, for the sake of discussion, that the rough details of the rumor are true, there are a few obvious questions raised by the prospect.

- Would the objective of the acquisition be to merge the two companies, or continue to operate them separately?

- Were they to merge, how would that affect the range offerings available from either company? Who would run the merged organization? What would it be called?

- Would GI have a long-term plan for the organization as a property, or would there be any immediate focus on taking the combined property public?

Should an official announcement arrive, rest assured that we’ll have plenty of coverage.

by William Toll - Friday, July 23, 2010

I was fortunate to have been invited to present information to the hosting community at HostingCon 2010.  The organizers suggested a panel and I was extremely lucky to have gathered the world’s leading SaaS experts and a successful SaaS company to the panel.. Joining NaviSite  was:

Alex Davis - WorkPlace Systems Trina Horner – Microsoft Jeffrey Kaplan – THINKstrategies Lincoln Murphy - Sixteen Ventures Justin Pirie – Mimecast Anders Trolle-Schultz - SaaS-it Consult

My goal with the panel was to highlight the opportunities for hosters to grow their business and capabilities by focusing on ISVs.  NaviSite has a significant number of ISVs who trust us to host their applications and data for their customers.  NaviSite offers both managed cloud services and managed dedicated hosting services. ISVs appreciate the multiple data centers, dedication to reliability and our deep experience in managing applications as a service.

In my discussions over the years many people have said “oh but Salesforce.com has the market locked up” and “the market is dominated by large players in each horizontal and vertical segment”.  These statements are simply not true.   There are thousands of ISVs that have not deployed their application or offered their application as a service.  In fact, only now are ISVs and their customers moving in greater numbers to deploy in a hosting provider’s data center.  The majority of applications in use today are still installed on-premise.

This is where the opportunity lies.  Several of the panelists above have significant knowledge and expertise that they offer to ISVs who are moving to SaaS.  Whether it is business, pricing or contractual model changes or application and data architectural changes – these consultants and several hosting companies, like NaviSite, can assist ISVs with their SaaS enablement needs.

The panelists relayed some great information about how ISVs see hosters and what hosters can do to make their offerings and services more attractive to ISVs.  The CTO of an ISV on the panel, WorkPlace Systems, a workforce management SaaS application, stated “we looked for a hosting provider that could help us close the deal and pass any due diligence tests that our prospects may have from their boardroom.” [Full Disclosure – WorkPlace Systems is a NaviSite customer]

As expected the topic of single and multi-tenant applications was brought up by the panel.  While many have their opinions on the “true SaaS” definition, ie. multi-tenant only, others have a more fluid definition.  I personally believe that the ISVs know what is best for their business, their customer requirements and I have spoken to many ISVs that have a timeline and fluid approach on the path to SaaS and multi-tenancy.

In the end – the panel all agreed that the opportunity is great and that while we might be at the height of the cloud hype cycle – we are still a long-way from having the majority of applications and workloads being deployed and marketed in a SaaS model.

by David Snead - Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Generally what I hear from clients is that the cloud isn’t that much different than their current offerings, so why should they revise their contracts?  Markus Latzel of Palomino System, Christopher Garcia of Dell and I discussed this issue yesterday at HostingCon  While the cloud, from a legal perspective, is an evolution, rather than a revolution, there are some significant issues that you should think about.

Christopher started out with a deep discussion about how pre-planning your contract drafting and/or negotiation is critical in ensuring that your contracts in this evolving technology adequately protect you.  In particular, hosts should spend some time discussing the delivery model with their customers.  Important areas that should be covered include:  SLA’s, whether an audit should be conducted, Security, and whether there is a special data requirement, like regulation.  There was significant discussion about how companies can comply with regulations like HIPAA / HITECH and Sarbanes Oxley, even if they don’t have expertise in these areas.  Creating contracts that effectively segregate responsibility for these, goes a long way to dealing with risk in a cloud contract.  Because of the nature of the cloud, complying with these regulations will be more difficult, and risky for hosts.

You can more easily isolate risks in the cloud by defining your requirements ahead of time.  You should specifically look at:

Operational concerns

A need for a secure revenue stream

Liability issues

Privacy

Security

Once you’ve agreed on a delivery model, you need to figure out the type of agreement you’ll use.  In general, most hosts are better served with a “standard” agreement.  Christopher pointed out that because the cloud is different from, say managed hosting, you can’t simply use a purchase order, or a service order that is attached to a master agreement that you drafted, or entered into with your customer 5 years ago.

Markus Latzel focused on intellectual property as a key difference in a cloud contract.  As an initial matter, hosts need to understand what intellectual property is, and how it will be shared in the cloud.  Will your ip be shared with your vendors through a new type of cloud platform?  How will you protect your customer’s intellectual property and given your place in the cloud “stack” how will you isolate risk in that stack.  Most importantly, how will you address IP issues ad have a happy contract “marriage.”

The panel then segwayed into specific contract provisions that may be critical to success in the cloud.  We all felt that hosts need to focus on their SLA, disposition of data on termination, security and privacy, and choice of law.  The key issue in a cloud SLA is for reliability to be demonstrated by metrics and objective criteria.  Because the cloud is not as standardized as other types of hosting, there is great opportunity for hosts and their customers to define terms in ways that are important to them, as opposed to the 100% uptime that is standard in the hosting industry.

I emphasized disposition of data upon termination.  Because of the distributed nature of the cloud, the contract needs to specifically state how data will be returned or destroyed throughout the entire cloud structure, and not simply with the directly contracted parties.  Because most legal protections in the contract will terminate or expire on the termination of the contract, it’s important to consider this when drafting the contract.

We closed with a toolkit.  Here are the “take aways” from the presentation:

What’s part of the agreement?

Where does the data go?

Does “one size fits all” work?

How reliable is the service?

When and how can the solution provider get its IP back?

How safe is the IP?

Did you handle breach of security?

Disaster recovery

Jurisdiction

What has the vendors performance been?

Terminate cleanly.

by David Snead - Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The first of two legal panels on the cloud was early this morning.  Jeff Gordon of Andrews Kurth and Jeff Cohen of Cohen and Richardson spoke about how to minimize litigation in your cloud environment.  There were some very interesting points in this presentation.

The first, that I repeat always and often is “anyone can sue anyone else at anytime for anything.”  It’s simply a fact of life that even if you don’t do something wrong, or think you haven’t, someone can file suit against you.  The best way to deal with this issue is the old Boy Scout mantra:  be prepared.  So from a litigation perspective in the cloud, what is prepared?

Using the definition of cloud computing from Wikipedia, Jeff Gordon pointed out that many judges may not have the level of technical sophistication that you have.  As a result, there is a great need that you set out in your contract what cloud computing means to you and the parties you’re contracting with.  Jeff Cohen pointed out that many judges don’t have more computing expertise than having a pc on their desktop.

So what cloud computing laws exist?  None.  With the fact that there are no specific cloud laws, how do you approach litigation risks?  You should start with your Service Level Agreement, and actually read it.  The first thing you  should look at is availability.  Not just uptime, but also when will support be available.  You should also consider the impact that areas covered by the SLA will have on your business:  so will a day credit for downtime make up for the business you’ve lost for that downtime?

Jeff Gordon then segwayed into Jurisdiction.  Jurisdiction is the ability of a court to hear a case.  The sharing and movement of data within the cloud may lead to some expensive litigation to determine how jurisdiction should be handled in cloud litigation.  This may be complicated by the fact that copies of the data are stored in different jurisdictions simply based on the way that the cloud works.  You should insert a forum selection clause.  This gives you control over where the dispute will be heard and eliminates a lot of uncertainty that you’ll be dragged into a court in another state or even foreign jurisdiction.  The key however is to make sure that you actually understand the laws in the state you’ve chosen.  So, for example, is the law of Texas more favorable to you than the law in California?

Data Security and Breach.  You should adopt your worst case scenario attitude.  Does your liability to customers extend to customers of your customers?  Specifically, set out the standard of care.  Your contract should not contain words like “reasonable.”  A court or a jury will look to other things like pre-contract negotiations to determine what reasonable is.  So, do you want your sales person’s pre-contract emails used to determine what reasonable is?

So how can you modify your contracts to deal with the litigation risks raised in this panel, Marcus Latzel of Palomino System, Christopher Garcia of Dell, and I will be presenting a cloud contract panel at HostingCon at 3 pm today in room 18 a-b.  This panel will be a deep dive into contract negotiation strategy and specific terms and conditions that should be in your contract.

by David Snead - Tuesday, July 20, 2010

As with prior years, this year’s metrics panel ended up having a theme.  While the broad focus was on how metrics help add value to your business, two major themes came up:  how metrics demonstrate customer service; and how to use metrics to develop concrete plans to change your business.

On customer service, the panelists uniformly agreed that customer service could be measured, analyzed and distilled to actionable items that would add value to your business.  Two of the panelists, Hari Ravichandran from Endurance, and Bill Boebelfrom Rackspace, disclosed their net promoter scores (the thirties and forties).  These scores are used across many industries and are a great way of getting concrete metrics that can be used companywide to create action.

The Planet has an interesting approach to getting out of the hosting box and finding novel ways to improve the customer experience:  look outside the industry.  The Planet looked to Ritz Carlton and its laser like focus on customer satisfaction to find customer service solutions that affected all aspects of its business from HR on through technical support.  A plan like this avoids constantly focusing on tech support as the barometer of customer satisfaction.  Readers of theWhir will know that this recommendation resonates with me.  My recommendation in this month’s “one more thing” is that hosting companies look outside the industry for ways to change their business.

Zak Boca of SingleHop revealed that he was a recent convert to using metrics in his business.  Since SingleHop is smaller than the Planet or Rackspace, they focus on five metrics to guide their business.  These metrics are posted companywide, allowing all employees to measure the company’s progress and performance.  This avoids the information overload that faces many companies using metrics.

This final point was echoed by Jay Sinder of Corelink who emphasized the fact that if you can’t measure it, you can’t take action on the issue and implement a solution.  Many of the panelists echoed this.  Metrics that are not fully understood, or well implemented, don’t return information that can be translated into action points.  The panelists all agreed that using metrics to transform your business is one of the fastest ways to increase its value.

by WHIR Happenings - Monday, July 19, 2010

I’ve been posting a few photos from HostingCon on the WHIR’s Flickr feed up to this point. I spent a little time this afternoon in the exhibit hall, which of course is not yet open.

I thought I’d just put up a note to let everyone know that there are some setup shots from some of the booths up on Flickr.

It seems like there are a few well-known companies that might be first-time exhibitors at HostingCon, such as Equinix, Dell and Digital Realty Trust. I could be wrong about whether they’ve had booths before.

Also interesting was the scope of the exhibits. There seems to be a lot of energy going in to some of these booths – so much so that the word “booth” really doesn’t apply in a lot of cases.

by Stacy Griggs - Monday, July 19, 2010

One of the significant changes in this year’s HostingCon is the number of  parties each night.  Since there doesn’t seem to be a comprehensive list, I wanted to post the ones I know about.  If you are hosting or attending a party you would like others to know about (that is not listed below) please post the details in the comments section of this blog post.  Let the good times roll!

Monday

5 – 7PM – Opening Night Networking Reception – 4th Floor Foyer

7 – 9PM – OpenStack Party with Rack Space @ Max’s Wine Dive.

8 – ? – Trustwave Party @ Six Lounge

Tuesday

4 – 6:30PM – HostingCon Exhibit Hall Happy Hour

7 – 9PM – R1Soft Party @ The Iron Cactus

8 – ?  cPanel Party @ Pure Ultra Lounge

Wednesday

6 – 9PM – HostingCon Closing Reception – Four Seasons Ballroom

Some of these parties require preregistration, so be sure to check with the host.  I know there are a number of parties missing , but figured I would get the conversation started.