I had no idea what I was getting myself into the first time I met Lance Crosby. It was a late winter afternoon, quite some time ago. I walked into a job interview, happy-go-lucky, for a sales position at a web hosting company. I thought, “I would love a sales job!” (or any real job for that matter). We sat and had a normal interview, and everything seemed to be going very well. I was unusually relaxed which was far cry from my normal interviewing skills. Relaxed, that is until it was time for the datacenter tour.

We walked through the dark NOC, past the twenty five to thirty television screens showing everything from The Weather Channel, to CNN, also displaying what appeared to be a bunch of meaningless graphs and digits. As we ventured into the badge-access-only datacenter, my head started to spin. I was shown diesel generators, rows of UPS’, HVAC units, switches, routers, and more servers than I had ever seen in my life (I had seen zero). I remember “playing it cool” and acting like it made some sense to me. I am sure this was very entertaining for Lance.

I was offered the job and that is when the terror set in. I began to realize this was much more than a sales job. I was going to be selling servers, at the same time wondering “what the heck IS a server?” Over the course of the following months I was able to learn about the internal components of a server and all they entail – RAM (makes/models), different HDDs (makes/models/sizes/speeds), port speeds, bandwidth usage, operating systems, control panels, backup solutions, etc. Over the phone, chat, and via email I met with and became familiar with our extremely broad customer base, the different businesses they ran, and their likes and dislikes. I dealt with the good, the bad, and the ugly situations. I even learned to take care of issues myself without badgering Steven to death. I finally knew what I was talking about! Now I absolutely love what I do and cannot imagine being in any other field. This is not to mention the wonderful opportunity of working at a young, successful, and innovative company. Not many server sales representatives have the honor of this experience.

I think this story probably sounds familiar to the majority of the sales team. The web hosting industry is an amazing one. When presented with all of the details and information that are vital in selling servers and keeping customers happy, it can be down right scary. However, once you open yourself up to the information that is being handed to you, it all falls into place. It is especially challenging to take in everything you need to know as a SoftLayer sales representative. We are required to be as technical as we possibly can so that there is as little correspondence with our Support technicians as possible during the initial sales process. It is an ever-changing industry, and we do need to be on our toes. Lance likes to kid and say that I did not even know what a computer was when I first started out. While that might not be entirely true, it is not very far fetched. I would like to think that we have all come a long way.

Yes, Mike Jones is my real name.

I am the least liked guy in the whole company. I am the one who has to say no. No to the fully enclosed domed cubicles with sliding doors and skylights. No to the quad processor quad core desktop PCs. No to 6 flat screen 30 inch monitors for each developer (3 is plenty). No to the recumbent Herman Miller massage desk chairs. No to the offices large enough to fly more than 3 RC toys at any one time. No to the “must haves” outside the budget. In short, I am the evil CFO. Some have even called me Iron Fist.

In spite of my constant no’s, we have built an amazing culture of innovation by saying “yes”, a lot more often than saying “no” over the last two years.
Here are some of the things we’ve said yes to:

• Yes to 10 of us starting the company when no one believed we had a prayer of surviving.
• Yes to outside investment.
• Yes to going ahead with the idea of a private network.
• Yes to building out data center space not knowing when or if we would ever see that first customer.
• Yes to not taking salary the first year to get the business started.
• Yes to investing in programmers to build a portal that gives customers what they want.
• Yes to spending extra money on infrastructure to allow us to build server farms on a scale never seen before.
• Yes to the API project.
• Yes to giving our developers time to be creative and come up with new ideas.
• Yes to Muenster Fest!! (Lavosby or Samf can explain in a future blog)

In the future, I hope to be able to share more with you from a financial standpoint about how we make this business work.

The Real Mike Jones (CFO, SoftLayer)

p.s. To put the rumors to rest, this is not me. In fact, none of these are either.

I’m a developer here at SoftLayer, and also the resident Photographer (we wear many hats).

We made an official announcement a few months ago regarding our new high density datacenter. It’s pretty rad, but you don’t have to take my word for it — Here’s the proof. Enjoy!

Since this is my first blog post, I thought I would take the time to introduce myself and explain my role here at SoftLayer. That way, if you wind up reading any future posts, your first question won’t be “who is this guy and why do I care?”

Like many of you, I’ve been in this business for quite some time. My first job in the industry was back in 1992 when I was working with the CIS department at Texas A&M helping to manage the university Gopher system. I remember going around campus to the various departments helping to convince people that putting information online in Gopher was the end-all/be-all for sharing information. Of course, that evangelizing didn’t last long. Shortly after going to GopherCon ‘94 in Minnesota, our attention started to shift to the Mosaic browser and HTTP protocol. From there, things just steamrolled.

After A&M, I went to work for Oracle Corp where we started work on an online learning website. The goal was to take all Oracle related CBT courses and find ways to put them online under one site. This was before such things were designed for the web and it meant working with the various vendors and all the different CBT formats to find ways to get them online.

Next was an ISP / shared hosting company named Catalog.com (now known as Webhero.com). We provided all the typical Internet services including dial up access, DSL, shared hosting, domain name registration, online storefronts as well as hosting for some extremely large enterprise organizations. We did a lot with that company and it still continues on today with a pretty solid product offering and services.

From there, it was into the enterprise datacenter hosting and dedicated server hosting markets. Now it’s all about SoftLayer and the services we can provide customers with our latest and greatest infrastructure.

As COO at SoftLayer, I am basically in charge of day to day operations including support, facilities management, internal systems infrastructure and anything else that gets dreamed up on a daily basis. What’s the funnest part of my job? Every bit of it! I love the daily challenges in the support group. Facilities planning and forecasting allow me to really dig into the numbers. And, since I originally started out as a developer and system administrator, I love being involved with internal systems. Now at this point, I’ve got to be honest; we’ve got some really good people here at SoftLayer that do all of the dirty work (the actual fun stuff), but I do get to stay involved in all of it. However, because these guys are so good at what they do, I don’t have to lose sleep over any one particular thing – instead, I get to stay involved in every piece of it. Maybe in future posts I’ll explain how we determine the number of chassis fans that go inside each server (over 35,000 chassis fans in production so far) or how many different types of SAS and SATA cables we need with how many different types of connectors (so many of differing types that it eventually became cheaper and more efficient to just have them custom made), where to put all of these servers, etc.

I guess the point of all that was to introduce myself and to let you know - having been in the industry for so long now and having dealt with everything from Gopher to dial up access to enterprise hosting to being in the dedicated server market now for quite a while, I feel I have a pretty decent understanding of what our customers are looking for and what their pain points are. While overall operations are critical for everyone, enterprise customers running CRM apps, file servers and domain controllers view things from a different standpoint than someone running a personal mail server or even a large shared hosting or VPS business. As I read through tickets on a daily basis, I try to put myself back in the customers’ shoes to make sure that the services we provide cover the needs of all the different types of customers we have. Having been a customer or provider at pretty much every level, I certainly understand the challenges many of you face on a regular basis. It’s our job to help you overcome as many of those as possible.

We have a lot of really cool things going on at SoftLayer and I hope to share some of those in future posts. In my next post, I’ll tell you all about Truck Day at SoftLayer.