Tag: Rackspace (Page 4 of 7)

Rackspace Hosting Expands in Austin

December 3, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Rackspace’s New Offices

Cloud computing company Rackspace Hosting Inc. has a new home in Austin.
The company moved into an 87,000 square foot location next to I-35 in north Austin in October. The offices can accommodate more than 500 employees. The web hosting company currently has 400 people – adding around 100 employees per year for the last two years. Rackspace wants to hire 50 more employees this year.
Rackspace, founded in 1998 in San Antonio, has more than 3,000 employees in San Antonio at its headquarters in the former Windsor Park Mall on Walzem Road. The company also has an office in San Francisco. Rackspace reported revenue of $1.24 billion last year and net income of more than $100 million. The company has a market cap of more than $9 billion.
Rackspace attributes the steady growth over the last few years to its service-oriented business model of web hosting.

Bill Blackstone, Austin Community Outreach Leader for Rackspace

“When you call you get a human, not an IVR,” says Rackspace Community Affairs Leader Bill Blackstone. “You get routed to your team that you know by name… literally in five rings.”
According to Blackstone, the support teams are fully authorized to make important decisions and resolve a customer’s issue without having to check with a supervisor or another department. They are also available at any hour. It all fits into Rackspace’s often touted motto of providing “fanatical support”.
But the support aspect is only one of the four pillars of service to which Rackspace attributes its success. The other three: The security found in physical dedicated servers, the scalability found in virtual servers, and the ability to combine physical and virtual servers to fit a client’s need.
“The combination of those is something that doesn’t exist elsewhere,” says Blackstone.
Rackspace also has an advantage in being the co-founder of the new standard-setting cloud computing platform called OpenStack. Developed in partnership with NASA, Rackspace helped set the standards for OpenStack that are now used industry-wide. The new technology is open-source and available for anyone to use. As a result, over 850 organizations are currently working to further improve the technology. While this means that any competitor can provide OpenStack service, Rackspace hopes to retain the lion’s share of potential new customers due to their reputation for support and their status as a leader in the OpenStack technology.
“We still believe that at the end of the day it’s not necessarily the actual technology, but the service that makes the difference,” said Blackstone.

Rackspace prides itself on “Fanatical Support”

National economic pressures have also impacted Rackspace’s success. While the ongoing recession has stunted Rackspace’s national growth to 30 percent a year – it was originally projected at more than 50 percent – it has caused a higher interest in the profitability of cloud computing. Austin Site leader Max Thoene says that much of the market had been resistant to the concept of cloud computing before the recession.
“The folks that were established that were doing this were like, ‘No, I like my physical server,’ even though it was only 6 percent utilized,” says Thoene.
But as the recession hit, companies feeling the pinch were forced to take a look at cloud services for the cost savings that they desperately needed. As a result, many made the big leap to cloud technology within the last few years. Thoene sees it as a glass-half-full situation.
“It really served as a vehicle to get people to kick the tires and look under the hood of cloud a lot more closely than they would have (otherwise),” said Thoene.
In fact, the International Data Corporation (IDC) — a market research firm — has released an often quoted prediction that “80 percent of new commercial enterprise apps will be deployed on cloud platforms” by the end of 2012 – a major swing for the hosting industry since the 2008 recession. Rackspace is second only to

Rackspace Austin Site leader Max Thoene

Amazon in the cloud computing industry and is sure to benefit from new cloud-using companies.
Rackspace Hosting is also enjoying the advantages of an Austin location. Just one of many tech companies expanding in Austin, Rackspace is experiencing rapid growth due to the city’s educated population and its popularity as a place to relocate talent. The local tech scene provides an ideal recruitment spot for Rackspace.
“We find that there is a great cross section in Austin that has both the technical skill and the service leadership type of skill set that we are looking for,” says Thoene.
According to Austin Technology Council President Julie Huls, this is a common trend for tech companies in the Austin area.
“Companies the size of Rackspace — which are growing at the same pace — are attracted to Austin for its culture. I think we have ample talent as it relates to certain skill sets. We have a very creative workforce here,” says Huls.
In fact, Rackspace enjoys a special symbiotic relationship with the hotbed of tech start-ups in Austin. It works with both the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce and the Austin Technology Council to invest in new start-ups. They also sponsor fairs – such as Chamberfest – and provide mentoring for new companies trying to get off the ground. In turn, many of those companies can then take advantage of potential cost savings with Rackspace’s cloud services – gaining the company more customers in the long run.
Thoene sees Rackspace’s tech community involvement as something that benefits both the company and the City of Austin by creating a healthy business environment.
“It’s a win-win,” says Thoene. “It’s a win for Rackspace because we get great people and it’s a win for Austin because we keep people employed.”

Story and photos by Andrew Moore

Rackspace Gives Back at 6th Annual Thanksgiving Food Drive

November 18, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

Rackspace Hosting held its 6th annual Thanksgiving food drive on Saturday at its headquarters in San Antonio.
Cars lined up along both sides of the makeshift food distribution center in Rackspace’s parking lot as the K-Rack DJ created a party atmosphere of re-mixed music. In coordination with the San Antonio Food Bank, Rackspace employees – or Rackers – prepared to distribute a thousand turkeys, as well as tea, coffee, pumpkins, watermelons, and yogurt.
Rackers also distributed 1,270 food boxes containing the rest of the Thanksgiving meal, which they had personally bought for community residents. Some Rackers had even decorated the boxes.
According to Chief Operating Officer Mark Roenigk, maintaining a fun, party-like atmosphere was a key part of the food drive.
“We like to do things that are uplifting,” Roenigk said. “We are trying to make it a fun thing. People should not feel bad that they are coming to get food for their thanksgiving.”

Stan Slimp and “Sugar Bear” dressed as turkeys with DJ Dale Bracey, photograph by Samantha Davis

Two rackers helped keep the party going by dressing up like turkeys and dancing in the front parking lot while greeting members of the community as they drove in. Resident Jana Martinez appreciated the happy mood.
“The music helps it out and everyone is so friendly,” Martinez said. “It makes it not seem like we need the help so much.”
The annual food drive was one of the largest events Rackspace had hosted this year. Fifteen hundred of the companies’ 2,800 employees were involved in the drive. The company spent $10,000 on turkeys and partnered with the San Antonio Food Bank to distribute them, and many other food items, to 1,000 families in the local community. According to Roenigk, sharing success with the community is a big deal at Rackspace.
“Our business model is very successful so we’re very, very blessed and we like to give back to the community,” Roenigk said. “We try to pick the highest impact events to serve the community of San Antonio.”
According to the San Antonio Food Bank, Rackspace’s Thanksgiving distribution event is by far the largest the food bank will do this year. Director of Community Investments Katie Ramsey said the help is sorely needed in the community.
“In November we usually get 90 people per day coming into the food bank and this year we are getting 110 people or more,” Ramsey said. “It’s just an increased need.”
Rackspace and the San Antonio Food Bank worked to meet that need by distributing 1,000 vouchers to residents of the surrounding community. Six hundred vouchers were distributed in cooperation with family specialists in local schools and 400 were distributed with the help of local non profit organizations, churches, and food pantries. Local residents appreciated the much needed support.

A local resident and her daughter happy to receive their meal, photo by Samantha Davis

“I think it’s a great thing that they’re doing here. It helps out a lot of us that can’t get certain things that we need,” Kelly Nevarro said. “It helps out a lot, these little things here, it great for the kids too.”
The food drive also got support from Roosevelt High School. A Roosevelt Junior, Jesse, volunteered to help and also recruited a few other classmates. The Roosevelt students served as Rackspace’s turkey brigade, loading turkey after turkey into the cars that pulled in.

Roosevelt High School students help load food into vehicle, photo by Samantha Davis

“It’s a great feeling inside to know that you can give something to someone who doesn’t have all the resources that you have,” said Roosevelt High School Student Carlos.
The annual Thanksgiving food drive is just one part of the much broader Rack-Gives-Back project, which is the community volunteer arm of Rackspace. In fact, there are three Rackspace employees dedicated solely to community support events. Community Affairs Specialist Cristina Ruiz said Rackspace is scheduled to have at least one major outreach event quarterly and smaller monthly events.
“We don’t just want to be a tenant,” Ruiz said. “We want to be part of the community, be a neighbor, and give back to this area.”

Rackspace Adds New Features and Support to its Cloud Software

November 15, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Rackspace Hosting today announced new features and enhanced support offerings for the Rackspace Private Cloud Software, dubbed “Alamo.”
Rackspace launched the software last August and thousands have downloaded the free software.
“The goal of the Rackspace Private Cloud Software is to provide customers with a fast and easy way to deploy a free OpenStack-powered private cloud anywhere in the world,” Mike Aeschliman, head of engineering and product for Rackspace Private Cloud, said in a news release. “With the new release, we can now offer Fanatical Support to customers’ cloud software using our remote access tools. This is a huge step in our mission to enable organizations to start realizing the benefits of clouds and trust them for mission-critical workloads.”
To get the software and find out more information, visit Rackspace.

Startups Burning the Midnight Oil at Geekdom

July 22, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 15 Comments

Members of Trakk-EM hash out the details of their idea

It’s after midnight at Geekdom and nestled in conference rooms throughout the 11th floor, groups of entrepreneurs continue to hash out business plans, design websites and figure out problems vexing their startups.

Cans of Red Bull are littered about along with empty water bottles, discarded coffee cups and Alamo Beer bottles. Bags of peanut M&Ms, Skittles, Mini-Hershey Bars, Pop-Tarts, Oreos, Rice Krispies Treats and more line the breakroom shelves.

Two of the members of Massage by Students working past midnight

In the Berners-Lee conference room, Josh Thielbar, a Rackspace employee by day and entrepreneur by night, pitches his BudgetAllies.com startup, a budgeting service aimed at families. He’s got a webpage designed already and a five minute pitch down solid.
“That’s a great pitch,” said Brian Curliss, head of the Massage by Students startup, a web platform that connects massage school students to local clients.
Thielbar is packing up to head home to his wife and three kids. He is a team of one. On Friday night, he had three people working on the project, but the team dispersed and the members either left the program or went to other ventures. Still, he plans to carry on and pitch to judges on Sunday night.
“I’m going to get first or second,” he said. “I didn’t come here to not win.”
He says his stiffest competition is TrueAbility, a team formed by four former Rackspace employees.
At that, Curliss objected. His team spent the day talking to people who run massage schools in San Antonio. He’s in it to win it too. They set up a consumer survey to get more feedback on the service. Curliss drove down from Dallas and has spent the entire weekend sleeping on a couch at Geekdom. Greg Stein, another team member, drove in from Austin and Yosef Javed travelled from Lake Charles, La. They say one guy drove 20 hours from California to participate in Startup Weekend San Antonio. Five people make up the Massage by Students team.
Initially, Massage by Students focused on marketing massage schools. San Antonio has seven of them. But after visiting a few Saturday afternoon, they decided to “pivot” or shift the focus of their startup away from schools to students who need a Customer Relationship Marketing or CRM platform. They plan to sell listings on their site to only 18 students in addition to the massage schools and they predict they can earn recurring monthly revenue of $2,000 to $6,000 in San Antonio and up to $100,000 nationally.
On Sunday, they’ve invited local massage students to visit Geekdom to give hour-long massages for $20.

The two member team working on Apartment Assurance

Chris Spence says he’ll stay up the entire 54 hours of Startup Weekend. He pulled an all nighter last night and he’s still up at 1 a.m. on Sunday.
He’s working with his co-founder, Jonathan Khan, on Apartment Assurance, a legal service for apartment dwellers. They’ve done market surveys and lots of research. They’re trying to hash out how much to charge for the service.
“We’re trying to decide whether to charge $14.99 a month or $19.99 a month, we’ve got to make the numbers work,” Spence said.
“I think it should be $9.99,” Khan said.
And so it goes in the life of a startup. By the time they’ve got to pitch later on Sunday, they’ll have all those details nailed down.
The crowd starts to thin out around 1 a.m., but a few people are letting off steam playing games of ping pong. The Trakk-Em team is still working in the commons area.

Startup Weekend San Antonio at Geekdom

July 3, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

In the old days, inventors tinkered in obscurity in their garages, spare bedrooms and basements.
But now that cool collaboration and coworking spaces like Geekdom have arrived on the scene, there’s no need to tinker in private. And if you’ve got a hankering to make something out of nothing, but you’re not into crafting like Martha Stewart or cooking like Gordon Ramsay, then you might want to take a shot at company creation especially if you like to get your hands dirty with coding and graphic design.
And Startup Weekend San Antonio and Geekdom have an opportunity for you to spend a weekend with like-minded individuals, brainstorming ideas, pounding out code and creating a new venture.
I covered the first Startup Weekend in San Antonio organized by Jennifer Navarrete when I worked at the local paper. I hung out with the teams for most of the weekend and I can tell you this is a serious venture. The people who attend this event are passionate about entrepreneurship. And they worked hard all weekend long. Some of the teams pulled all nighters.
The event generally starts out Friday evening with a brainstorming session. The group considers the ideas and votes on the best ones. The teams are formed and then the fun begins. They work the rest of the time to put together business plans, web sites and products and at the end they pitch their companies to venture capitalists and other interested investors.
Alan Torng and Michele Stewart of Austin are organizing the event along with Cristal Glangchai of San Antonio. Rackspace, the Kaufman Foundation and Geekdom are sponsoring it.
The event takes place on Friday, July 20 through Sunday, July 22 at Geekdom, on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre at 112 East Pecan street in downtown San Antonio. The early bird registration prices are done, but you can still snag a ticket for $99 here. This event usually sells out. At the last Startup Weekend Austin, people were submitting videos for a chance to get off the waiting list and get a ticket.

Successful Entrepreneur Jason Seats Now Helps Startups

June 25, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Jason Seats, managing director of TechStars Cloud and cofounder of Slicehost

To find out about high-tech startups in San Antonio, talk to Jason Seats.
He’s not only the managing director of the TechStars Cloud program at Geekdom, a collaboration and coworking space downtown, but he’s been there done that and has plenty of T-shirts to prove it.
In 2006, Seats, cofounded Slicehost with his college friend Matt Tanase and two years later sold it to Rackspace for millions. The exact price of the acquisition was not disclosed.
But Rackspace did report paying $11.5 million in cash and stock for Slicehost and JungleDisk and up to $16.5 million more based on performance goals.

Here’s a video of Robert Scoble (at the time a reporter with Fast Company Magazine. He now covers startups for Rackspace) interviewing Seats and Tanase about the acquisition, which took place on Oct. 22, 2008. The acquisition allowed Rackspace to compete more effectively with Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud computing business.

The life of an entrepreneur is a risky one.
Some people prefer the security of a desk job with a corporation while others risk everything to create something from nothing.
Life is about making active and passive choices, according to Seats.
He graduated in 2001 from St. Louis University with two degrees in computer science and engineering. He got a job at a startup right out of college.
“It was a rough time to graduate,” Seats said. The Dot Com collapse had just occurred and the job with the startup didn’t work out. So he took a secure job with St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis and he stayed there for five years. He wrote software programs for the hospital.
“If I could stay there five years I could have done it for 15 years,” Seats said. “A lot of the people I worked with are still there sitting in the same chairs.”
But Seats was bored and restless. He took an MIT online course on open projects. One day, he read an article on “How to Love the Job You’re In” and he realized that he needed to make a change.
“I was rationalizing what I was doing there,” Seats said.
He started looking at his options and ended up taking a job with CPI Corp., the company that ran Sears Portrait Studios. He worked on creating a video software compression program for them.
“That broke me out of my rut,” Seats said.
Around that time, his buddy, Matt had started Slicehost, a web hosting company in 2006. He had already invested $10,000 in the business. Seats matched that and they became partners. But Seats didn’t quit his day job. He spent nights and weekends working at Slicehost and his days at his CPI job. They spent three months building the core product. The idea was to buy a server and virtually divide it into smaller pieces and sell “slices” to customers. They bought three initial servers. Then they put up a Website, explained the offering and opened up a chat room. They turned the system on and the first customer walked through the virtual door. Web hosting started at $40 and rose from there depending on the amount of server capacity required.
Seats planned to quit his day job at CPI within two years of starting up Slicehost. Instead, he quit two months later. By then, they had two dozen servers running, a waiting list of customers wanting to buy the service and they never advertised.
“It became clear that things were going to happen faster than we expected,” Seats said.
Seats and Tanase had one client on retainer for a development job that helped finance Slicehost. They bootstrapped the company and poured all the revenue back into buying more servers.
By the fall of 2007, Slicehost hired its first employees: one programmer and one community support person.
“We had a big open community,” Seats said. “If one of our members had a problem they could go out to the community. Our support costs were very, very low. People felt good about the support we gave. And our customers worked for us.”
To maintain that community, Seats and Tanase put up a blog post with job postings and hired the first two people who applied for the programmer and community support jobs.
“It was a totally organic move to bring them in.” Seats said.
Paul Tomes in the United Kingdom got the community support job. He’s still with Rackspace today, Seats said.
By the end of the second year, Slicehost had eight employees and 15,000 customers with 55 percent of them in the United States and the others coming from 170 countries.
“We never did any advertising,” Seats said.
Slicehost grew organically through word of mouth marketing by its customers.
“We spread in the circles that made sense,” Seats. “We never had an active sales force. We never talked about sales. We talked about support all the time.”
All of the Slicehost employees spent time in the chat rooms dealing with support, Seats said.
“We were always looking for ways to solve root problems,” he said.
In July of 2008, Lew Moorman, now president of Rackspace, opened up a support ticket with Slicehost and that started the courtship that would end up with Rackspace acquiring the company. From that first e-mail, it only took a week for the first acquisition offer, Seats said.
The guys at 37Signals did this great 30 minute four-part video interview with Tanase and Seats that recounts the full version of the Slicehost story from founding to acquisition.
As a condition of the acquisition, Seats moved to San Antonio to join Rackspace. He bought a house in December of 2008. He worked at Rackspace until June of 2010. He considered the idea of going back to school to get his Phd in Physics. But instead he started volunteering as a mentor with 3 Day Startup San Antonio. He liked working with entrepreneurs.
In the fall of 2011, Graham Weston, chairman of Rackspace, and Pat Condon, co-founder of Rackspace, approached him about heading up the new TechStar Cloud program in San Antonio. He met with Nicole Glaros and Dave Cohen with TechStars and they offered Seats the job.
“Working with Jason has been pure joy,” Glaros said. “He did a wonderful job. It’s going to be really cool watching him develop the program further.”
TechStars Cloud had its first class of 11 companies graduate last April. Seats still talks with the companies weekly. And they think very highly of him.
“Not only is Jason technically competent but he’s very insightful,” said Matt Gershoff with Conductrics, one of the TechStar Cloud companies.
Seats is tremendously loyal and speaks plainly and truthfully, Gershoff said.
“Everyone respects him,” he said. “He’s an amazing guy.”
Colin Loretz with Cloudsnap, another TechStars Cloud company, already knew who Seats was before joining the program.
“It was cool to meet him and realize he was the kind of guy who will go out of his way to help you out and help you succeed.”
Seats was the “best mentor I could ever hope for,” Loretz said.

Rackspace Celebrates 6th Annual Green Day

June 8, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Victor Rodriguez
Special to Silicon Hills News

About 800 Rackers (Rackspace employees) and members of the community attended the company’s 6th annual Green Day.
Rackspace held the event on Wednesday at its San Antonio headquarters.
San Antonio Backyard Chickens brought a bunch of chickens and educated Rackers on how to produce farm-fresh eggs in their own backyards.
As for refreshments, many people enjoyed trying out grass fed beef and goat burgers from Fresh Horizons.
Many Rackers scheduled demos at North Park Lexus and Cavender after seeing the green vehicles on display, including the sold out 2013 Range Rover Evoque.
This year’s Green Day kicked off the beginning of Rackspace’s mid-week Farmers Market. Rackers have always welcomed the event with great enthusiasm.
Every Wednesday, Rackspace will host a handful of vendors in the company’s parking lot from 4-7 p.m. as a convenient way to provide Rackers with fresh and local groceries. Now, Rackers and the public can conveniently grab local produce, eggs, meats, and other treats on their way home from work.

Rackspace is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

The Open Compute Project helps data centers save energy and increase efficiency

May 2, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

By L.A. Lorek

Data centers gobble up energy.
But some of the smartest minds in the information technology industry want to change that.
They are meeting in San Antonio today and tomorrow to rethink the old ways of putting together servers, power and cooling units and the rest of the guts of data centers to save energy and increase efficiency.
It’s called the Open Compute Project, launched last April by Facebook with the goal of creating the most efficient computer hardware and software for data centers. Of course not everyone has joined the project. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are not on board. But lots of major players like Facebook and Rackspace are.
And in just a year, the Open Compute Project has made data centers 38 percent more efficient to run and 24 percent less expensive to build, according to the organization. The group comes up with new hardware and software standards and then they share those with everyone else. The entire data center industry benefits from the open collaborative work of the best engineers in a variety of companies.
About 500 data center leaders from Intel, AMD, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Facebook, Rackspace and more met today at Rackspace’s headquarters in San Antonio for the third summit designed to hammer out designs and think up projects to improve the way data centers operate.

Frank Frankovsky with Facebook

Wednesday morning, Frank Frankovsky, vice president of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook, gave the keynote address on the progress made in the last year.
First off, Frankovsky showed a slide listing dozens of new companies that have joined the movement including HP, AMD, Fidelity, Quanta, Tencent, Salesforce.com, VMware, HP and others. Frankovsky wrote a blog post on May 2 providing a full list of new members and detailing all the accomplishments in the past year.
And later on the stage, executives from HP and Dell both unveiled their newly redesigned servers dubbed Project Coyote and Project Zeus respectively.
The objectives of the Open Compute Project are scale, value, simplicity, sustainability and openness, Frankovsky said. That involves rethinking the entire data center from the racks that house the servers to the electrical systems that connect them together.
“We’re ditching the 19 inch rack design,” he said.
A big part of that is creating new 21-inch width standard for racks inside data centers to replace the outdated 19-inch racks, which date back to the 1950s, Frankovsky said.
“We want people to differentiate less and innovate more,” he said.

Following Frankovsky, Glenn Keels, HP, director of marketing of its hyperscale business unit, said the reason HP joined the Open Compute Project was because “leaders do not sit on their laurels” and “leaders develop standards.” HP is number one or number two in the data center markets it serves, Keels said. HP powers some of the largest cloud data centers in the world including Facebook, he said.
The cloud market is small but growing exponentially between now and 2020, Keels said.
“HP has begun to think differently,” Keels said. HP is transforming servers and changing the experience with projects like moonshot, voyager and odyssey aimed at improving efficiencies in the data center, Keels said.
“Open Compute Project is the most robust group of problem solvers focused on the data center space and moving from technology and form factors of 1995 to today to reclaim stranded time, space and power,” Keels said.
“We have to reinvent ourselves every time and Open Compute is a fantastic forum for us to do that,” Keels said. “Standardization has the ability to unlock innovation.”
Keels unveiled HP’s Coyote open rack standard at the conference.
Then Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of Dell’s Data Center Solutions Group, showed off Dell’s new server and storage designs that meet the Open Rack specifications.
“Dell is deeply rooted in our support for open alliances,” Norrod said. “It’s in our DNA…We are very active in our support for open source.”
Rackspace is also active in the open source movement and in creating less expensive and more efficient data centers. Late Wednesday morning, Mark Roenigk, Rackspace’s chief operating officer, detailed the company’s plans in an interview.
Rackspace has nine data centers globally including two in the United Kingdom and one in Hong Kong. Its U.S. data centers are in Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and the Washington, D.C. area,.
“We shuttered two in San Antonio in the last six months due to inefficiencies,” Roenigk said. “There’s a great example of how quickly this technology is moving.”
In the last two years, Rackspace has seen a 22 percent efficiency improvement in its data centers, Roenigk said.
Rackspace plans to leverage the Open Compute Project designs for computer servers, storage, network and utilities in its next generation data center, which it plans soon, Roenigk said.
Overall, Rackspace has 80,000 servers online serving 172,000 customers today.
“We want to be influential in the design of the hardware,” Roenigk said.
So Rackspace works closely with original equipment makers like HP and Dell, he said.
“Most recently we’ve increased the density of a rack from 7 kilowatts to 18 kilowatts a rack providing more computing power coming out of a smaller footprint,” Roenigk said. “That means less cost which is passed on to our customers.”
Sustainability and saving energy is a core covenant of the Open Computer Project, Roenigk said.
“We were recently judged by Greenpeace in a report “How Clean Is Your Cloud,” Roenigk said. “We’re pleased that even though we’re a small player in the market, we’re in the middle of the pack.”
“We think we can be a big influencer in data center efficiency and the power used to power those data centers,” Roenigk said.
Those decisions on being green stem from the sources that Rackspace uses to power its data centers. That’s why it has bypassed states, which provide cheap power from coal sources in favor of hydro electric, wind and natural gas sources.
“We’re really about serving customers,” Roenigk said. “They pull us and push us in different directions all the time.”
Two years ago, only one in 25 customers ever brought up the subject of sustainability when talking about hosting, Roenigk said.
“Today it is more like six or seven in ten,” he said. “It is now a real part of the sourcing and procurement process.”
On Thursday, engineers attending the summit will hammer out their ideas in special sessions that go very, very deep, Roenigk said. The Open Compute Project has a formal process for people to bring forth their ideas, he said. The board decides which projects are going to drive the most value to the open source community. Then the engineers meet once or several times a week. When they are done, they publish their design specifications to members of the Open Compute Project to use, Roenigk said.
“Linux took 20 years to become a standard,” Roenigk said. “We will do what Linux did in 20 years in five years or less.”

The following video is from Rackspace and explains its role in the Open Compute Project.

Rackspace is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Meet the TechStars Cloud Companies of 2012

April 11, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Rackspace wants to do for San Antonio what Dell has done for Austin, said Graham Weston, its chairman.
“You’re here at the very beginning of something big” Weston said.
That was evident Wednesday at the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre in downtown San Antonio when 11 teams took to the stage to showcase their cloud-based businesses at the first ever TechStars Cloud Demo Day.
Throughout the nearly three hour event, the audience of about 350 people, which included angel investors and venture capitalists, applauded their accomplishments and they laughed a few times too.
Jason Seats and Nicole Glaros served as managing directors for the TechStars Cloud and another 75 entrepreneurs volunteered to mentor the companies. Glaros spent three months in San Antonio, relocating here from Boulder just weeks after having a baby.
While most of the companies asked for financing, Seats asked the audience not to report the details of the deals because of Securities and Exchange Commission rules on fundraising. In general, though, all of the companies have already raised money to finance their operations.
To kick things off, Dirk Elmendorf, co-founder of Rackspace, introduced the first company.
“I liked Keen from the very beginning,” he said.
Keen.io gives mobile developers the data they need to optimize their applications.
“The Keen team has that magic” Elmendorf said.
That team includes Ryan Spraetz and Dan Kador, formerly with Salesforce and Kyle Wild, formerly with Google. All of them are engineers, best friends and they have been working together since high school 13 years ago. All three quit their jobs within three days of starting the TechStars Cloud program. They relocated from San Francisco and moved into an old 4,000 square foot bed and breakfast in the King William neighborhood.
“What we came in with three months ago is so far from what we have created today,” Spraetz said. “The Tech Stars Cloud program has just been amazing.”
Keen.io reinvents analytics for mobile applications, Spraetz said.
“Every mobile application is its own universe filled with information generated by millions of users,” he said.
Keen.io allows companies to create their own custom analytics using its platform.
“In the last three months we’ve designed and built the first version of our program,” Spraetz said. Today, more than 100 mobile apps use Keen.io to track their analytics.
“We’re looking for active mentorship from smart and engaged investors,” Spraetz said.
The next presenter, Emergent One created a platform that allows any company to easily create an Application Programming Interface or API, which is a set of tools for building software applications.
“APIs are immensely valuable for all kinds of businesses,” said Kevin Pfab, its CEO. Best Buy recently introduced an API that it projects will double its business, he said.
But right now, building APIs is hard, Pfab said.
“What may seem like a small project turns into a massive one,” Pfab said.
That’s where Emergent One comes to rescue. It has an API generation platform that allows a company to create a custom API in hours instead of months and years, Pfab said. He showed a technical demo to illustrate how easy the process was. The platform also provides deep analytics on how a company’s API is being used, he said.
“The entire API solution is being offered right out of the box,” Pfab said. “And you can get started in minutes.”
Emergent One’s platform allows a company to build a new API faster and cheaper than ever before, he said.
The baby-faced Pfab also drew the loudest laugh from the crowd when he announced that between himself and his partner, Mike Taczak, they also “share 46 years of experience being alive.”
Mentor Paul Ford with SoftLayer introduced Callisto.fm, a real-time engagement analytics site for media creators and distributors. Its platform can tell them who’s using their content and for how long. It wants to replace Neilsen and Arbitron’s media ratings services.
Callisto.fm provides real-time metrics for online content.
“When your video goes viral in Japan you will know it before anyone on the planet,” said Michael Sitarzewski, Callisto.fm’s cofounder and CEO. The platform also provides information on social activity like how many times the content has been tweeted or posted to Facebook, he said.
“This stuff is amazing and we’re having a blast building it,” he said.
Callisto.fm is the only company measuring real time user engagement across all media platforms, Sitarzewski said. It offers its products with pricing starting at $50 a month.
The other team members include Travis Silverman, Richard Jones and Chris Roth. Callisto.fm is fully funded. It has already raised $700,000 from DFJ Mercury and TechStars. But it might seek another round of funding later on this year.
Conductrics, which helps companies increase their customer conversions via its platform, has already snagged Pfizer and Under Armour as customers, said Matt Gershoff, co-founder.
The company’s software allows companies to tailor their website to different customers depending on where they are coming from and what their interests might be. For example, Under Armour can tailor its site to offer cold gear to people from snow states and heat gear to people from sunshine states, Gershoff said.
Conductrics has created a very simple API that lets developers build apps customized for different customers, he said. The company has already optimized 12 million decisions for its customers.
In addition to Gershoff, Nate Weiss is a co-founder and chief technology officer.
CloudSnap is tackling the Software as a Service, known as Saas, marketplace with a Saas in a box solution, said Colin Loretz, co-founder.
“Saas spending is projected to reach $16 billion in 2013,” Loretz said.
Cloudsnap allows web applications to connect together. About 60 percent of companies are trying to integrate their web applications and they find the process time consuming, expensive and risky, Loretz said.
“We know these issues firsthand as we used to be those expensive consultants,” Loretz said.
For example, Unbounce can’t take leads and put them into Salesforce. Cloudsnap fixes that. It makes it easy to snap together your application with out writing any code, Loretz said. CloudSnap supports more than 100 applications today, he said.
“Cloud adoption is next space race,” he said.
Cloudsnap connects Basecamp and Salesforce together and allows them to share files, Loretz said. It’s the glue for applications on the Internet.
Distil.it is a content protection network that stops malicious web scraping bots from stealing content from digital publishers like CNN and Engadget.
On the Internet, web scrapers can steal what used to be unique and valuable content and as a result digital publishers lose 146 million visitors daily, said Rami Essaid, co-founder and CEO. That equates to $5.5 billion annually stolen, he said.
“Existing hardware solutions are not effective in real time,” Essaid said. “Distil is the answer.”
Distil, through customized algorithms, identifies malicious bots and stops them from taking a website’s content, he said.
“Our platform is easy to step up,” Essaid said. “Our network is extremely intelligent.”
The market in the U.S. is worth $1.3 billion, Essaid said. It has struck recent partnerships with SoftLayer, Rackspace and ZippyKid.
Next, Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace introduced Andrew Cronk, cofounder and CEO of Tempo DB.
“The demand for the solution for this problem is about to explode,” Moorman said.
Tempo DB is a big data analysis company that is a database service for time series data.
“We make it possible to store and instantly analyze the massive streams of measured data that break traditional databases,” Cronk said.
“If you thought we had big data today you haven’t seen nothing yet” Cronk said. He calls it “massive data” that is being generated by all kinds of connected device or “the Internet of things,” he said.
“This is an incredible opportunity to measure and learn more about our tools,” Cronk said.
Temp provides visualization, analysis and storage of data in a set of tools “that are an analyst’s dream” Cronk said.
“We’ve got everything you need to start getting real value from your data today,” he said.
For example, one customer, InThrMa operates smart meters that generate a half a billion data points per thermostat per year, Cronk said. With Tempo, InThrMa is able to capture and analyze that data. With the data, InThrMa is able to provide all kinds of new insights including energy use forecasting for customers.
“We are working with companies like this in three markets today – energy, networks and sensors,” Cronk said. “We’re currently streaming in over 25 million new data points everyday.”
The team includes Cronk, Michael Yagley, CTO and Justin DeLay, CMO
“We are finally building a system we wish had existed years ago,” Cronk said.
Appsembler is a platform that allows software companies to launch “Software as a Service” or “SaaS” applications in minutes, not months, said Nate Aune, the company’s CEO and founder.
Appsembler offers a “Saas in a box solution” that includes hosting, billing, support and provides and overall integrated solution, Aune said.
It already has 5,000 customers using the platform and 3,000 more on a wait list, Aune said.
Flomio makes it easy to build NFC and RFID enabled applications, said Richard Grundy, its co-founder and CEO.
“We extend the web into the physical world,” he said.
Flomio allows developers to early create NFC enabled applications and cloud-based updates are easily deployed to all devices, Grundy said.
He used a neighborhood coffee shop as an example. The owner might want to create a mobile loyalty app for the business. That’s easy to do with Flomio, Grundy said.
It has already sealed partnerships with Texas Instruments, Motorola, Trimble and ACS, he said.
The other members of the Flomio team include Jonathan Hilley and John Bullard.
Weston, chairman of Rackspace, introduced Vidmaker, an online video collaboration site.
“When you think of Vidmaker, I want you to think about one company: Instagram,” Weston said. He’s already an investor in the company, which he thinks will do for video what Instagram did for still photographs. Facebook recently bought Instagram for $1 billion.
Vidmaker makes it easy to manage and edit video on any device, anywhere with anyone, said Dale Emmons, its cofounder and CEO.
“It’s going to unleash a wave of creativity,” he said.
Vidmaker is targeted at video hobbyists and enthusiasts, Emmons said. A need exists for an easy to use collaborative video service online, he said. Everyday, people do 300,000 searches on Google for video editing software, he said.
Vidmaker hasn’t launched yet, but when it does it expects to offer a fermium version of its software for people who post content with a creative commons, allowing others to use it. It will also offer a starter package at $10 a month for 10 gigabytes of storage for a private account. It’s rates scale up from there.
Emmons and Ryan Bolyard previously worked on video editing software at Sony. The other cofounder, Yuri Zapuchlak worked at Intuit.
“When we joined TechStars we had no user interface,” Emmons said. But in three months of 18 hour days, they built a beautiful user interface and they expect to launch the site in a beta test soon.
The last company to present was introduced by Pat Condon, cofounder of Rackspace.
Cloudability was one of the most seasoned companies on the stage. It had already graduated for an incubation program in Portland, its hometown and it had closed on a $1.2 million round of financing from Trinity, Walden plus Portland investors. Cloudability makes a platform that allows companies to monitor and manage how much they spend on the cloud. It’s free for companies that earn less than $2,500 a month and pricing goes up from there with a small business edition, enterprise edition and partner edition. It has already signed up 2,200 companies in more than 80 countries.
“We want to get this tool into the hands of every cloud business user,” said J.R. Storment, cofounder with Mat Ellis and Jon Frisby.
Along those lines, Storment announced Rackspace, one of its partners, will begin offering Cloudability to all of its 175,000 users for free.
“That’s really just the beginning,” Storment said.
Cloudability has nine employees and has a clear path to profitability this year, Storment said.