Drum roll, please … it’s a momentous day for The Planet!
This morning we’ve launched an awesome new Web site that will make it far easier for you – our customer – to learn about and purchase The Planet’s products and services. We’ve made the site easier to navigate, backed by a wealth of new features for visitors who aren’t certain which services are best for their business.
Prominently featured is our messaging based on “The Power to Choose.” We offer the broadest range of options in the industry. Whether you’re looking for dedicated servers, management services, fully managed hosting or colocation, you’ll find a solution that meets your needs.
You may have noticed advertising from The Planet on many new properties, as well as a new campaign that has The Planet ads showing up many places you have never seen us before, based on your having visited our site in the past … and this is just the beginning.
Go ahead and take a test drive through the new site and let us know what you think!
-Steve
January 19th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
So you’re ditching the Planet Alpha, Planet Northstar brands already? seems like you take one step forwards then two steps back?
January 19th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
btw, that’s not to say this new look isn’t a good thing…it’s 100% more professional than anything before it. Just surprised you’re losing the two brands you setup only a few months ago.
January 19th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
We are moving away from the brands because they made the company seem a little disjointed … like a Northstar customer had no similarities to an Alpha customer when in actuality, we really offer a broad spectrum of products and services that can be built on, combined and moved between as a customer sees fit.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Unbelievable. The Planet goes from Colo, to Server Matrix, then Total Control and Focus -> Merge with EV1servers -> then scrap Server Matrix and Total Control for just The Planet -> then Alpha and Northstar and now we are back to square 1. So history does repeat itself. Maybe the business plan from day 1 was better afterall. I wish you luck, but I have had enough and I think I am going to find a new provider.
January 29th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
The mission of the company has remained relatively unchanged, while the branding and positioning have evolved throughout the years. Even before the merger, both companies set their sights on becoming the number one IT outsourcing provider in the world. With the merger, we’ve been able to take the strengths that each company brought to the table to help build our brand in a new direction. To prepare to succeed in the future, we had to focus on our core competency of dedicated hosting … With more than 20,000 customers, it was imperative to hone that customer experience first (which required stripping away a lot of the things that distracted us from that focus).
As we continued to build and improve upon the dedicated server branch of the business, we began rebuilding our managed hosting offering from the ground up … not just providing “server management” as we had in the past. When we acquired a company to build out the “managed dedicated servers” or “advanced services” group to fill the gap between dedicated servers and full-on managed hosting, we started to see the big picture for The Planet moving forward. By confining each of the divisions in their own brand, we were giving the wrong impression (as I mentioned in the comment above) … To take John Donne a little out of context, he said “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” and that’s the driving force behind the simplification of the branding. The divisions operate relatively independently, but they are all “parts of the main” – metaphorically parts of the content and literally pieces of The Planet.
Our move back into colocation is the result of an evolving industry climate that provides us a great opportunity to build a new data center and provide enterprise-class facilities for customers whose needs may dictate a change to owning their hardware. While it shares the generic “colocation” name with the legacy services provided in the past, our new colocation offering is more refined and specialized to accommodate larger businesses on more of a per-rack or per-cabinet basis than the per-server basis we largely focused on in the past in that business unit.