The Planet Blog

As promised, I’ve got a few pictures for you contrasting our upgraded workplace with our old offices. Doug explained why we made the transition to a new, consolidated office, so you can consider this post a continuation on how we’ve changed our work environment to advance The Planet’s pursuit of providing the best customer experience in the industry.

Jimi Hendrix once said in an interview, “In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first.” I could creatively weave in a “the world/ The Planet” pun, but I’ll spare you the cheesinesses and simply show you some of the ways the move has upgraded our work environment, enabling us to provide better service.

The Call Center

If you’re speaking with Billing, Technical Support, or Abuse, you are probably talking to someone in this room. In the new call center, the screens in the front of the room show statistics like real-time ticket counts and statuses, call lengths and hold times, live chat requests, and quality assurance statistics like support ratings, escalations, and new policies.

The Network Operations Center

If you have a chance to swing through Houston to visit us, the new Network Operations Center will probably catch your eye. You’ll see the NOC staff hard at work under a blue glow with its new nine-workstation, stadium-seating configuration (above right). It faces nine monitors with switchable sources that track various statistics and status reports over time. As you can see in the old NOC (above left), everyone worked along a single aisle in the middle of the room, so the monitors on the back wall were behind half of the staff . With the new configuration, everyone can keep an eye on the monitors and respond to notifications accordingly.

In the near future, I’ll sit down with The Planet’s new VP of Network Operations Stan Barber to explain the NOC’s role in The Planet’s day-to-day service (like monitoring and filtering DoS and DDoS attacks, tracking and notifying customers about the network status, and addressing network-affecting issues).

The Cubes

The picture shows the sales area to show the general contrast between the old (above left) and new (above right) work spaces. Lower partition walls, higher ceilings and quad-cubes make collaborating a lot easier, and it’s much more conducive to me throwing a Nerf ball at Kevin Landreth.

Did I forget anything? … Oh yeah:

The People

Smiling faces. It looks like I don’t have to report any unhappy employees to Doug.

Because a few of you have asked for more on the other areas in which we are investing, I will have a new post for you soon about The Planet’s most recent data center and network improvements and retrofits; the company-sponsored education and certification programs in Technical Support and the Network Operations Center; and our investments in new server hardware.

-Kevin

“Uh, I’m going to have to ask you to move your desk. Now, if you could get it to go as far back against that wall as possible, that would be great … that way, we’ll have some room for more boxes and things we need to put in here.” The movie Office Space had me at “Hello, Peter,” but that quote is one of my favorites in the movie. As I mentioned in my previous post about The Planet Day, we are working on our own Office Space.

Literally.

Today, we held the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new building, and I snapped a few pictures around the new Bayou Place location to give everyone a glimpse of the new digs. I’ll wait until next week for all of the Houston folks to get settled before I post an extended tour featuring all of the departments in candid “at work” photos … once you get through this post, you’ll probably want a little breather before the next wave of pictures, anyway.

If anyone gets lost as we meander through the halls, keep this map with you. We’d ask that you not leave any breadcrumbs to track your location 1) because it didn’t really work out for Hansel and Gretel and 2) because you’d mess up our new carpet.

As you get off the elevator outside of our office, you are greeted by The Planet’s logo over the tall sliding-glass doors in the floor-to-ceiling glass entryway.

Similar to the way your parents used to mark the inside of your clothes with your initials, we wanted to mark the walls to be sure we wouldn’t misplace the office. If found, return to the corner of Capitol and Bagby in downtown Houston.

The eye in the sky. Don’t worry … I didn’t hurt myself scaling the walls and hanging from the ceiling to snap pictures of a few of the faces as Doug gave his opening remarks to welcome everyone to the new building. Rather than make me risk life and limb, Doug had the builders create a catwalk for me.

Well, the catwalk might not have been build just for me … the Bayou Place building formerly housed Houston’s convention center with significant amount of the vertical space. Rather than letting that space go to waste, Doug worked with the builders to create about 10,000 square feet of usable space “floating” 20 feet above the rest of the office.

This is a picture of the “park” along the catwalk. Remember, none of this existed as of a few months ago. Notice the vintage rocking chairs and beautiful foliage.

Meet my new best friend. The superstar in this picture is a Starbucks-capable espresso/coffee machine. This will be one of the last times anyone will see this area empty … it was designed to accommodate quite a few folks. If you can’t find a seat on the counter, turn 90 degrees to your left and you’ll see:

Now you can lay your fears of drinking your coffee while standing to rest (pun intended). This raised area is accessible by two sets of stairs and an elevator. And in addition to the park, the lounge and the kitchen, we have three large conference rooms.

We’re ten pictures deep into the post, and you really haven’t seen any work spaces yet. Getting a sense of the grandeur yet?

Back to the Open House. For the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Doug welcomed 275 employees and guests with his vision for the new office:

• Consolidate our Houston folks in one location (with the exception of the data center techs at each respective DC).
• Attract new talent to join our growing team.
• Foster better relationships between departments.
• Create a fun, interactive work environment to generate out-of-the-box thinking about how we can provide even better products and services to our customers.

I’ll dive deeper into these points with Doug within the next few posts. On another side-note, we consolidated all of our non-DC offices in Dallas to our D2/D6 facility last week for the same reason as the consolidation in Houston. We’ve got a lot of great expectations for both cities as a result of these moves.

Doug invited Howard Park from GI Partners and Walter Ulrich from Houston Technology Center to share a few words. Howard thanked everyone for the hard work they have put into The Planet over the past year and a half, and he says he expects even greater results now that we’re in the new location.

Walter explained the mission of Houston Technology Center, and thanked The Planet for its continued involvement in incubating technology entrepreneurship in Houston. We also presented HTC with a donation of $25,000, as gold sponsors for the 2008 Web-Based Business School they run for entrepreneurs. They teach these budding business owners about marketing, design, legal issues, sales and emerging trends in the business landscape. We will be in an ongoing relationship to build this area’s reputation to rival that of the Silicon Valley in the next six years.

Our Houston Network Operations Center is hiding there in the background. I’ll save the detailed pictures of that space for a future post, though.

It has taken a lot of sweat and elbow grease to get the new office into shape, and this t-shirt gives you an idea how many companies have been involved. We can’t thank everyone enough for the work they’ve contributed … the end result is simply spectacular.

In my next post, I’ll show you around the work areas to compare and contrast what we are moving from to what we are moving to. I might even have a few pictures of how far this office space has come in the past few months.

Stay tuned.

-Kevin

Put on your party hats, lace up your dancing shoes, and line up at the punch bowl. It’s officially The Planet Day in Houston, Texas! To celebrate our move to Bayou Place in downtown Houston, the Mayor of the City of Houston proclaimed:

The Planet is the world’s largest privately held dedicated hosting company. The company provides IT infrastructure solutions to more than 22,000 small and medium-size businesses and hosts 3.1 million Web sites worldwide. The Planet offers the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class support, and is backed by state-of-the-art facilities and unmatched network connectivity. The Planet helps turn information technology into a powerful competitive advantage that enables companies to successfully grow their businesses.

Headquartered in Houston, and with additional data centers and offices in Dallas, The Planet’s move represents a significant step in the company’s growth, bringing together in a single location a broad base of operations under one roof.

To commemorate this important day in its history, The Planet is making a generous contribution to the Houston Technology Center, which further underscores its commitment to the HTC mission and to the technology community in our city.

On December 12, 2007, The Planet will host its Grand Opening at Bayou Place. On this auspicious occasion The City of Houston extends best wishes for a successful and rewarding event.

Therefore, I, Bill White, Mayor of the City of Houston, hereby proclaim December 12, 2007, as

The Planet Day

in Houston, Texas.

Here’s an updated picture of the proclamation. Click the image for a larger view.

Needless to say, our team is excited to celebrate this holiday! We’ve got a ribbon-cutting ceremony this afternoon, and we are in the process of preparing our two Houston offices to be consolidated into the new location this weekend so we can hit the ground running next Monday morning.

Our office tours in Houston and in Dallas are still among the most viewed posts on our blog, so I’ll add another tour post to the collection with pictures from the new building within the next day or two.

-Kevin