The Planet Blog

Do you have any plans for Tuesday, June 16, 2009, at 11:00am?

Well … cancel them.

You’re invited to join us as we celebrate the opening of our new 106,000-square-foot colocation data center facility in Plano, Texas!

How often to do you get the chance to witness the ceremonial shearing of a beautiful ribbon by the blades of comically large scissors? Whatever your answer is to that question, I would suggest that’s not often enough, so you should take advantage of this opportunity.

The grand opening event for this data center — our eighth — will feature remarks from The Planet Chairman & CEO Douglas J. Erwin and Plano City Manager Thomas H. Muehlenbeck. A light lunch and refreshments will be served, and you, as our guests, will have the opportunity to tour the ultra-secure, “green” facility.

On the technical front, the new data center uses the latest modular cooling technology from Turbine Air Systems (TAS), with high-efficiency, water-cooled chillers that eliminate the possibility of an interior water leak. The facility meets SAS 70 Type II standards and is protected by biometric security access.

If you’re keeping track at home, the addition of this raised-floor real estate brings The Planet’s footprint up to 224,000 square feet … more than five acres of enterprise-class server space.

For more event information and to register to attend, visit http://www.theplanet.com/New-Data-Center-Grand-Opening/.

If you wait too long to register, your “light lunch” might end up being a package of Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter, so sign up today!

-Kevin

One of The Planet’s core values is integrity: “In all aspects of our business, our actions are ethical, honest and consistent with our values and can withstand scrutiny of the light of day.”

That core value is evident throughout our day-to-day operations, and recently, our managers reinforced it, reminding us that they keep their promises (costs to their dignity notwithstanding).

If you recall the epic Underdogs vs. Big Dogs dragon boat race, a last-minute wager made the competition pretty interesting: The losing team had to buy a meal and serve it to the winning team.

The Underdogs were victorious (a point that we often reference), so the Big Dogs kept their end of the bargain by serving us breakfast and answering our every beck and call … and we made sure they stayed busy. We were served an elaborate spread of tasty breakfast selections and the managers, led by head waiter Doug Erwin, poured our drinks, delivered our food, picked up our trash, and answered any and all of our absurd requests (back rubs, special orders, spreading jam on toast … you know, the usual).

As you can see, the Big Dog attire for the event was a unique blend of elegance and formality: tuxedo T-shirts.

The Underdogs gathered early, eagerly awaiting their “breakfast served with a smile.” Once the food arrived, an assembly line of “waiters” marched towards the table, each carrying different breakfast items. They all used proper manners, i.e. “What would you like, ma’am?” or “How can I help you, sir?”

Every request was taken with the utmost sincerity. When an Underdog requested milk, a Big Dog quickly headed upstairs to the refrigerator. They were patient as we decided on our pastry selections (and subsequently changed our minds), and made sure to fix our coffee just the way we liked it … we were even offered a variety of creamers. Our orange juice was hand-shaken and poured into our glass. And, once all 20 members of our team were full, each manager took a tray and headed to the call center to distribute the rest of food.

Some of the managers continued to wear their shirts for the rest of the day, and the extra shirts were distributed to the Underdogs to wear as a reminder of the stunning victory.

The team spirit and friendly competition have come to an end … at least for now. There is another Dragon Boat Regatta in October, and if the managers are up for it, we would be happy to place another friendly wager on the outcome.

May the best team win! (GO UNDERDOGS!!!)

- Rachel

P.S. Head over to our Flickr page for more pictures from the breakfast.

When Anastasia Tubanos of The WHIR came down to Houston, she had a chance to meet with several people on our team to get a sense of where the company has been, where the company is, and where it is going.

Last week, we posted Anastasia’s interview with Urvish Vashi, which covered the recent launch of Planet Alpha, Planet Northstar and our Advanced Services. In the video below, she speaks with The Planet’s Chairman and CEO Doug Erwin about our company culture, building a solid business foundation through the merging of two successful companies, and his vision for The Planet over the next two years.

Our CEO, Doug Erwin keynoted Day 2 at ISPCON! Are you surprised? His topic was Beyond Hosting: Unlocking Profits with On Demand IT Infrastructure for the SMB, and he shared a The Planet’s perspective on the evolving IT marketplace, including several suggestions to effectively keep up with it.

I’ll dive deeper into what he shared at the conference in a future blog post, but I wanted to submit a quick update on the happenings from Day 2 at ISPCON.

In addition to Doug’s keynote, I joined three very interesting breakout sessions and continued my trek through the conference Exhibit Hall. The breakout sessions I graced with my presence? “30 Rapid-fire Website Wins, Guaranteed,” “Five Ways to Boost Profits without Increasing Costs: Customer Services” and “Guerrilla Marketing for Service Providers.” Needless to say, I was like a kid in a candy store.

My Key Takeaways

From the “Website Wins” session: Several of the “wins” really jumped out at me as key features in efficient site design. With an increased emphasis on simplicity and clarity to the paradigm shift of “site construction” to “site gardening,” the site development process is clearly in a period of transition to best facilitate the customer experience, search engine friendliness and cross-browser compatibility.

From the “Customer Services” session: Customer service is at the heart of a host’s business. Web hosts should have a customer-centric mentality rather than a product-centric mentality to truly be successful in the industry. That underlying mentality will bleed into every aspect of your business, and will be conveyed both implicitly and explicitly through all of a company’s communication.

From the “Guerrilla Marketing” session: There are countless ways to differentiate and market your company outside of the traditional marketing techniques, and the question featured in the conclusion of the presentation embodied the guerrilla marketing mentality: “Is your message one in a million or is your marketing message just another one of the millions?” I enjoyed the session because it investigated many effective “outside the box” opportunities to generate interest and improve the customer’s buying experience (or at least the experience they have while they are receiving marketing information).

We’ve got one more day worth of sessions here in San Jose, so look for more stellar insight soon!

-Kevin

a night doesn’t go by that I don’t find myself thinking about the planet’s current and future customers … about their business needs … their suggestions and comments … and how they rely on the planet to supply their IT solutions … it’s one of the things that keeps me up at night … i’ve spent a lot of time in the past few months … talking to lots of folks and asking questions … anytime I could corner some of our employees, customers or industry folks … picking up bits and pieces on what we can do better …

i’m very lucky to have a great group of folks at the planet and incredible customers … all willing to talk to us … in fact, we feature a number of our customer success stories on our web site … dickson supply, bigstockphoto.com and auto lead exchange to name just a few … these companies come to the planet for help in managing their hosting operations … they don’t want to manage server farms or internet providers … and don’t want to run their own data centers and man them 24×7x365 or worry about negotiating the best hardware deal … they’ve asked the planet to take on that responsibility …

no matter what business you’re in … to serve your customers you need to talk to them and really understand their business needs … there’s an old, old, old sales saying, “to sell john brown what john brown buys, you must learn to see through john brown’s eyes,” … don’t remember the author but I picked it up during ibm sales training … a couple of weeks ago we had a company meeting and talked about some of our customers … I talked with employees about customer success stories … about how companies rely on us to run their business … which is why we’ve got to be at the top of our game … i talked about ownership and follow through … about customer satisfaction and how we all work to support their needs …

i wanted all my employees to hear from a customer first-hand so they can continue to learn what “johnny” needs … so i invited a customer to come and speak to the company and tell them first-hand about why they picked us and what they expect from the planet in regards to support and service … this customer also happened to be one of our newer accounts that’s moving their entire server inventory to the planet from two other providers … the speaker did a super job … at the end of the meeting I heard several folks talking about the impact he made and how it really crystallized our responsibility to customers … we’re going to do more talking and listening to our customers … I know we can never talk to all 22,000 of you, but we can try … over the next quarter we’ll be launching several programs toward this end …

we have a great group of employees at the planet … and we’re continuing to invest in them with training and tools … and along the way we’ll bring talent in to fill certain needs … speaking of which … the latest addition to the senior management team is steve reichert … steve joins us as vice president of information technology and operations … he’ll be running the IT organization, software development and operations of our data centers in both cities …

steve comes to the planet with more than 27 years of experience in running IT organizations and data centers … most recently from infocrossing in omaha … in college he did his fortran and cobol programming on a 029 key punch that he lugged around in his backpack … just kidding … he’s trading in the corn fields and moving to dallas, where he lived for more than 16 years earlier in his career … you can read more about him on our web site … we’re thrilled to have him join the team … we’re working really hard to supply you with great products, excellent service and great results … we know we have more to do … in fact we’ll never totally be satisfied because excellence in never truly achieved … the yard sticks keeps moving …

thanks for your notes … all the input helps me learn … and even sleep better at night … be careful … it’s a jungle out there.

- Doug

I find myself in unfamiliar waters with the launch of our new corporate blog today … this is new to me and very uncomfortable … I am used to dealing with customers, face-to-face and one-on-one … or making speeches to large audiences … i have never liked communicating through the written word … this new world of the masses and forums and blogs is strange … I do not like “hanging out there” … control freak I guess … but also because it takes me so much time to put my thoughts down on paper … a very very big time consumer … of which like you … there never seems to be enough time … (in my next life I want to come back and study the sciences so I can work on slowing down the rotation of the earth, therefore giving people 28 or 30 hours in the day) … oh well … my marketing team has told me I must join the 21^st century and get on with it … don’t get me wrong … I love talking to anyone who will listen about our company and what we’re doing … i will talk for hours about our plans and dreams and progress here at The Planet … but as I have already said … it has usually been through speeches and personal meetings with customers … but … here goes …

Anytime you merge two large companies there are going to be challenges … and we’ve made no secret that we’ve had a few … simply said … we’re trying to take the best of the two, compare it with anything on the outside and pick the best of breed in all we implement … we knew making these changes would not be easy but ultimately it would allow us to deliver better products and services to our customers …

we are driven to become the best at what we do … we realize that we need the best trained employees and tools to accomplish this … we are willing to spend the money to do this … and we’re already spending a chunk of dough on training our teams and buying tools that a world-class company must have …

we’re attacking the customer support and technical support areas first … we went out and hired a top-notch industry expert who has built many large, highly efficient world-class customer support centers for Fortune 500 companies … Jim Picone is the guy … the support centers he has built are easily 10’s of times larger then our needs … so we gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse and had him pick his family up and move them to Houston … we are thrilled to have him and as a lot of you have already mentioned in the forums and notes to me … there is already a difference … and we have just begun …

we have consolidated the dallas and houston call centers into one … we have invested in a system that now allows us to record and monitor the quality of our responses to the service calls so we can evaluate the rep’s performance and provide on-the-spot coaching and training … we are buying an entirely new phone system that lets us collect and review stats for the first time … it is hard to deliver world-class services if you don’t know how many calls you are getting and what hold times customers are experiencing … (hopefully that phone system will be installed within the next 8 to 10 weeks) … we are also evaluating a crm system … more work to do here … should be making the decision shortly … all of this is part of the millions of dollars we told you we are going to spend in order to build a world-class experience for our customers … you will see great strides with customer service each and every day … we are moving as fast as we can …

we are in the process of increasing our wages so we can keep and attract top talent … we are implementing a program to test our current and future technicians allowing us to have three levels … we will have criteria for them to work toward and goals they need to accomplish before we promote them … we are putting this in so our employees will view working at the planet as a place they can grow and have long term careers … in the past we paid poorly and taught them the basics and then they left for more pay … churn hurts and we want to keep our good employees … we will help by paying for them to get certifications … we will provide tuition reimbursements … and we will create a culture that rewards good work and customer focus …

Throughout the company we’re creating a culture that focuses on customers, ownership, integrity, trust and passion … a lot of powerful words but it is our rallying cry … we will prove it to you day by day … baby steps first and then great strides …

We have a lot to do … but we’re moving and we’re headed in the right direction …

so wrapping up my first entry (and it only took 2-½ hours) … let me thank you for your business … we all appreciate your business … we realize that you pay our salaries … thanks for the feedback you give us … keep it coming … it makes us work harder and run faster …

thanks for reading …

“Be careful … it’s a jungle out there …”

- Doug