Do you know the way to San Jose? Well, if you do, you should hustle this direction for ISPCON. This week, we’ve got a few people here for the conference where “the service provider industry goes to GET REAL about the future of their businesses,” and I wanted to post a quick blog with a couple of the highlights from Day 1.
The conference is built around eight specific areas of interest to service providers: Wireless, Hosting, Technology, VOIP, Applications, Customers, Facilities and General Business. Attendees can select the most relevant topics to their business and join in the “Conference Breakout” sessions they find the most interesting. This conference structure allows for a great deal of customization, but the unfortunate trade-off lies in the fact that one might want to attend several of the concurrent sessions. To poetically paraphrase Robert Frost:
Several “Conference Breakout” sessions diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not attend all
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked at one session as close as I could
To where I could its topic call …
I won’t make you endure the rest of that silliness. I can tell you which topics I checked out this morning sans rhyme: “Using Social Networking and Web 2.0 to Market Your Business,” “Choosing to be Great Instead of Big,” “Strategies for Growing Your Hosted Business,” and the Day 1 Keynote session, “Neutrality’s Linchpin, is Bandwidth a Commodity?”
My Key Takeaways
From the “Web 2.0 to Market Your Business” session: the hosting marketplace is evolving as the digital world is evolving, so marketing departments have got to dynamically adjust to be most effective: blogging, social networking, social bookmarking, creating videos, etc. To illustrate the shift from Web 1.0 to 2.0, check out the YouTube video used in the presentation.
From the “Choosing to be Great” session: It’s very difficult to be “Great” and “Big.” A “Great” company is defined as “great in customers’ eyes, great in quality, great in the community, and a great place to work,” and a “Big” company often struggles to meet all of those requirements. A company must devote all of its focus to its customer experience, social impact and employee environment or it will fall short of “Great”ness.
From the “Strategies for Growing” session: A host has to provide value, a great customer experience, and sticky products. Value and customer experience are pretty self-explanatory, but the sticky product term may need a little clarification: A sticky product is one that inherently generates loyalty or “gets customers to stick.” A great indicator for your product’s stickiness? Churn.
The keynote session: Cogent’s Founder and CEO Dave Schaeffer explained his perspective on Net Neutrality. In a nutshell, he would like to see the Internet entirely “open, fair and accessible to everyone.” Because this is such a hot-button issue, there was an active Q&A session to wrap up the keynote. The most interesting question I heard was “Shouldn’t there be some kind of file priority in the event of a bandwidth shortage … or to put it more succinctly, is every packet of information equal?” Dave didn’t skip a beat when he responded, “I do believe that some traffic deserves a higher priority, but file priority should be a moot point. Instead of worrying about a theoretical limit bogging down bandwidth, we should overbuild our widespread network infrastructure to provide more than enough capacity for all traffic to be delivered at high priority.”
This afternoon, I’ll head into the Expo hall and find some good swag to bring home and show off. Look forward to another blog post soon about Day 2 which will include Doug’s headlining keynote!
-Kevin
