The Planet Blog

“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

Folgers says “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.” I say it’s Starbucks.

Five minutes after I walked into the office today, my phone was ringing (not usually a good thing).

ME: Hello, this is Ali.
KH: Hey, it’s Kevin.
ME: Hi.
KH: I’m at Starbucks. Would you and Katie like something?
ME: YEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Not only did Kevin bring us Starbucks, he got our ridiculous orders right (Grande Nonfat Sugar-Free Cinnamon Dolce Latte and Venti Non-fat Latte with 5 Splendas), he put tape on the top so they wouldn’t spill. AND he didn’t just buy for us; he bought for other people, too.

Kevin, you win at Starbucks and for that, we thank you. Rock on!

It’s gonna’ be a good day.

As you know, Halloween is known for candy, costumes and sequels. Hence, nothing would be more fitting to follow yesterday’s Spoooooky post than a sequel post with more candy and costumes.

Never to be outdone by the Houstonians, The Planet’s Dallas contingent had their own little hootenanny in celebration of All Hallow’s Eve. In this anthropological investigation of the Dallas festivities, we see several striking similarities.

Apparently, every Halloween event needs two things: A Mario, A Pirate, and A Ninja. You can see Hiram costumed as Mario in this picture, and we already established that you will not be able to catch a ninja on camera, so we just need to have a documented pirate for the party to be a complete success.

Whew! Now that Alicia helped us get those requirements out of the way, we can take a look around at some of the other characters making an appearance.

This is officially one of the easiest “Where’s Waldo?” pictures anywhere. Interviews with Waldo-finders will be featured in success stories on a first-come, first-served basis.

In my humble opinion, Jessica’s vending machine costume was one of the day’s most creative. Unfortunately, the novelty and humor was lost on Thuy, another pirate attendee … Shortly after this picture was taken, the chips and candy were pillaged and plundered. Let that be a lesson to everyone: Don’t take pictures with pirates.

Beehive hairdo? Check. Ridiculous amount of tattoos? Check. Bling? Check. Patrice’s Amy Winehouse got my vote for the best costume in Dallas. She and Adron strike a pose in the picture above.

Do you see Waldo in this picture? He’s a little sneakier… As an interesting side-story, Steve, the dapper “pilot” formerly paid the bills as an airport lounge singer. To give you an idea as to why he was “formerly” an airport lounge singer, we can simply investigate where he got the pilot’s uniform: A commercial pilot walked up to the stage in the middle of Steve’s set and gave him one of his extra uniforms on the condition that Steve never subject a crowd of people to his singing voice again.

Don’t act like you’re surprised. It happens to be October 31, the day widely celebrated as Halloween, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you a look behind the scenes at the creativity of some of the folks here in Houston. Following a communal sugar rush from an abundance of candy and cake, I snapped a few pictures of some of the costumes seen around the office today.

The array included some that were funny, others that were creepy and a few more that were outright scary. Needless to say, we made for an interesting thematic juxtaposition: a dark knight with Super Mario and someone dressed as grapes … with a pirate thrown in for good measure.

We weren’t able to get the whole group together at one time for a picture since people had to run in and out to take care of their work, but the above picture is a good snapshot (pun intended) of the broad costume spectrum.

I know what you’re thinking, and I completely agree … “Awesome.” The best part: When Mario (Jason) hit the “?” box, it made the “bling” sound of coins or the *insert relevant onomatopoeia* sound of the mushrooms from the Super Mario video games.

I am not ashamed to admit that I was absolutely terrified of Chucky from the Child’s Play movie line when I was younger. I am, however, ashamed to admit that I might still be terrified of him (and Daniel by association).

“I’m gonna stay by the bar … and put out the vibe.” I am wildly envious of Chris and Kelly here. I’d naturally want to wear a powder blue or bright orange tux on Halloween to pay homage to Dumb and Dumber, but I’m afraid that if I actually got one of the costumes, I’d wear it at least 250 days out of the year.

Imagine you’re walking down the street and you see Doug in this suit coming your direction. Would you (a) Move across to the other side of the street; (b) Put your head down and walk by him quickly; (c) Slow down and talk to him; or (d) Turn around and run away as fast as you can? The correct answer: (d).

While International Talk Like A Pirate Day has passed, the unofficial “Dress Like a Pirate Day” is upon us. Josh’s costume actually led to quite a tense situation … it’s a commonly known fact that Ninjas Hate Pirates (and vice versa), so you can imagine the awkwardness when we were told that a ninja was in our midst.

Unfortunately, ninjas cannot be seen by the naked eye. Trust me, there was a ninja in front of that wall when the picture was taken … At least I THINK he was there.

Happy Halloween!

Back and by popular demand, I’ve got a new set of pictures for you! About a week ago, I was in Dallas, where I did a little investigatory photo-journalism in our offices and in a couple of our data centers. I could add a disclaimer on the picture quality, but if you’ve endured the last few picture-laden posts, you’re probably desensitized to the blurred focus and poor photo composition.

If you were to drive South on I-35E through Dallas, you’ll see one of The Planet’s offices on your right-hand side just before you got to the home of the Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Stars.

Trendy, contemporary, stylish, post modern? Office buildings like this one make me want to pretend to be an architect (like George Costanza).

Did you think the stylishness was going to be left with just the exterior? You should be embarrassed about being so wrong. On the right side of the hall, you will see a large white paper with hand-written notes. This poster was created at a recent meeting where every manager committed to improving some aspect of our business, and it is displayed prominently to remind our team of the goals we set.

As you can see, we don’t relegate the fluorescent pink ethernet cables to the data centers, but the keen observer will note that the cables didn’t make it too far away from a data center. This conference room (called Asteroids) overlooks a small portion of our D2 data center.

The window in the upper-left corner of this image is the conference room from the previous picture. D2 is one of The Planet’s legacy data centers. As you can see, the central floorspace is occupied predominantly by cages and cabinets with no overhead cabling. How do the cables get run? I thought you’d never ask …

In data center tours of this facility, these plexiglass sections are a big attraction. The cable tray is run under the floor to get the cables to their respective destinations. I mentioned how raised our “raised flooring” is in the “Data Centric” post, but I snapped a perspective picture for you from D6:

Before you cry “Foul!” on this picture, I should explain that the Dr. Pepper bottle in this picture was not opened in the data center … it’s simply one of the most standard heights I had to give a good perspective of the floor’s height.

I am starting to believe that the bright colors used on the cabling in our data centers is meant specifically to keep me from taking a clear picture of a hot row.

I realized after the previous data center post that I didn’t include any pictures of the other side of a server row, so I made sure to include one in this post. Aren’t the blue lights soothing? If you walk down this aisle, you feel like you need to be listening to Blue Train (which happens to be the album playing through my headphones right now).

Here is another beautiful picture of the side of the server that really matters. This Clovertown rack again features the organization I explained previously: every cable is individually numbered and assigned to a specific box to make server identification as quick and easy as possible.

Cut so short? No!!! Well, the mark of a great storyteller is the ability to leave an audience wanting more, so while I have a few more pictures of the backbones of the data centers (power, generators, network, GNOC, etc.), I’ll save those for a rainy day.

- Kevin

We got spirit! Yes we do! We got Spirit! How ‘bout YOU?

*pom pom shake*

Hi. I’m Ali Lastrapes, Associate Marketing Communications Manager for The Planet. I’m the person who makes sure tasks get done be it graphics, web updates, budget reports, marketing plans or lunch. (Yes, I do lunch really, really well. I also love to make little asides as you may see below. Think of it as Ferris Bueller talking to the camera.)

I’ve been here all of about seven weeks, give or take a few days. In my extended tenure, I’ve noticed something that makes The Planet stand out amongst a myriad of typical corporate stereotypes: teamwork and camaraderie. (Well, that and the casual attire, but I digress.)

It’s refreshing to work for an organization that fosters an environment where new ideas, hard work and personal growth are rewarded. It inspires you take pride in the work you do and the manner in which you do it in. I actually look forward to coming to work. I enjoy tackling the tasks of the day and seeing ideas blossom into reality. I like knowing that the team pulled together and launched a hugely successful promotion or new product (even if it means 6:30 AM conference calls). I don’t mind working long hours if the effort I put in and the success it brings is appreciated and acknowledged (which it always does). I LOVE spending lunch hours laughing over YouTube videos. (What? Lunch is totally part of my workday, people.)

So, I’m happily making myself at home here at The Planet. Together, my associates and I are working our fingers to the bone, putting together products and campaigns with one purpose in mind: fulfilling the needs of our customers and making the process as simple (and entertaining) as possible.

I look forward to making my way in the company, bringing you all compelling campaigns and giving you a laugh or five.

Goooooo TEAM PLANET!

*spirit fingers*

-Ali