New Hosting company appointed
By: james.baker@veepal.com February 20, 2011 at 9:09 am
Every year we review and always look to improve our service to our clients. Likewise we also review on an annual basis the service we receive from our suppliers to ensure they meet our service levels. In June 2008 we decided to review our data centers and our existing hosting company and after careful consideration and a through review process we decided to move to a new company. We wanted to found a company that would help us meet our increasing demands for 2010 so the the company we have awarded the contract is called Rackspace. Here is some information on them but do look at their site www.rackspace.co.uk
About Rackspace
Rackspace®, a leading hosting services provider, delivers websites, web-based IT systems and computing as a service. Our rapid growth is the result of our commitment to serving our customers, known as Fanatical Support® and our exclusive focus on hosting.
With over 6,000 customers in EMEA, Rackspace is totally focused and experienced in managing hosting solutions’ for their customers, from simple web servers to complex online applications, email solutions, security and storage services. We help our customers forget about their online infrastructure through providing Fanatical Support® for their hosted applications.
By outsourcing your hosting to Rackspace, you get the peace of mind that your hosting environment is being looked after by the experts, whilst alleviating the pressure on your own IT department. We take away those IT hassles, all those day to day IT tasks and projects you really don’t want to focus on. The implementing, updating, troubleshooting, patching, monitoring, administering, backing up and storing, and upgrading – all becomes our responsibility. Couple this with our Fanatical Support and you know that it’ll be taken care of by the experts with a unique passion to get things right for customers. Once you have Experienced Fanatical Support from Rackspace, you won’t accept anything less!
The Fundamentals of Rackspace
Founded in 1998 in San Antonio, TX
European headquarters established in 2001
2600+ Employees worldwide
70,000 Worldwide – 20,000 managed hosting customers and 50,000 cloud computing customers
6 Data Centres – 3 in USA, 2 in Europe and 1 in Asia
97% of customers would refer Rackspace to a business colleague
Rackspace has been voted as having the best customer service in the Country (in the 2008 National Business Awards)
Rackspace provides the world-class infrastructure necessary to keep your servers up and running uninterrupted around the clock. Rackspace has three Data Centres in London which are all
engineered with fully redundant connectivity, power and HVAC to avoid any single point of failure, and staffed 24 x 7 by highly trained technical support staff. Security of your mission critical
Internet operations is of paramount importance. Multiple levels of security are employed to ensure that only data centre Operations Engineers are physically allowed near your routers, switches and
servers.
Security procedures are as follows:
No Public Access
Public access to Rackspace data centres is strictly forbidden. We do not host equipment that we do not own and manage, which obviates the need for anyone but our highly trained Rackspace
Engineers to be allowed into the data centre. Because we manage all equipment and are the only ones allowed in the data centre environment, we are able to provide a higher level of service than anyone else in the industry.
Our new website has gone live this week and I am thrilled with the look and feel of the site. Again, thank you to everyone involved in the development of the site and I am sure that you all will agree that it’s a great source of information for potential clients. The new site is packed full of the latest features and the initial client response to the site has been excellent. I particularly like that readers can view some of the features and get a sneak preview quickly. The website clearly shows all the in built features we offer to clients as part of the rate card and it easy to see where and how clients will benefit when they switch to TrackerRMS. Please do contact me at david.alonso@tracker-rms.com if you have any feedback and I hope you enjoy the new content.
New website goes lives
By: james.baker@veepal.com December 11, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Our new website has gone live this week and I am thrilled with the look and feel of the site. Again, thank you to everyone involved in the development of the site and I am sure that you all will agree that it’s a great source of information for potential clients. The new site is packed full of the latest features and the initial client response to the site has been excellent. I particularly like that readers can view some of the features and get a sneak preview quickly. The website clearly shows all the in built features we offer to clients as part of the rate card and it easy to see where and how clients will benefit when they switch to TrackerRMS. Please do contact me at david.alonso@tracker-rms.com if you have any feedback and I hope you enjoy the new content.
Another reason to love SaaS
By: james.baker@veepal.com October 22, 2009 at 2:43 pm
After walking away from our feature request review the other day I was thrilled again by how quickly we get clients features into TrackerRMS. 92% of our 2009 features came directly from our existing client base. It did get me thinking about what a great role our developers have here at TrackerRMS and why I am continually being approached by potential employees. We only take on creative and innovative people and their constant feedback on features is vital in our decision making process about which features goes into the new release. I saw this blog the other day on entitled “Why can’t on-premise software vendors innovate” and I thought it was spot on. Thankfully our team of developers do not have these issues!
Development talent is wasted maintaining old versions: since customers don’t upgrade, the vendor must support old – even ancient – versions of their software. And upgrades must work with many old versions… again multiplying the effort to write upgrade and migration scripts.
Development talent also wasted porting to multiple platforms: porting the application code to multiple databases, operating systems, and application servers requires a significant amount of development work and time, not to mention significant testing and documentation efforts, and also further multiplies the technical support efforts.
Multi-platform support constrains innovation to the least common denominator of the various platforms: it’s hard to be innovative when you’re focused on making every new feature work across multiple versions of four different databases.
Long release cycle times reduce ability to innovate: All the porting, multi-path upgrades, and testing efforts mean that releases are very slow in coming – maybe a release a year at most. By contrast, even SaaS applications that have been around for a decade can release new functionality every 3-4 months because all these wasted efforts are eliminated.
On-premise vendors lack intimacy with how customers use the software: On-premise vendors have no idea what the customer’s business processes, configurations, setup or data looks like. In addition, they are shielded from customers by the system integrators who perform the lengthy implementation projects. Innovation involves applying technology to solve customer needs, but since on-premise vendors are somewhat blind to how their software is used in practice, their ability to innovate is severely hampered.
Customers don’t upgrade: Even when some modicum of innovation is achieved, customers must upgrade for the innovations to have impact, and upgrades are infrequent because they are so costly to customers.