It’s been a few weeks since Voxel was acquired by Internap and now is a good time for some reflection. Much of the “post-deal” craziness has started to die down and we’re back to our day jobs. A few high level points for those of you who don’t want to wait for my take on things:
- Internap is full of seriously smart, hard-working people with 15 hours-a-day work ethics.
- MIRO and XIP™ are hot stuff, we can’t wait to use them.
- The company-owned facilities in major cities like New York, Dallas, Santa Clara, etc., are run really nicely (and they look good too).
- The Voxel brain trust and product set really ‘clinks’ with the IT platform Internap has developed.
- There is huge excitement within the company about automation, intelligent software and scalability solutions. Basically the engineers at both Voxel and Internap seem to have a lot to talk about over lunch.
One personal journey that I’m starting on is that this is the first time in 11 years that I’ve got a day-to-day boss. I’m sure I’ll have some adjustments and missteps in the process of working with a larger team, but Steve Orchard, who heads up the entire operations and service organization at Internap, is making it pretty easy so far for the guys and gals on the Voxel operations team. His team has a culture of service that I’ve found throughout Internap — one in which C-level execs all the way down to new engineers are willing and excited to roll up their sleeves, hop onto an SSH (Secure Shell) session and fix a problem or improve the experience for a customer. Internap has an engineering-based culture similar to what we’ve grown up with at Voxel and one I know our clients will appreciate. Plus, as soon I saw Steve load up PINE (Program for Internet News & Email) and rapid-fire respond to a couple dozen emails over horrendous airport WiFi in the time it took me to load up my Outlook client, I knew the guy had street cred and could relate nicely to the customers and partners that make up Voxel’s client base.
As VP, hosting operations and support, I’ve got the task of scaling up the team that provides 24/7 support for hosting and cloud customers. It’s somewhat familiar territory for me — growing a highly technical team of global engineers that help make our customers raving fans — but on a whole new scale. You can be sure I’ll be taking pro tips and leveraging the experience of the top notch NOC and customer service team that Internap has built over the years. I’ve seen the call logs and ticket reports from the NOC, and it’s pretty impressive to see how proactive and professional this group is.
Overall it’s been a great experience getting to know this new, much larger team over the past weeks. I’m excited for what we’ll be able to accomplishe with our combined resources — essentially we’ve strapped on a rocket to many of the Voxel projects that were always hampered by resources, budget or hours in the day — and we’re ready to bring even more market-leading hosting and cloud solutions to our customers at an accelerated pace. As we do so, make sure you keep in touch with us and let us know what we’re doing wrong, doing right or not doing at all — we’ll be anxious to hear your feedback.
