Your New Infrastructure Calendar

In our ongoing efforts to keep your IT infrastructure life nice and tidy, today we’re rolling out a new way to track of all your important contract dates.

StackCal is an overview of all the Expiration & Auto-Renewal dates pulled automagically from the contracts you’ve entered into your Stackpop ICM account. So say goodbye to manually creating those calendar reminders because they’re all right here!

You’ll find your new Infrastructure calendar as a tab in your dashboard.  Upon login, you’ll see the current month with your important dates labeled accordingly. To the right is a list of contracts needing attention and down below are quick jumps to every month of the current year.

Personally, I think it’s the best thing to happen to calendars since Gary Larson.  

Is your calendar looking a little empty? We can help with that!  If you need help getting your footprint fully fleshed out on ICM, head on over to your dashboard and send us your docs through Stackpop’s White Glove service.  

Never used White Glove? Drop me a line (svh@stackpop.com) and we’ll get you started.

Login now to see what’s on the horizon for all your POPs.

- Schuyler

Introducing Stackpop Trends

When we first launched Stackpop in 2011 we always knew that the ability  to give our customers insights to global pricing trends would help them to more efficiently scale and grow their infrastructure. We also knew that there are many types of buyers with separate challenges. Some companies have entire departments focused only on negotiating with vendors for procurement of their infrastructure.

Conversely, many young companies and startups in rapid growth modes end up spending hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars in excess of what they should, due to the fact that they feel they don’t have the time or the experience to optimize their spend.

At Stackpop, we believe that we can help all types of customers. Our Infrastructure Cost Management (ICM) Platform helps customers manage and optimize their IT infrastructure spend and our data is a key component of ICM’s overall value proposition. This value will only increase as we continue to sign up more buyers and sellers. What you see today with the small sample of data in Trends Beta only scratches the surface of what is on our product roadmap. 

Now onto some questions that folks might have about the Trends data.

How did we get the Data? 

All data points included in Trends comes directly from our vendor partners.  Some of these ‘sellers’ are public and some are not. We let our vendors control what data they input (with minimums) and what information is exposed to logged in vs. anonymous users. By normalizing what information is collected within our seller-side data model we can then ask questions of our database: 

- What is the median price of a cabinet with no power in China, Japan, and Singapore?

- What is the average cost per month of a Intel E5-2690 core amongst dedicated hosting providers, broken down by continent

- and so forth …

Why are you only showing data at the country level?

This is aggregated to the country level - we will allow for more specific queries in the future. 

What if I’m paying much more or less than what your data shows?

Well, it happens. Some folks are great negotiators, have access to economies of scale, and found a good or bad sales person at the particular time they were buying. While we do plan on accounting for this ‘spread’ in the future, this data today represents a mixture of aggressive pricing with ‘list’ pricing, so we feel that is fairly representative of the real world. 

Does this include any of your customers’ contract data? 

No, it does not include anything but data directly from our vendor partners. 

Can I search aggregate pricing by vendor?

While Trends data does not allow association of price points to individual vendors, if you’re a registered user you can log in to your account and user our marketplace to search for specific configurations.

Do you have a deep analytics product or a raw data feed that you provide?

Not at this time, no. 

If you have more questions, feel free to shoot me a note (jason @ stackpop) and let me know. We look forward to hearing from you!

Check out our Trends Heatmap now

-Jason

Our $50 Adjustable IKEA Standing Desk

I’ll be the first one to say that my sitting posture over the course of the work day goes quickly from perfect to pitiful. As a designer & developer, I spend 8+ hours at a desk each day clicking and typing away. As the clock ticked forward, my chair slipped backwards until I felt like a single-cell organism oozing under my desk.

Per ergonomic recommendation of our CTO, Aram, we set out to find the best solution to convert our existing desks into standing desks. Since furniture and hardware stores are scarce (and pricey) in Manhattan, we decided to take our business over to the Red Hook IKEA in Brooklyn.

Our Mission:

Our biggest concern was to find parts for a height-adjustable standing desk to accommodate the varying heights of the Stackpop team. When you have a height variance of 5’8” to 6’3”, there is no such thing as a one-size-fit-all— and so our hunt began.

We knew we needed both a table-top and adjustable legs. Once inside of IKEA, finding the table top was easy— there are plenty of options. The one we went for was the LINNMON Tabletop (White) at 39 3/8” x 23 5’8” for a whopping $5.99 (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00251338/#/00251135):

The table-legs, however, proved to be harder of a find. There were many table-leg options, but they were either too tall or not adjustable. For myself, I needed about a 9” extension from our existing office tables. With the LINNMON table top being 1 3/8”, we had to find legs that would adjust from 7” upwards to 12” for our taller Stackpoppers.

After spending about 20 minutes in the Self-service section, Aram & I happened upon adjustable legs made originally for beds: the adjustable SULTAN support legs for $10 each! (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/45932080/)

Assembly:

After a Sunday afternoon bus and subway ride from Red Hook to DUMBO to Manhattan, we arrived back at our Flatiron office. Unfortunately, the pre-drilled holes in the tabletop formed a pentagon, and the legs we bought had only 4 holes. So we rolled up our sleeves and brought out the handy toolset and started drilling.

Measuring and drilling the holes for the support legs (~1” from the corners):

Securing the legs:

Before:

After:

Aram working at his shiny new standing desk:

Conclusion:

After a day of scavenging IKEA for parts and a night of assembly with our Biz Dev Director, Schuyler, the rest of the team hopped on board to the standing desk revolution. So far after half a week in, the consensus is that there’s improved energy and focus if you stand while you work. In addition to better posture, you also end up burning a couple hundred more calories standing than you do sitting over the course of a full work day.

Item List Summary:

• LINNMON Table Top (White) x1: $5.99
• SULTAN support legs ($10x4): $40.00
• Screwdriver & Drill bit

Assembly Instructions:

1. Take a ruler and draw margins of 1” from the corners of the bottom of the table.
2. Trace the template for the table legs and mark the centers of the holes for drilling.
3. Using a power drill and drill bits, make holes for the screws to secure the table legs.
4. DRILL ALL THE LEGS!!!
5. Adjust the height of the table by twisting the table legs to appropriate height.

Reference: 

Have any questions about how we made our standing desks?

Send me an email (zethus@stackpop.com) or tweet us @stackpopinc!

Happy IKEA-hacking and happy standing!

- Zethus

Your Dashboard Got a Facelift

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Stackpop Release Notes! We’ll publish a comprehensive synopsis here for each major update.

Without further adieu, let’s dive right in and introduce you to YOUR NEW DASHBOARD!

ICM Customers

We pulled the Spend by Month graph out of the reporting suite and dropped it front and center.  It’s a quick snapshot that tracks your overall IT Infrastructure spend over the past 12 months - hover over the graph line to highlight your exact monthly spend down to the penny.

We’ve also streamlined the overview tables at the top of the dashboard. Reborn as “Your Summary”, we condensed Monthly Spend, Contracted Spend and Contracts into a single toolbar. Click on each section to dig deeper and reveal breakdowns of monthly spend for the 3 past and 2 future months, contracted spend by vendor and contracts by status.

Oh, and that little red circle in contracts section? That’s just a little heads up indicating how many contracts you have expiring soon; hopefully helping you keep on top of everything with as few mouse clicks as possible. 

In addition to these nip/tucks, we added a side bar below and to the right of the graph with some handy dandy info.  Here you’ll be able to access to your White Glove email address as well as view a log of recent activity in your company’s account.  Managers, now you can see who changed what and when (!) — and for those of you not yet using White Glove, give me a shout (svh@stackpop.com) and let’s explore how my team can make uploading your costs even easier!

Marketplace Service Providers

Don’t worry Providers, we didn’t forget about you! We added some great new features for you too.

Similar to the ICM customers’ dashboard, upon login, you now have a nice big visual representation of your Stackpop presence.  We built you a map with a sweet data visualization overlay highlighting each of your inventory locations on the Stackpop Marketplace. Not only can you now ‘see’ all of your inventories geographically, but by clicking through you can directly access each of your inventories easier and faster. 

As you can see from the map above, each city in which you have Infrastructure service for sale will be tagged with a number and color-coded. The number represents the total listings in that city with gray representing Colocation, purple for Connectivity, and brown for Dedicated Hosting.

Providers, your new ‘Summary’ toolbar has been streamlined as well to keep the details for Inventories, Coupons, Orders and Contracts tucked away nicely in dropdowns. Clicking on each section reveals a breakdown by status; click through again to reach the full list. Just another way we’re making it easier to manage your infrastructure sales funnel.

I’ll keep publishing release notes each time we have a major release to make sure that each of you is up-to-date and getting the most out of your Stackpop account.

And of course, WE LOVE FEEDBACK, so if you have a feature request, suggested improvement or even gripes, send me an email and we’ll get it in the queue.

Happy Stackpoppin!

~~ Schuyler (svh@stackpop.com)

Fascinating prediction…

From a 2002 paper on ERPs on the opportunity for cloud-based/SaaS ERP/CRM products:

Title: The Evolution of ERP Systems: A Historical Perspective 

http://odo.lv/xwiki/bin/download/Training/ERP/193070836XExcerp.pdf

“This situation again is an opportunity for smaller players to seize the day and 
offer smaller systems running on smaller hardware platforms more efficiently. These innovators will ultimately take the lead in the ERP software market as large systems will not produce the continual income stream that 
small, robust, easy-to-use systems can achieve. Importantly these attributes 
contribute to a system becoming ubiquitous in the same way that Microsoft has achieved ubiquity for its operating system. Future successful vendors will capture large markets of smaller businesses, who will provide a more consistent and enduring income stream.”

- Jason

What’s Your (Infrastructure) Burn Rate, Bro?

I was recently in a coffee shop in Union Square and overheard the following conversation:

“What’s your burn rate, bro?”

“I’m not sure actually. Pretty low I think”

Besides some peculiar surfer dialect sneaking into what appeared to be a business meeting, the content of the conversation struck me as quite strange. I was assuming from other bits of eavesdropping that both gentlemen were start-up CEO’s, and its completely baffling to me that a CEO, regardless, of stage wouldn’t understand his or her company’s monthly burn. One founder I know calculates how many days he has left - weekends be damned. Sure, ours varies a bit from month-to-month, but I know what the max is and we try to forecast on worst case scenario when possible.

Anyway, I think suggesting that start-up CEO’s and founders should be aware of burn rate and current life is fairly obvious and not worth a full blog post. What this conversation did get me thinking about though, was something that we deal with on a continual basis with rapidly growing companies: what do you spend on your infrastructure every month? What’s your Infrastructure Burn Rate?

Most of our customers have engaged us with 2 similar problems: 

1. They think they’re spending too much on infrastructure (and they usually are)

2. They want to know how to save costs and scale more efficiently over time

In regards to number 1, they usually come from companies who are on AWS or Rackspace and have grown quite rapidly. We’ve spoken to companies who spend as little as $10k and as much as $90k a month. We’ve found that in most scenarios the number where it starts making sense to look for more cost effective alternatives is about $15 - $20K per month and it almost always is the best move if you’re spending more than $40K per month on public cloud or hosting. 

For situation number 2 the awareness is already there and they are looking at options for datacenters, private clouds, CapEx costs being spread out over time, how much bandwidth costs in their region, etc. Our marketplace data gives them a very insightful look into this (in minutes, not days) and of course we typically offer up ourselves as resources as well. We’ve even engaged as consultants (self funding through actual revenue … novel idea!) in a few larger projects and produced many satisfied customers, some who are saving $1 million over a three year period. To put in perspective, thats 20% of $5M dollar, Series A round, or real money for almost any company. 

The fact is that (outside of headcount) IT and infrastructure costs are one the largest, if not the largest, components of a yearly budget at almost any company that has more than 100 employees. The closer startups grow into this number, the higher the percentage of their expenditures on cloud/servers/technology make up the total bottom line. 

So my advice to start-up founders: when you reach the $10K/month public cloud spend, start thinking about your infrastructure burn rate and start thinking about saving your VC and revenue dollars. Remember that saving this cash now - which can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range (or more) - allows you to keep more of your company as you raise capital in the future. 

— jason