April 2013
3 posts
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...
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...
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...
March 2013
5 posts
3 tags
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...
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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...
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New Almost-Flat Menus →
A sneak peek of some new @stackpopinc ‘almost-flat’ registration forms by @zethussuen
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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...
January 2013
10 posts
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“You don’t like Wizards? So? Are you the customer? Will it help the customer? Get...”
– @lincolnmurphy
One of my favorite new blogs on all things SaaS sales/marketing
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7 SaaS Revenue Streams →
Diversification+Experimentation+Network Effect=Win?
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“Meetings are for deciding; reports are for reporting.”
– @virtuallybing via comment section in this @bfeld post on Urban Airship’s meeting rules
Trimming IT Infrastructure Costs in 2013? →
Here are 9 tips from Gartner - most of which the Stackpop ICM tool does natively
Have you signed up for your free Stackpop account yet?
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Should you automate your Help Desk?
Short answer…HELL YES!
Gartner highlights some obvious pitfalls in IT help desk automation, however, one thing that they leave out is how to monetize, albeit indirectly, the necessary content that you’ll be creating as you automate.
Through building up your internal wiki and knowledgebase you are not only creating a way for your customers to answer your own questions but you are also...
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“Wired people should know something about wires”
– @NealStephenson via @ajblum during his #TED2012 talk on internet physicality. @tubesbook is now #requiredreading for any newbies joining the team
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Ever wonder why touchscreens don't work while... →
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my friend om...
patriciahandschiegel:
….has a blog now on Tumblr
A few things about Om:
1. We both own media companies
2. His is a lot larger than mine. For now. (ha ha)
3. He has good taste in shoes
You can follow his blog here
Om on Tumblr? Instafollow!
December 2012
26 posts
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“In general we heard from a lot of folks that the companies put off all their...”
– Kelly Morgan, research manager at 451 Research
More evidence that datacenters aren’t going the way of the dinosaur anytime soon. Who’s ready to get their Rack’N’Stack on in 2013?
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Uptime in King →
Always love to see other B2B techops/devops driven startups solutioneering these types of issues
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“The downtime raised new questions about Amazon’s management of the region, and...”
– @datacenter writing on the holiday outages AWS suffered in Ashburn on Christmas Eve and Day.
Outages due to load balancing issues? Ahh the holiday joys of the cloud! Pretty bush league AWS. Just when you thought AWS’s year of PR nightmares couldn’t get any worse another misstep to add...
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“Tell state legislators to stop unfairly taxing Vermonters’ internet service...”
– Stop the Cloud petition in Vermont protesting legislature to tax cloud services.
The Vermont Tax Committee Voted against State Cloud Services Taxation two weeks ago. Hopefully this is an early Christmas present for all those tech companies in the Green Mountain State who are trying to turn around...
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What can we look forward to next year?
Leading northeast fiber providers Lightower & Sidera will MERGE in #2013 under Berkshire’s vigilance
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“The sales and earnings have increased every single year and have in fact...”
– Vinita Mittal - Motleyfool.com blogger in her post comparing $ORCL to $CRM.
Sure both of these are ‘enterprise’ grade products, but not quite sure how I follow these being labeled as comps. $SAP & $ORCL are HUGE bloated software for tries to do a million things for a million types...
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“Between the birth of the world and 2003, there were five exabytes of information...”
– Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google (via inthenoosphere)
So does data follow an inverse supply-demand relationship? ie> the more data there is the more valuable it becomes?
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Everything's Bigger in Texas
With new legislature making the rounds in Texas, this could soon include datacenters and corresponding tax breaks
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3 Words: Software. Defined. Networking.
2012 certainly marked the year when SDN gained momentum and made a serious splash in the Infrastructure world (at least from an M&A POV)
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Downtime: TechOps & DevOps Worst Nightmare
Thanks to DC Knowledge, we get to remember the Top 10 (bottom 10?) moments in 2012 outages. And no, contrary to popular belief, they’re not all AWS Ashburn related
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Innovation or Unnecessary Security Risk?
Emerson Network Power unveils their new app to manage datacenter coolers. If it’s connected to the web, doesn’t that just make it vulnerable to hack? Do you really need to adjust your PUE remotely and put all of your client’s at risk?
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http://www.evolutionoftheweb.com/ →
By far one of the coolest websites we’ve seen in a while
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Another reason to fund STEM?
Learning how to count!
OK OK granted maybe I’m being a bit harsh on the US Gov’t but how do you just uncover ~2K datacenters you didn’t know you had 2 years ago???
In the US Gov’sdrive to shutter all of it’s datacenters and move exclusively to the cloud, more datacenters keep crawling out of the shadows.
At the onset there were 1,100 data centers, but the 2011 plan...
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My enterprise brings all the boys to the yard
Word around the startup water cooler keeps circling around and centering on enterprise as the next hot market segment for VCs.
Looks like building a business with intrinsic value and dare we say a BUSINESS MODEL might just be a better investment than that shiny new consumer toy in the long run…
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Storm approaching the Amazon data center
devopsreactions:
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Our favorite new Tumblr →
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What about the rest of your stack? →
Pinterest, Yelp and Flipboard discuss their AWS optimization strategies. Great insights as to how to maximize your cloud costs if you have the time and manpower to stay on top of and leverage the constant ebb and flow of the AWS spot market.
This does beg the crucial question, however:: How do you manage the costs of the rest of your inelastic IT stack? And probably more important…how do...
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Would you pay for Google and Facebook? →
Hate to pull the fire alarm, but if the ‘sender pays’ model gets approved at this week’s UN World Conference on International Telecommunications we’ll probably see some big changes in the way the ‘net is monetized. If content producers/distributors start being taxed for the HUGE amount of bandwidth they use, we, the end-consumer, will be sure feel it.
Maybe this is the evolution of the...
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Carriers don't have the resources to innovate from... →
Vice.com Publishes Exclusive with John McAfee... →
Whoops!
November 2012
7 posts
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No Country is an Island →
Syria shuts down all inbound and outbound traffic a la Egypt last year. How long before this shutting out the internet becomes akin with banning reporters during wartime?
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Do you know where your DC's generator is?
I have a feeling we’ll be seeing fewer and fewer generators in the basements of #nyc datacenters in the future
Here’s a rundown of all the #nyc #datacenters hit hard by #sandy via @datacenter
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Since when does a server closet equal a...
Apparently (according to IDC) the total number of US datacenters will fall to 2.89M in 2016 from 2.94M this year. Cloud is to blame for fewer (but bigger) datacenters being built via GigaOM
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“CA wants a judge to shut down New Relic”
– The latest iteration in the long line of tech’s version of David v. Goliath
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/05/ca-files-lawsuit-against-new-relic-seeking-injunction-claims-patent-infringement/
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