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2012 at SoftLayer: A Year-End Review

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It’s already December 18, so you’ve probably read a few dozen “Best of 2012″ and “Looking Back on 2012″ articles around the web by now. I hope that you indulge me as I add one more tally to that list … I can’t suppress the urge to take a nostalgic look back on all of SoftLayer’s successes this year.

As Director of Communications, the easiest milestones for me to use as I look back are our product announcements and press releases, so I’ll use those as landmarks to help tell the story of SoftLayer in 2012. Instead of listing those points chronologically, it might make a little more sense to categorize them topically so you can see the bigger picture of what’s happening at the company when it comes to product innovation, growth, the startup community and industry recognition.

Driving Product Innovation

When your company motto is “Innovate or Die,” there’s a lot of pressure to stay on the bleeding edge of technology. In this calendar year alone, we launched some pretty amazing products and capabilities that have the potential of reshaping the competitive landscape:

  • Flex Images – In February, we announced Flex Images — an amazing tool that blurs the line between “cloud” and “dedicated.” Users can easily replicate servers and move them between physical and virtual platforms to quickly meet their changing requirements. None of our competitors can match that level of flexibility.
  • High Performance Computing – In April, we launched high-performance computing (HPC) options powered by NVIDIA Tesla GPUS to provide an on-demand, consumption-based platform for users with the most compute-intensive environments.
  • SoftLayer Private Clouds – In June, we unveiled Private Clouds based on CloudStack and Citrix CloudPlatform. A Private Cloud is a an optimized environment that enables quick provisioning of cloud instances on dedicated infrastructure, and because we’ve automated the provisioning and expansion of the Private Cloud architecture, customers can order and configure full private cloud deployments on demand.
  • Big Data: MongoDB – Our most recent product release, an optimized MongoDB environment, was the amazing result of a strategic partnership with the team at 10gen. This flexible pay-as-you-go solution simplifies the big data buying process and enables organizations to swiftly deploy highly scalable and available production-grade systems. Big data developers don’t have to settle for lower-performance virtualized platforms, and they don’t have to hassle with building, configuring and tweaking their own dedicated environments (since we did all the work for them).

Expanding in Key Vertical Markets

Beyond the pure “product innovation” milestones we’ve hit this year, we’ve also seen a few key vertical markets do their own innovating on our platform. With a paintbrush and a little creativity, Pablo Picasso popularized Cubism, so when our creative customers are provided with a truly scalable platform that delivers unparalleled performance and control across both physical and virtual devices, they do their own world changing. Several top online gaming providers and cutting-edge tech companies chose SoftLayer to do their “painting” this year, and their stories have been pretty amazing:

  • Broken Bulb Studios – This social gaming developer uses SoftLayer’s public and private cloud infrastructure with RightScale cloud management to easily deploy, automate and manage its rapidly expanding computing workloads across the globe.
  • KIXEYE, Storm8, and East Side Games – These online gaming companies rely on SoftLayer to provide a platform of dedicated, virtualized and managed servers from which they can develop, test, launch and run their latest games.
  • AppFirst, Cloudant and Struq – These hot tech companies moved to SoftLayer to achieve the scalability, performance and the time-to-market they need to continue meeting global market demand for their services.
  • Huge Wins in Europe, Middle East and Africa – Companies like Binweevils, Boxed Ice, Crazymist, Exit Games, Ganymede, Hotwire Financial, Mangrove, Multiplay, Peak Games and Zamzar are just some of organizations that choose SoftLayer to deliver the cloud infrastructure for their killer applications and games.

Supporting the Startup Community

2012 was the first full year of activity for the Catalyst Startup Program. Catalyst is geared toward furthering innovation by investing time and hosting resources in helping entrepreneurs build their businesses, and as an extension of that program, we also supported several high-profile incubators, accelerators and startup-related events this year:

Earning Industry Recognition

All of this innovation and effort didn’t go unnoticed in 2012. SoftLayer’s growth and accomplishments throughout the year resulted in some high-profile recognition:

  • SoftLayer won the Red Herring “Top 100 North America Tech Award,” a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. With this award, we join the ranks of past recipients like Facebook, Twitter and Google.
  • SoftLayer was listed in the Top 10 on Business Insider‘s Digital 100 list of 2012′s Most Valuable Private Tech Companies in the world, alongside Twitter, Square and Dropbox.

Beyond that “official” recognition of what we’re doing to shake up the market, the best barometer for our success is our customer base. According to an amazing hosting infographic from HostCabi.net, we’re the most popular hosting provider among the 100,000 most visited websites in the world. We easily beat out all other service providers — almost doubling the number of sites hosted by the second-place competitor — and we’re not slowing down. We’re using the momentum we’ve continued building in 2012 to propel us into 2013, and we encourage you to watch this space for even more activity next year.

-Andre


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