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Something came to my attention the other day that prompted me to think about careers, resumes and accomplishments.  I then began to think about what I had accomplished, the things I'm really good at and how all of this could be translated to ‘resume building’ and a growing list of talents to add to a resume or on LinkedIn.  

As I reflected on my life in general, both personally and professionally, I identified areas where I've been successful on a consistent basis and then looked for common themes around those activities.  Then, like a bolt of lightning it hit me.  One area I had overlooked was how I've been able to excel at motivating and inspiring people. 

I get a great deal of satisfaction by challenging people to achieve greatness and then giving them credit for their feats of excellence.  It's funny, because as I was trying to figure out how to translate such an intangible trait my resume, the phrase “20 years of motivating people and kicking ass” came to mind.  But on a resume, that doesn't seem to as substantive as “15 years building SaaS applications” or “3 years of RoR programming.” 

So if there is a lesson in this post (beyond shameful self-promotion), it is to do what you feel good doing, regardless of what it translates to on paper.  Those who know me or get to know me understand the value I bring to the table, and that my intangible strengths cannot be bought, taught or manufactured.  I feel that skills such as these are core to the success I have had in business and, more importantly, in life. Without a doubt, they are directly tied to the wonderful relationships (both personally and professionally) that I have maintained throughout my life. 

So to wrap this up, I encourage everyone to explore within and discover how to nurture these kind of traits and focus less on “how will this look on my resume” and more on “how will these skills help me make a difference and change lives."  If all else fails, there's always the example set by this successful man!

Yes, I've got another life lesson post for you. For those of you wondering if I've abandoned writing about technology, rest assured that I'll be getting back to the techy stuff soon. I can't avoid it. It's in my DNA. For now, there are a lot of things I have learned in my life, both personal and professional, that I think could be valuable to others, so I felt the need to share. 

Recently, I took a trip to the UK, and it’s almost shameful to admit that I hadn't yet made it to Europe.   Anyone who travels to the UK obviously has to use public transportation, so the Tube was a regular source of passage.  One thing that caught my attention was the phrase “mind the gap” when entering or exiting the train.  While at first this seemed a little comical to me, I later thought about it and wanted to draw this similarity to the business world. 

Often times we get caught up in the day-to-day and miss out thinking about the future and building a business for success. This gap in our thinking can limit our success.  It’s critical to allow people you surround yourself with to grow, take risks and be accountable.  As an effective leader, I feel the most important responsibility is to remove barriers and allow people to achieve their full potential.  Those who take advantage will help themselves, and the company, to reach amazing heights.  So make sure you mind the gap and give people a platform to get on the train. 

Something that has puzzled me for a long time is why when it comes to decision making, many people seem encased in cement and are incapable of making a call. 

Over-analyzing, triangulating and posturing all come to mind.  The reason….people are simply afraid to fail.  I have never subscribed to this mentality and think it’s a sure fire way to destroy a business.  You must take risks and you must fail (from time to time). 

Failure is a critical part of the learning process and will make you a much stronger person and team in the long run. The days of “why try because, we will only fail” are OVER! 

I say fail fast and move on and don’t let the same mistakes impede your progress.   If you embrace this ideology, there is no challenge too big!

For a long time now, I've felt that the phrase "Drink the Kool-Aid" didn't deserve the bad rap that it typically gets.  For me, it has lost its original negative meaning, and actually has the power to communicate positive values and help establish a company culture that is mutually rewarding for everyone in an organization.

Culture is something that is born out of a strong will to succeed and the ability to align yourself with extremely passionate people who share the same vision.  You have to work at it constantly and keep evolving it over time.  Strong cultures don’t just manufacture themselves, so it's important to treat culture with the same importance as having a business plan, creating a product and building a successful company. 

I learned a lot about building a good company culture from my co-founder and friend Frank Addante, who recently outlined his keys to success for Inc. Magazine.  In addition to founding StrongMail with me back in 2002, Frank has had great success over the years and built many awesome teams.  As I was reading his article, I began thinking of the common rules that I live for building healthy company cultures.

1. Always hire “hand-raisers.”  These are the folks who crave responsibility and always look for ways to help others.  Give people like this the appropriate accountability and guidance, and you will witness great things.
2. Make sure your goals are aligned.  Again, right or wrong, it's critical that people on your team know the vision, the role they play in that overall vision, what they are supposed to do and how it fits into the goals of the business. 
3. Treat culture like a job.  Let's face it…IT IS!  It is important to stress the values of the company and lead by example every day (not just when it's convenient to do so). 
4. Be accountable.  It’s not always going to be perfect, and it is important to understand that mistakes are part of growing.  Own up to them and learn from them.  I have certainly learned a lot of “what not to do” things with my time at StrongMail, but those to me are just as valuable (if not more).
5. Ask questions.  It’s often the simplest thing that is overlooked.  Many times we get caught up in the daily grind, and we think that a lack of knowledge is viewed as failure.  If you aren’t sure, ask.  Learning is a beautiful bi-product.

Remember, it’s only a job.  Work is a normal function of life and an inescapable reality, but as I tell people at StrongMail, if you make it as fun as possible, it doesn't have to feel like work.   

You will find that creating a healthy company culture pays great dividends and creates a great sense of pride and satisfaction (not to mentions it's an excellent recruiting tool).   So I say create a culture that your employees will embrace and let the sugary stuff flow throughout the organization and watch the success roll in!  OH YEAHHH!  (Sorry, I couldn't resist, and hope I am not violating copyright laws!) :-)

We are very fortunate to have a wonderful relationship with Rackspace. We recently had a very large joint win supplied from them so as a kind gesture we put together a short video thanking the Racker’s for their continued support and efforts. I thought I would share so enjoy!

Hello everyone. Sorry I have not posted in a while. I have promised to be more diligent on this going forward. We have reached a tremendous milestone last quarter surpassing our 500th customer and I could not be more proud as the co-founder of this company. I owe a ton of thanks to everyone at StrongMail for making this a reality. Not only did we accomplish this but we were also able to secure three long awaited patents for our core technology that has allowed us to grow to this achievement. These patents are related to our core technology called AMP that allows us the flexibility to achieve record-breaking throughput, highly dynamic/ personalized messages and industry leading deliverability. I am truly a proud papa today and looking forward to what we will accomplish at StrongMail in the future.

THREE CHEERS FOR STRONGMAIL…

Well I hope you got the pun from the title as its my best attempt at being creative. The data center hosting business has over a short period of time become very confusing for most people. I thought I would make an attempt to simplify this topics for everyone. First of all a simple definition of what these terms are (of course minus the last one which is a joke) and then my take on each.

SaaS -- Software as a service is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or upload the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires.

Think of this as the traditional ASP model from the Dot-Com boom. This is merely the act of offering a software solution such over the internet and charging fees for users per month (eg. salesforce.com).

PaaS -- Platform as a service is a runtime-system and application framework that presents itself as an execution environment and computing platform available over the Internet with the sole purpose of acting as a host to application software.

Think of this as the actual application framework that would run a SaaS platform that provides the technology stack (eg. Google AppEngine).

IaaS -- Infrastructure as a service is the delivery of computer infrastructure (typically a platform virtualization environment) as a service. The big push of virtualization technologies such as Xen, VMware, Hyper-V, KVM and others have really helped this category flourish.

Think of this at its most basic element of providing the actual physical (however in this case its virtual) resources like RAM, CPU, storage to run the application and platform (Amazon's EC2/S3, Rackspace Cloud, Terremark Vcloud, etc).

Now how do all these things fit together (or do they)? First these can all be used independently or together. For instance we have salesforce.com here at StrongMail to help run sales and support. We also use The Rackspace Cloud to fulfill the infrastructure for our Cloud offering. They are mutually exclusive to each other. These can however be used together and here is a simple diagram on how they interact and who would be interested in each layer. I hope this has been helpful.

Thanks to saasblogs.com for the picture.

When designing large scale systems, it's very easy to get caught up in details that will result in massive complexity. The most important thing is to remember is to focus on the problem you are trying to solve and keep things as simple as possible. Design your system in such a way that allows easy growth so that when your platform need to scale and adoption takes off you can easily build.

Think about this like Legos or building blocks. Create a system that is modular in design that will allow you to add capacity where you need without adding complexity and tons of iron. If you take the time to design it properly, it will provide the flexibility you need without breaking the bank.

I had this video forwarded to me by one of StrongMail's greatest minds (Junior as we call him) and thought it had a lot of merit. It's greats to see people with a positive outlook on life and business by keeping both in perspective. What it really boils down to at the end of the day you have to go home, look at yourself in the mirror and be happy with what you see. Moral to me is innovate, build, learn, and make mistakes but most important HAVE FUN.

PS...The video was filmed a bit choppy so don't think it's your ISP. :)

Many different things come to mind when I hear the word “Cloud.” To be honest, the first thing that I think of is this classic Homer Simpson audio clip. My co-founder Frank Addante often said I should write a book and base every milestone or event in my life on some clip from The Simpsons (I guess that is why the show it still going strong after all these years).

In any case, back to reality. Don’t get me wrong, I think the cloud idea is fantastic. Utility computing, capacity on demand, real-time scalability are all great ideas that allow maximum flexibility, provide massive cost savings and allow companies to maximize the computing power amassed over time. The one thing I don’t like about the cloud is that it seems a lot of people are very confused about the concept. I think this is quickly being pushed into the same category as “Web 2.0” and other classics.

My opinion is that simply offering your solution as a SaaS (or Software as a Service) does not constitute “being in the cloud.” While this is an important component to this relatively new way to offer software products today and adoption rates are very high, this is not the sole concept of the cloud. I think the company rPath does a good job at laying out the base components needed for adoption of the cloud computing model.

Here's the moral to my post. Whether we have the terminology right or wrong, the goal of the cloud is extremely promising. Being an infrastructure guy, I salivate at the opportunity to architect, deploy and manage such systems. I love scale, high capacity, on-demand access and repeatability/reusability. It is also exciting to keep pushing our own technology to allow our customers more flexibility when they deploy (whether software, hardware or virtual appliance).