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!

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).

In terms of technology, it's amazing how much progress we've seen in such a short period of time. With all the wonderful technology that exists today, I can now plug an IP phone into any decent broadband connection and conduct business like I am in HQ, when, in fact, I might be thousands of miles away. It's also amazing how important email has become to life and business. Whether it’s corp-to-corp email servers like Microsoft Exchange or world-class, on-premise outbound email servers like StrongMail (shameless plug), most modern businesses would be hard-pressed to live without it.

As I write this blog, I am also dealing with an internal Microsoft Exchange issue, and, even though my IP phone is handy, it can't compensate for the utility and effectiveness of email. Fortunately, we have email continuity in place, DR plans and full backups, because my preferred way to get and process information is email. The days of a simple phone call seem long forgotten (if not even preposterous for me to suggest). When Exchange went down and the back-up system was coming online, I actually heard people say “you mean I have to call someone to setup up a meeting?” as if to say that is the craziest idea they have ever heard.

As painful as an Exchange outage can be, losing your enterprise transactional email capabilities could cripple your ecommerce efforts. That's why trusting the emailing of order notifications and password reminders to your shopping cart system is never a good idea. These systems are designed to process online orders, not send email.

Email is certainly here to stay. It is an extremely important and effective communications tool , and it is growing by leaps and bounds every day. It seems like nearly everyone is rushing to buy the latest and greatest smart phones to get “on-the-go” access to web-based email like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail and to connect to their corporate email. As the founder of an email company, this prevalence and reliance on email would seem to indicate that I'm in the right business and not just drinking the Kool-Aid.

Respectfully yours,
Tim “email is life” McQuillen

It is funny how things progress in life. While attending college in Texas I was the person the IT guys hated. It never failed that whenever I entered a computer facility things usually ended up with smoke and a lot of expletives. I seemed to have the wonderful knack of breaking anything I touched that was computer related. After graduation, I moved to California and started a recruiting business with a few buddies. This is where I learned my first little bit of technology (it was out of necessity and cheapness). Plus it also helped me vet candidates before sending them on interviews. That skill led me to a company I still have a lot of respect for today and responsible for helping me grow the skill set that allowed me to co-found StrongMail. The company was called L90 and the technology we delivered was call adMonitor. This was an advertising and email platform we ran as an ASP and the company did extremely well. We had well over 3000 blue chip customers, a super team, and excellent technology. At our peak we were serving well over 8 billion transactions a month and chomping at the heels of DoubleClick.

When I started with L90 I was doing corporate recruiting to help reduce the amount of fees that they were spending on hiring talent in a very difficult market. After roughly 4 months of doing this and meeting my partner in crime (Frank Addante, who was the CTO and founder of L90, serial entrepreneur and pretty much the most driven guy I have ever met) I feel he quickly saw a skill in me that I wasn’t even sure I had. I started to run IT operations having no prior knowledge in this industry and then within a few months started building out the infrastructure that enabled our billions of transactions. The coolest thing about doing this was the challenge and scale. The entire industry used a system called Keynote to track competitors’ availability. High-scale and redundancy were a must.

So how did this all lead to founding StrongMail you might ask? It’s simple. At L90 we relied on many systems to produce results and they were a nightmare to maintain. I only had a staff of 2 people and we had a ton of gear (close to 800 systems). The challenge we had at L90 was it took many programmers to write custom code to allow our customers the flexibility to do what they desired. It also took a lot of hardware to run open source software (we used Sendmail) and that technology was really intended to run corporate email like Exchange. I love open source and we used it anywhere we could but it just was not designed to meet the needs of the outbound email and delivery. We parlayed the challenges we learned by running a very successful business and realized there was a gap in the market (at least we were hoping there was). Building this stuff is not easy, its takes a lot of time and effort and it is hard to scale. In my next entry I will discuss the problem itself and how we address it at StrongMail.