Posts Tagged 'Event'

This year, SoftLayer partnered with ThreeFortyNine, a co-working space in Guelph, Ontario, to offer founders, funders, and anyone else heading to Montreal’s International Startup Festival an amazing first class ride on the SoftLayer Startup Train.

I sat down with Brydon Gilliss, the founder of ThreeFortyNine, to learn more about the experience.

Now in its fourth year, the Startup Train is quickly becoming an institution for entrepreneurs, funders, and professionals traveling from Toronto to the International Startup Festival. What was the impetus behind creating this experience?
The travel time to conferences is often wasted time. We wanted to try and make better use of it. Also, it can be lonely when you return from an exciting conference but don't have anyone to connect with after who had that shared experience with you. Having a group of people from your city who you travel and share the experience with creates a longer-term alumni effect in your community.

The International Startup Festival in Montreal draws one of the largest audiences of tech entrepreneurs out of any event in Canada. What do you think makes it so popular?
The city, for one. Montreal is one of the best cities to visit in the summer. There is always an attraction; a reason to make the time. The festival venue is completely different ... right on the water in Old Montreal. The festival-atmosphere makes it a unique and an enjoyable experience.

How has the Startup Train experience changed over the past 4 years?
Startup Train alumni know what to expect. There are always new people to meet and learn from, and we don’t complicate the experience with too much programming. There is enough to keep your business-busy if that’s your goal, but it’s also easy to relax, enjoy the service and views while meeting and chatting with people with a cocktail in hand. This year, VIA Rail, is doing us a favor and giving us one of their cool dome cars typically used for the longer-haul cross-Canada trips.

We’re really excited to do some speed mentorship on the observation deck of the train this year. What else can attendees expect to experience on the SoftLayer Startup Train this year?
There are plenty of people to discuss your ideas with. You can take advantage of the networking with like-minded startups, running your ideas past some of the old hats on the train, or getting some quality advice from the mentors on-board.

The train experience attracts people from around Ontario, not just Torontonians. What do you think gels the Ontario tech community, and how does this play out each year at the Festival in Montreal?
I'm not sure I know the answer. Certainly the train, as with other events in our community, is a gel point in itself. In Canada, in general, we're working to find our way quickly in this fast moving startup world. Events like the train and Startup Festival, are important ways for our lonely entrepreneurs to come together and build our energy; share battle stories; etc.

With around 2,000 people attending the International Startup Festival in Montreal it can get pretty hectic at the venue and in the Old Port in general. What are some tips you can give founders traveling, on or off the train, to Montreal for the Festival?
Getting to Montreal is half the battle. Those choosing Startup Train travel can expect to exert minimum effort with the payoff of maximum enjoyment. Train travel is so easy especially when compared to flying. To fly these days (we won’t even get into the 401 or driving in Montreal), travelers need to be hours early in order to be processed and searched. You have to deal with luggage hassles. You end up losing valuable time in an irritating environment. The actual flying experience itself isn’t an event compared to the romance and fun of train travel. From the moment you get to VIA Rail’s first class lounge prior to leisurely boarding, the actual experience itself is so relaxing. In a plane you’re not likely to get a view, but on a train, that’s all you have. It’s easy to meet and make authentic connections with people on the train right away, so that by the time you arrive in Montreal, you’ve already got some necessary work done. Near the Festival site, you’ve got plenty of social options in the city (walking distance and otherwise). It’s easy to sneak off and grab a beer on a cobblestone street in Old Montreal with startup train passengers if you need a break from the Festival.

For anyone interested in riding the SoftLayer Startup Train, please visit http://ibm.co/1HHV2QZ. If you are a member of our Catalyst Startup Program and would like to travel to the Festival on us, please email me ASAP.

-Qasim

At the Cloud Connect China 2014 event in Shanghai last month, SoftLayer met with over 2,000 industry experts, business leaders, and partners from around the world. Through our interactions with event-goers at our booth and following our Regional Sales Director Allen Poon’s keynote, “Growing on The Cloud: Faster, Easier, Economical,” we increased awareness in the APAC market, learned our customers wants and needs, and deepened relationships with our partners.

On top of that, we were honored to host our first exclusive customer luncheon in Shanghai, which included experts from the sales engineer, channel partner, and marketing teams. We were delighted to hear the great job we were doing from our customers:

It’s always an honor to meet with SoftLayer customers, and I hope to see you at our next event.

For all our readers in Asia below you will find the blog in its Chinese translation!

SoftLayer九月上海客户交流！

在上月的 2014全球云计算大会中国站 ， SoftLayer很荣幸能与超过两千全球行业领导， 专家，以及合作伙伴会面。通过我们这次活动的交流以及区域销售主任Allen Poon的主题演讲: “在“云”上成长：更快速、更简单、更经济“, 提高了SoftLayer品牌在亚太区市场的认识，了解到客户及对我司的期望，同时也加深了在中国的合作伙伴关系.

另外， SoftLayer也很荣幸首次在中国与客户午餐聚会。来自销售、 销售工程师、 渠道合作伙伴的专家团队与大家分享最有影响力的游戏案例。 也很高兴听到我们正在从我们的客户做的出色的工作：

非常感谢大家一直以来对SoftLayer的支持， 希望下次活动再与您见面！

此致.

Winifred Wong　（王小姐）
Regional Marketing Manager – GCG

When attending South by Southwest (SXSW), the streets of Austin can feel like a giant maze. Keeping up with all the events in and around the conference is exhausting (if not impossible), so we thought we'd create a simple "SoftLayer at SXSW 2014" cheat sheet to eliminate the twists, turns and Internet searches that you'd otherwise make to track us down.

SXSW Interactive (SXSWi) Tradeshow

You will find the SoftLayer team in the Austin Convention Center Exhibit Hall at Stands 404 and 406. SLayers will be on-hand to give you a guided tour of the SoftLayer customer portal and answer any questions you have about moving your business into the cloud in general or moving it onto SoftLayer, specifically. If you have trouble locating our booth, we've got an 8-bit-inspired milestone for you to look for: The Server Challenge II.

We launched the original Server Challenge at SXSW in 2011, and since then, we've been tweaking and improving the competition to engage with conference attendees and help us tell the SoftLayer story. The objective of the competition is to popular 24 drive trays into two 2U servers and plug the network cables into the correct switches in the fastest time possible. If at the end of the show you have the fastest time, you will walk away with a MacBook Air and major bragging rights. As a reward for reading the SoftLayer Blog, we'll give you a leg up on the competition by letting you watch the current 43-second Server Challenge II world record completion:

SoftLayer Speakeasy

If you're looking to chill, recharge or get work done in the midst of the SXSW craziness, sign up to join us at the SoftLayer Speakeasy, featuring the Catalyst Startup Lounge. Our Catalyst team is taking over a great 6th Street venue on Sunday and Monday to provide a relaxed co-working space for customers, partners, and startups. Entrepreneurs, investors, developers and individuals in the startup ecosystem are welcome to stop in for free WiFi, coffee and drinks all day, and after 7pm, you'll enjoy live music!

Register Now
Location: 501 East 6th Street, on the 2nd floor
Dates/Times: Sunday, March 9 at 12:00 PM to Monday, March 10 at 10:00 PM

SoftLayer Catalyst Incubator Program - SXSWi Panel

SoftLayer VP of Community Development Joshua Krammes joins a panel of customers and partners on Monday for a look at the tangible resources startup companies need to succeed:

IBM Cognitive Food Truck

While you're in town for SXSW, you're going to get hungry. Luckily, the Austin food truck scene is amazing, and you have quick and convenient access to any kind of food you can think of. This year, you'll even have quick and convenient access to any kind of food that IBM Watson can think up! Stop by the corner of Red River and 4th Street for a creative, crowd-sourced treat from the IBM Cognitive Food Truck. By using algorithms to determine why people like certain foods, Watson comes up with unique combinations of ingredients that deliver unbelievable results. And the best part...

Vote for the dishes you want to see the IBM Cognitive Food Truck create at SXSW online or by Tweeting your desired dish using #IBMFoodTruck. And if you get to try any of the food, let us know what you think about it.

With this cheat sheet, finding SoftLayer at SXSW will be a breeze ... Navigating the streets of Austin in the midst of all the crowds and chaos still might be tricky, though.

See you on Sunday!

-Rachel

The traditional approach to software development has been very linear: Your development team codes a release and sends it over to a team of quality engineers to be tested. When everything looks good, the code gets passed over to IT operations to be released into production. Each of these teams operates within its own silo and makes changes independent of the other groups, and at any point in the process, it's possible a release can get kicked back to the starting line. With the meteoric rise of agile development — a development philosophy geared toward iterative and incremental code releases — that old waterfall-type development approach is being abandoned in favor of a DevOps approach.

DevOps — a fully integrated development and operations approach — streamlines the software development process in an agile development environment by consolidating development, testing and release responsibilities into one cohesive team. This way, ideas, features and other developments can be released very quickly and iteratively to respond to changing and growing market needs, avoiding the delays of long, drawn-out and timed dev releases.

To help you visualize the difference between the traditional approach and the DevOps approach, take a look at these two pictures:

Traditional Waterfall Development

DevOps

Unfortunately, many businesses struggle to adopt the DevOps approach because they simply update their org chart by merging their traditional teams, but their development philosophy doesn't change at the same time. As a result, I've encountered a lot of companies who have been jaded by previous attempts to move to a DevOps model, and I'm not alone. There is a significant need in the marketplace for some good old fashioned DevOps expertise.

A couple months ago, my friend Raj Bhargava pinged me with a phenomenal idea to put on a DevOps "un-conference" in Boulder, Colorado, to address the obvious need he's observed for DevOps education and best practices. Raj is a serial, multiple-exit entrepreneur from Boulder, and he is the co-founder and CEO of a DevOps-focused startup there called JumpCloud. When he asked if I would like to co-chair the event and have SoftLayer as a headline sponsor alongside JumpCloud, the answer was a quick and easy "Yes!"

Sure, there have been other DevOps-related conferences around the world, but ours was designed to be different from the outset. As strange as it may sound, half of the conference intentionally occurred outside of the conference: One of our highest priorities was to strike up conversations between the participants before, during and after the event. If we're putting on a conference to encourage a collaborative development approach, it would be counterproductive for us to use a top-down, linear approach to engaging the attendees, right?

I'm happy to report that this inaugural attempt of our untested concept was an amazing success. We kept the event private for our first run at the concept, but the event was bursting at the seams with brilliant developers and tech influencers. Brad Feld and our friends from the Foundry Group invited all of their portfolio CEO's and CTO's. David Cohen, co-founder of Techstars and head honcho at Bullet Time Ventures did the same. JumpCloud and SoftLayer helped round out the attendee list with a few of our most innovative partners as well as a few of technologists from within our own organizations. It was an incredible mix of super-smart tech pros, business leaders and VC's from all over the world.

With such a diverse group of attendees, the conversations at the event were engaging, energizing and profound. We discussed everything from how startups should incorporate automation into their business plans at the outset to how the practice of DevOps evolves as companies scale quickly. At the end of the day, we brought all of those theoretical discussions back down to the ground by sharing case studies of real companies that have had unbelievable success in incorporating DevOps into their businesses. I had the honor of wrapping up the event as moderator of a panel with Jon Prall from Sendgrid, Scott Engstrom from Gnip and Richard Miller of Mocavo, and I couldn't have been happier with the response.

I'd like to send a big thanks to everyone who participated, especially our cosponsors — JumpCloud, VictorOps, Authentic8, DH Capital, SendGrid, Cooley, Pivot Desk, SVP and Pantheon.

I'm looking forward to opening this up to the world next year!

-@PaulFord