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IBM today announced a broad set of global initiatives to better position clients to take advantage of cloud opportunities. This effort is aimed to further expand IBM's cloud ecosystem, enabling organizations to develop solutions and services on IBM SmartCloud and PureSystems, built on open standards.  As cloud becomes increasingly important for clients to drive efficiency, they are looking at Managed Service Providers (MSP) like PEER 1 Hosting to help them quickly develop cloud based services in a more simplistic, secure and economical way.   To date, IBM has built relationships with more than 1,400 MSPs, focused on delivering industry specific capabilities such as helping a small healthcare provider manage digital records on the cloud securely, or helping a midsize bank help their clients securely conduct more and more of their daily transactions via smartphones. 

IBM is taking its collaboration with MSPs and the global ecosystem one step further by enabling them to build innovative solutions and services on IBM's advanced technologies such as SmartCloud, PureSystems, and analytics. IBM will also provide MSPs access to IBM experts with deep technical skills at global centers of excellence, offer an unmatched set of programs to support  MSP marketing efforts to help them build their brand,  generate demand for their services, and grow their marketing skills.

For more information, please read IBM official press release.  

About the Author

Rajan Sodhi

VP Marketing and Communications, PEER 1 Hosting

Rajan Sodhi joined PEER 1 Hosting in November 2004 and is responsible for corporate marketing and communications. Rajan has over 20 years experience in branding, digital marketing and social media. In 2006, he launched the popular BIG Marketing for Small Business blog to serve his passion for all-things marketing. He has produced award-winning digital advertising campaigns, and his opinions and insight have appeared in publications around the world. 

While there are still a few weeks left of summer remaining, now is the time for online retailers to start thinking about the their eCommerce websites and the looming holidays. With online holiday shopping in the US alone topping $37 billion in 2011, can you truly afford to have website performance and availability issues this season? Every second of downtime and latency impacts shoppers’ online experiences and their decision to purchase from you.

As you begin to plan for the upcoming spike in shopping traffic, there are two fundamental elements to consider that impact your eCommerce website performance and speed:

1.     Fine-tuning the design, development and user experience of your website.
2.     Optimizing the performance, availability and scalability of the infrastructure powering your eCommerce site.

Get a jump-start on your planning with these best practices:

Brush Up on Your eCommerce Website's History
Understanding historic traffic patterns can give you an idea of what to expect. When can you expect to hit your peak traffic load? How many visitors at any given minute? How many simultaneous checkouts? How does your marketing impact your traffic flow? Utilize a combination of traffic history, metrics and analytics to help you prepare. If you haven’t historically tracked this type of information, plan for this year and try to anticipate your traffic and build this in to your online shopping strategy.

Consider the Cloud
Talk to your hosting provider about what scenarios you may face over the holiday shopping season to help find the cloud solution that’s right for you. That may mean bursting in to the public cloud to manage massive traffic spikes or utilizing a private cloud to increase existing server utilization. 

Over-Prepare and Build in Redundancies to Protect Your Revenue Stream
Address data continuity and disaster recovery in your plans. Determine your tolerance for downtime and then chose what best suits your needs: geographically dispersed; hot standby; warm standby; or backup remote location. Look for a hosting provider with multiple data centers and the ability to back up to other locations.

Provide Shopping Guides
Create shopping and buying guides to make it easy for shoppers to make decisions when they’re not purchasing for themselves. This is your opportunity to show opinion and expertise, giving customers a reason to buy from you instead of the manufacturer or another retailer.

Think Social
If you’re not already leveraging social media to help drive traffic to your website now is the time. Spend the next three months establishing a presence and voice on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Choose one to start with and add on as you become more comfortable using the various platforms. If you’ve already developed a solid social media following consider trying something new, like Pinterest.

For more tips on maximizing your eCommerce performance this upcoming holiday season, join PEER 1 Hosting at Shop.org’s Annual Summit, taking place on September 7, 2012 in Denver, Colorado. Each fall, Shop.org produces the Summit as an educational and networking event for the entire digital retail community. See you there!

Not all cloud internal networks are created equal. When it comes to making a purchase decision, understanding the functionality of cloud infrastructure is crucial. Though cloud hosting providers usually give you a choice when it comes to the amount of CPU, RAM, storage and servers needed, those are not the only differentiators  between providers.

Cloud Spectator recently published the results of an internal network performance benchmark, comparing PEER 1 Hosting’s Zunicore cloud servers next to Amazon’s EC2. The performance of each provider’s internal network was tested on a virtual private network (VPN) and measured both speed and consistency.

The study showed that Zunicore outperformed Amazon in every one of the ClouSpecs performance measurements. Zunicore cloud proved to be better and a more consistent performer.

Review the complete data details from the Cloud Spectaor comparison here: Internal Network: Zunicore vs. Amazon EC2

About the Author

Rajan Sodhi

VP Marketing and Communications, PEER 1 Hosting

Rajan Sodhi joined PEER 1 Hosting in November 2004 and is responsible for corporate marketing and communications. Rajan has over 20 years experience in branding, digital marketing and social media. In 2006, he launched the popular BIG Marketing for Small Business blog to serve his passion for all-things marketing. He has produced award-winning digital advertising campaigns, and his opinions and insight have appeared in publications around the world. 

For companies that produce and analyze vast quantities of data to power their business, High Performance Computing (HPC) is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must. Offering as much as twenty times the performance of normal servers, HPC has streamlined computing tasks, in many cases shrinking project deliverable times from weeks or months to just hours or days – a competitive advantage companies can’t afford to lose in this challenging economic environment.

Having a flexible IT infrastructure and computing capabilities are the keys to realizing significant competitive advantages in today’s market. Data volumes are not decreasing – in fact they are on the rise and getting bigger. One of today’s growing pain points in IT is that many companies have outgrown their data centre space and resources allocated to HPC; and adding more can be costly – not only are they expensive to purchase, they consume three to four times as much power as a normal server and generate several times the amount of heat. Not to mention they can take months, even years, to implement.

Despite the importance of HPC, many CIO’s find themselves locked in budget battles and arguments over IT and business priorities when trying to support evolving HPC needs with additional computer resources and headcount. To overcome this challenge and keep their businesses as agile as possible, leading companies are streamlining their HPC growth through strategic outsourcing.

While outsourced HPC was once considered hallowed ground, new HPC private cloud solutions provide the benefits of a traditional outsourced service with the IP protection, security, flexibility, and speed CIOs require for their HPC initiatives. As a result, CIOs now outsource HPC just as they outsource other core portions of their business. They view HPC in the same manner as outsourced Microsoft Exchange email, CRM applications, and product development.

Rather than waiting weeks or months for project approval and to acquire the necessary hardware and software, an organization can utilize HPC cloud services to instantly initiate any size project within days. The reasonable cost and on-demand nature of HPC, even at an extremely high scale, means that IT teams no longer need to predict their HPC needs or battle to decide which projects should take priority. When requests come to IT from engineers, scientists, and others working on the next “hot” initiative, IT responds as an enabler rather than a roadblock.

The move to outsourcing HPC to the cloud has opened the floodgates of innovation. Instead of long project delays caused by wrangling, leading companies are now seizing on new market opportunities with superior agility and setting themselves apart from the competition, while gaining responsiveness to business needs, saving time and money.

Benefits of Outsourcing HPC Infrastructure

• Security: Look for a provider that offers a single-tenant solution. If your data never leaves a host’s network you can be certain it’s protected at every crucial point by multiple layers of security.
• Flexibility: HPC doesn’t need to run all the time like a web server. Use only what you need, when you need. Scale up infrastructure during peak workload periods and scale down to save costs during lower workload periods.
• Agility: Infrastructure can be up and running in a matter of minutes or days, not months or years, transforming IT from a roadblock to a business enabler.
• Savings: Save on the cost of running and maintaining an in-house data centre, from space to infrastructure, system administration and energy costs.
• Time: Outsourcing HPC means organizations can spend less time on HPC infrastructure needs and more time on their core competencies and winning business.

Today, PEER 1 Hosting has been recognized as one of Achievers 50 Most Engaged Workplaces. We are extremely proud of our corporate culture and this achievement – this annual award recognizes top employers that display leadership and innovation towards engaging their employees.

Our people are what make us different from other companies - they are the key to our shared success. PEER 1 Hosting couldn’t offer the exceptional customer service and support we’ve become known for if our employees aren’t plugged in and happy, at work and beyond. We firmly believe that engagement and excitement outside of work will translate to job performance.

The PEER 1 Hosting approach to People and Performance goes beyond the standard free-food, foosball tables and “wear whatever you want to work” perks that have become status quo at tech companies around the world. With a focus on quality relationships and interactions, we are committed to enabling each person to make a difference in the lives of their colleagues, customers and communities.

So far it’s working. PEER 1 Hosting continues to grow year after year; we have expanded domestically and internationally; and now, our unique corporate culture has been recognized as one of the country’s most engaged workplaces.

Much of today’s entertainment industry is built on impressive, complex graphics. From gaming to blockbuster movies and everything in between, big entertainment needs big data. This week the PEER 1 Hosting team will be at SIGGRAPH 2012, the premiere conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, where we’ll be demonstrating our Self-Service High Performance Computing (HPC) Cloud. Designed with creative industries in mind, our HPC Cloud marries the science of cloud computing with the art of digital content creation. 

For example, in order to keep True Blood fans engaged while they eagerly awaited the launch of the fifth season this past spring, Los Angeles-based interactive agencies Made In Haus and BBDO created an app that gave fans the ability to “glamour” their friends, a common tactic used by vampires on the show for bribery and commandment.

The creative idea needed a large HPC Cloud to power the Motion Portrait software that created animated 3D avatars based on images captured by the users’ smartphones or computers. To ensure that the computing-intensive “Glamour Your Friends” app could handle the rendering and the crushing demand of the show’s rabid fan base, Made In Haus turned to PEER 1 Hosting to create a load-balanced, on-demand HPC Cloud. The flexible cloud hosting solution, with a utility-based pricing model, is designed with the capability to handle big data, so developers can focus on the product, not where and how their data will be stored. 

If you’re headed to SIGGRAPH be sure to drop by booth #227 to check out how PEER 1 Hosting's HPC Cloud takes a bite out of big data.

About the Author

Rajan Sodhi

VP Marketing and Communications, PEER 1 Hosting

Rajan Sodhi joined PEER 1 Hosting in November 2004 and is responsible for corporate marketing and communications. Rajan has over 20 years experience in branding, digital marketing and social media. In 2006, he launched the popular BIG Marketing for Small Business blog to serve his passion for all-things marketing. He has produced award-winning digital advertising campaigns, and his opinions and insight have appeared in publications around the world. 

At PEER 1 Hosting, we’re all about two things, Ping & People. They’re both equally as important. I’m Sheila Bouman, Chief People and Performance Officer at PEER 1 Hosting and I focus on the relationship between people, organization development and business strategy.

I don’t come from the typical HR background. I started my career as a high school teacher and my work over the past 25 years has been focused on being really curious about what makes people great, what needs to be removed or provided so people can truly unleash their talent. I can see the goodness and the talent in just about everybody and I feel excitement when attempting to figure out how to either awaken or unleash it.

After 15 years as an organization development consultant, I joined PEER 1 Hosting. This rapidly growing company is helping to create the most human experience on the web. We’re a Vancouver-based company that has grown into one of the world's premier hosting companies and I’m proud to be a part of that.

PEER 1 Hosting has a vision to be the most human company on the web, a place where our customers would want to work. Although we’re operating in the often distant technology sector, we are 100 percent focused on what makes our people and our customers thrive. We care about them in ways that typical companies don’t, and that is what makes us amazing and desirable. My vision is global, but through humanism, not human resource.

Before joining PEER 1 Hosting, I co-founded Navigo, where my team helped leaders plan and implement complex changes that aligned the contribution of people to where the leaders wanted to take the company. Navigo's talented consultants are experts in Strategic planning, leadership development, engagement and change management.

I live by the promise that PEER 1 Hosting is trying to make a difference to the lives of its customers. We say it all the time, it’s not about being the biggest, it’s about being the best.

Microsoft’s World Partner Conference is one of the most anticipated events on the channel industry events calendar each year. Technology companies from around the world gather to hear the latest and greatest from Microsoft, take in the company’s roadmap for the year ahead and of course, spend time connecting and building relationships.

This year’s conference continued to build upon its predecessors. Toronto played host to the five day conference, attended by an astonishing 15,000 people representing companies from at least 130 countries across the globe.According to this article from the Toronto Star, the event was expected to inject $52 million in to the local economy from hotel rooms, restaurants and event spaces – making this year’s WPC the largest corporate event held in Toronto.

 As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, our PEER 1 Hosting team was among the tech companies in attendance exhibiting at the conference, enjoying our first year as a bronze sponsor of the event.

While a lot of exciting news came out of the conference, there were two key trends dominating the conversation that caught our team’s attention:

• Cloud: In the past few years the cloud has become a top priority for many facets of business and IT and shows no signs of slowing down. During his keynote, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner described Microsoft’s vision when it comes to the cloud as: continuous service for every person, every device, and every business. 

  Microsoft appears to being using the cloud as a synonym for going “off-prem” (off-premise opposed to on-premise). As such, partners need to become forward thinking about the cloud as it pertains to growing business needs.

• Big Data: Business intelligence is a key trend, with big data poised to only get bigger and more important. In fact, Kevin Turner’s exact words when it comes to Microsoft’s strategy: “We’re going BIG in big data!”

As the building block for all of Microsoft’s business intelligence offerings, there was a lot of chatter around the launch of SQL 2012. PEER 1 Hosting will be launching SQL 2012 later this month, but we’re no stranger to big data at PEER 1. In the spring, we launched our Self-Service HPC Cloud solution, specifically tailored to industries that rely on business intelligence to power their bottom line.

Now, the big news for us was that our SMART Partner Program. We continue to extend our invitation to all partners in the Microsoft ecosystem to get SMART. Any Microsoft partners that sign up to be a SMART Partner will benefit from an automatic upgrade to SMART + status. That means earning an evergreen 12% commission instead of the usual 8%.

Launched earlier this year, our SMART Partner Program is about building relationships that create mutually beneficial revenue streams. Rather than build a partner program that benefits only the PEER 1 Hosting side of the relationship, we developed the program around our partners’ business success. So, whether they are a small startup or an established, household name, they will benefit from a partnership with PEER 1 Hosting.

Benefits of the SMART Partner Program include:

• Easy Back Office Management 
• No Upfront Revenue Commitment 
• Dedicated Channel Representative 
• Partner Portal Access 
• Referral Events 

Learn more about becoming a SMART Partner. See you next year at WPC in Houston!