As someone who has taken an enterprise to the cloud globally, I understand just how much of an impact the cloud can have on a business. I have been a vocal supporter in the belief that the cloud can open all sorts of possibilities. It’s not just about cost mitigation and scalability.

Businesses looking to learn more about what cloud computing can offer are faced with a plethora of suppliers purporting to have cloud services. Many of the potentially transformational benefits can be lost in the confusion of conflicting ideas, and these businesses sometimes gain a false sense that the cloud sounds like stuff they have heard before.

The truth is that real cloud is a service that’s hard to fake. The key is that the products, services and technologies offered by a vendor enable an enterprise to focus on its business imperatives without having to worry about the infrastructure. It is always a tough question: does a company invest in expensive infrastructure just in case it becomes successful beyond expectations? Does it allow a huge opportunity to slip through its fingers simply because of a conservative approach to investing in infrastructure? Both are risks that all businesses have to traditionally face.

These risks become real concerns when businesses do not use the cloud. Cloud approaches mean that businesses can effectively forge ahead knowing that the infrastructure will cater to their usage needs. Imagine starting a fishing business and not having to worry about how big a boat and net you should buy. Instead, you can rely on being able to start with modest equipment and elastically expand the ship and net at sea if you happen to come across a huge school of fish.

The freedom from encumbrance that results from this elasticity has the potential to change the way businesses approach their strategic planning, innovation and related areas of risk management and process streamlining. More agile methodologies ensue that facilitate experimentation and allow changes to happen organically, leading inevitably to a focus on the business goals rather than the potential impediments such as not having enough infrastructure.

Cloud facilitates this change in thinking, but it has failed to overcome the concerns around privacy, security and data sovereignty. Despite all the advocates who have effectively said that the benefits outweigh the risks, the fact remains that some businesses stand to lose more than they can gain if their data is exposed. In some cases there are legislative impediments, PCI compliance, health records, national sovereignty rules to name a few, that render the potential gains seemingly academic. Further concerns around the high dependency on single cloud providers have further limited the uptake.

But Rackspace has largely addressed these concerns by open-sourcing the cloud. By working with NASA, Rackspace has given birth to what is now among the fastest growing open source projects in history – OpenStack. The OpenStack Foundation now has more than 8,600 contributing developers and has been adopted by more than 100 companies, including IBM, Dell, HP, NTT, Red Hat and Canonical. Rackspace has very publicly gone “all-in” on OpenStack and is one of the largest contributors to the code base. Rackspace’s approach is that Fanatical Support will be the key differentiator that enables the company to excel.

As a result of OpenStack, businesses have the freedom to build on the hybrid cloud, an infrastructure platform that uses a combination of public multi-tenanted cloud infrastructure, dedicated servers and private cloud facilities that are on their own premises if necessary. The technical barriers between each of these topologies are being eliminated, making for one platform that truly allows businesses to have freedom from worrying about their infrastructure as they focus on driving their business forward.

The freedom to choose a mixture of topologies, suppliers and service levels really allows businesses to focus on what they do, not how they do it. Adding Fanatical Support to that freedom allows cloud computing to fully realize its potential. And that excites me.

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Oh, and for those who want to understand more about my role at Rackspace, I have come on board as the Director of Technology and Product – Asia Pacific. My functions include promoting how cloud computing concepts can help businesses achieve their goals, expounding on the concepts of the open cloud, as well as helping ensure new Rackspace products and services are ready for the market in the Asia Pacific region.

I welcome the opportunity to talk about my journey to the cloud and how thinking cloud and related topics such as Big Data, the Internet of Things and social media can change our approach to business.

As one of the early cloud adopters, and someone who has worked hard to promote what cloud can bring to businesses, I was looking to join a vendor where I could leverage cloud concepts to truly make a difference in the world. The more I looked, the more Rackspace seemed like the right place to be.

The first thing that stood out to me was the company’s core values:

• Treating Rackers Like Friends and Family
• Passion For Our Work
• Committed To Greatness
• Full Disclosure & Transparency
• Results First – Substance Over Flash
• Fanatical Support In All We Do

These formed a picture for me of an organization that was striving to really make a difference. The term that stood out most was the word “Greatness,” a value that I personally believe in very strongly. Companies that are committed to greatness are alive, vibrant and focused on growth.

Rackspace is best known for its Fanatical Support. I have to admit that before I experienced this commitment to great customer service, I thought it was just marketing hype. I was first exposed to Fanatical Support when Altium acquired a company and brought in a new head of IT who had utilized Rackspace’s Fanatical Support. His face was radiant as he described the fact that Rackspace knew about problems on his servers before he did. I was still pretty skeptical, but impressed with the positioning. I thought if a company can pull this off, it would make them really successful. I have always believed in providing phenomenal support, so I was impressed in an intellectual way.

Then I joined Rackspace. And what I found inside shocked me: here was a company that had inculcated the very idea of going above and beyond into the core of its being. I went to the London office for my induction program – five days of aligning new Rackers (Rackspace employees are called Rackers) to the fundamental principles that drive the business. There are over 1,000 staff in the London office and I must have been approached half a dozen times by people asking me, “You seem lost – what can I do to help you?” This was no fake offer – each time this happened I was helped all the way to my objective, and the Rackers always seemed eager to help.

Everything the company does drives this Fanatical Support. The company uses Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure the likelihood customers will refer others. But even the induction program had us rookies being asked how likely we would be to recommend each of the presenters to our colleagues or friends. The presenters, we learned, were vying for a coveted internal trophy. I have never seen such engaging and creative presentations, all designed to prepare us to be effective in the Rackspace culture.

The company’s mission is to be recognized as one of the world’s greatest service companies. And it shows.

Be sure to tune in next week for part two of Alan’s two-part series on why he joined Rackspace, which focuses on the products and the strategy.

San Francisco gets a big-city rep, but it’s actually pretty small. You really notice exactly how small when you’re in a car looking for a parking space. San Francisco, as a city, has exactly four parking spaces available for cars. And it costs $317 per hour to park in them; more on days when the Giants are playing.

The truth is that owning a car in the city is a headache. As a result, in our San Francisco office, we’ve concentrated on making it easier for people to bike in and we’ve won awards for it.

Everyone’s got their own idea of what a biker is. Some envision Lance Armstrong wannabes and call up a mental picture of a guy on a fancy bike zipped into a yellow jersey. Others think of the Portlandia Bicycle rights guy, tatted to the nines with a tuft on his chin and giant holes in his earlobes maneuvering a fixie in and out of traffic.

Here I am with my bike on Bike to Work Day 2013 in San Francisco

But for lots of people, biking to work is about people riding in their jeans on normal-looking bikes. It’s just how they get to where they’re going. But when you don’t have a Tour De France support staff tailing you, there are ways this can be difficult.

The first problem you face as a biker is the ever-present fear of having your ride ripped off. You leave a nice bike on the street, even chained up, and there’s a good chance it’ll get stolen or stripped of parts while you’re inside the office coding. That’s no fun, especially if you’ve invested in a nice bike that has a lot of memories caked into the sweat on the top tube.

Then there’s the question of sweat. Thomas Edison said “genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration”- which is fine if you work from home. But nobody likes a stinky nerd at the office. Try pair programming after going a few miles up and down San Francisco’s notorious hills. Not fun.

And then there’s the maintenance issue. Bikes don’t exactly take care of themselves. There are two ways of dealing with the requisite break-fix scenarios. You can DIY at home and spend a small fortune on tools or you can roll into a bike shop and spend a small fortune to have an expert do it for you. Either way, it’s your money in somebody else’s pockets.

Two representatives from the San Francisco Yellow Bike Project came to Rackspace SFO for bike tune-ups for Bike to Work Day

Biking to work is great, but without safe storage, an opportunity to get clean and some good tools it isn’t practical for most riders.

Now San Francisco has an ordinance that requires office buildings to contain a shower, a certain number of clothes lockers and bike parking spaces. That’s great! But sometimes it isn’t enough. When the architects worked on the office plan for SFO (Rackspace’s San Francisco office) we told them that they’d have to dedicate more space to biking than was required. They came back with a revised plan. We still wanted more.

It seemed crazy at the time; we wanted 10 times what was required by law. But we’ve been growing gangbusters here. Not every new Racker brings a bike, but plenty do and the bike space is starting to get crowded. All of this space is indoors with a convenient sidewalk-level door and a place for you to change your shoes, store your helmet and take a quick shower.

I could stop right there and feel like I’d reached biker Nirvana. But we’ve also got a really incredible bike workshop, with all of the tools necessary to maintain, repair and upgrade bikes. I’m not talking about a wrench and a screwdriver either. These are tools that people don’t necessarily have at home such as the precision tools to true a wobbly wheel or a bike repair stand that makes it much more comfortable to work on a bike. I am quite proud of how we’ve made our studio both functional and inviting. It welcomes people to learn and become more self-sufficient in their cycling. We’ve even got loaner bikes, helmets and locks for guests from out-of-town or quick errands if you walked or took transit.

SFO Racker Tomaz Muraus with his bike

But wait, there’s more.

Truth be told, it would be quite a commute for me to bike to work from my home 40 miles south of the city. Fortunately, Rackspace offers commuters benefits to defray the cost of using public transportation. I’m able to bike from my front door to the CalTrain and then bike from the station to the office and Rackspace picks up a big part of the cost.  It’s no surprise that around half the SFO employees bike to work on any given day and all but a few use some alternative to cars for transportation.

There are a lot of reasons to not drive to work. For some people, it’s just a healthy way to get a nice bit of exercise on the way in to work. There’s plenty of good science that shows that exercise makes a person smarter and happier and healthier. For some people, it’s about the community of bike riders. For some people, it’s about saving money. For others, it’s about not burning fossil fuels. Or merely the satisfaction of not needing to find a parking space and being able to bike past congestion. Rackspace supports all these things and at SFO, we support them fanatically.

In an ideal world, our workplace would be a source of happiness, where employers allow us to do meaningful work, aligning with personal passions. If this sounds too good to be true; think again! The creators behind Good.Co (aka Good Company) developed a professional networking app to help you find joy and meaning in your career.  This week we highlight Good.Co as our first Must Have App, a new series devoted to sharing the most innovative apps on the web.

Recently, I attended the TechStars Demo Day in San Antonio, hosted by our friends at Geekdom. Twelve startups took the stage to pitch their cloud-based apps, in hopes of securing funding or partnerships from attendees. Good.Co was among those startups. I immediately noticed a parallel between Rackspace and Good.Co: Rackspace is a strengths-based company and Good.Co looks to help employees discover their strengths and determine if those fit within their existing role or company culture.

What is Good.Co? from Good Co on Vimeo.

The Science Behind Good.Co

Users take a fun, three-minute pop culture-themed assessment consisting of 15 questions. Responses to these questions then allow Good.Co to provide a unique workplace personality type, which is called an archetype. The personality archetype allows users to explore strengths, weaknesses and ideal workplace environments through the app. Users can also see how well they fit in their current job, discover a “Fit Score” with friends and colleagues and learn how to thrive in careers.

If users are looking for a new job, they can explore the large database of business profiles to see how well they’d fit in at some of the country’s largest companies. Finally, the app integrates with LinkedIn. Now, once a user has their archetype, Fit Score and strengths, it’s easy to simply pull up LinkedIn to search job openings.

The Good.Co algorithm PPA (Proprietary Psychometric Algorithm) identifies intricate patterns in the user’s responses to help decode personality and strengths based on research by co-founder Dr. Kerry Schofield. She’s a leading psychometrician out of Oxford with more than two decades of scientific research in the field of psychometrics with statistical models.

Traditional psychometric evaluations require lengthy, time consuming, and repetitive lists of sometimes more than a 100 questions designed to understand sociability, drive, reliability, independence and intelligence. Good.Co has built its assessment on twenty years of empirical research and evolved it to be more relevant for the modern workplace, using only 15 questions! That’s much better than the time it takes to answer 100 questions.

Good.Co was founded in 2012. The inspiration for the company came from real life experiences, founder Samar Birwadker explained.

“I realized the toll a bad work culture fit can take on your personal life. Every single one of us can think of at least a handful of people who are unhappy in their jobs,” he said. “That was me.”

In fact, 46 percent of all new hires don’t get past their first 18 months of employment – specifically due to a bad cultural fit.

Birwadker had a dream to create a system that was easy to use and actually worked to match people with a company based on their personality type. “Nothing quite like what I imagined existed yet – so we created Good Company,” he said.

Even though it’s a young company, the app has seen almost 4,000 signups since its April launch at Tech Stars Demo Days, and each new user organically invites an average of two new users into the system.

To bypass the wait list and get access, head to Good.Co and use early access code goodcorackspace. Learn more and find yourself in Good Company on Twitter, Facebook and its blog.

Austin Loves Puppies

Austin Rackers are celebrating Green Day in a new office this year, but they’re going outside to do it. They significantly reduce their energy consumption by sending the majority of Rackers to work outside where Mother Nature provides the lighting and the air conditioning (after all, Texas is lovely in the spring). Austin Rackers also have a special place in their hearts for animals, so they celebrate Green Day by bringing their dogs to work.

The Green Fayre in London

London Rackers have dubbed their celebration ”Green Fayre” and will have several special guests onsite, including some goats, to teach Rackers about sustainable practices. Well, the goats may not actually be teaching per se, but Rackers will be able to see how soap and other products are made from goat’s milk. London Rackers will also learn about the Eden Project and enjoy some recycled beats with a guest deejay – how’s that for going green?

Green Day at the Castle

San Antonio’s event will be free and open to the public. Attendees will learn about environmental conservation, get information on local utility rebates, recycle used electronics, understand proper recycling practices and try out some hybrid and electric vehicles. It’s a great way to spend a few hours outdoors learning how to reduce your carbon footprint and make choices that are better for the earth.

 To learn more and see photos from our offices, check out Rackspace Green Day on Facebook.

I know this is the standard approach of modern software methodology. At some point in the day, you have a meeting where everybody piles into a conference room and nobody sits down. A manager or tech lead or project manager makes everybody speak as succinctly as possible and then everybody flees as soon as they can be released. It’s usually held at the earliest time that you can expect people to be in the office, around 10 a.m. – except nobody who gets in before 10 a.m. can get anything done because the meeting will trash any focus gained.

I have also found that certain meetings develop a fear response. Standup meetings are like this. Just about everybody who is not a pathological liar or part-machine is going to have a bad day at least once in a while. And so there develops this little seed of fear that someone is going to call you out on it. And then there’s that time where you got a little too long-winded and whoever was running the standup called you out on it.

Nobody likes their standup.

Instead, we have tea time.

In a team, you have unavoidable communication requirements. Some of it is business-related; we go through the team and everyone explains what they have been working on and what they might be blocked on – a casual version of a standup. And some of it is that mushy touchy-feely stuff that you can’t categorize but binds a team together. It’s the antithesis of direct and precise office communication, but in-jokes and silly stories and “I’m feeling meh about this” have always been a part of people working together.

It started when we were planning, before we started development on our project. We would plan things between other responsibilities sitting in the corner of the office where there is a couch and a big-screen TV (it’s there for pair programming, which is another story). Eventually, we needed a break. Felix, our English Product Manager, says “Ken, fancy some tea?” He comes back with a hot pot of tea, teacups and Hobnobs (which are quite nice biscuits… made of oats and covered with chocolate and oh so good). Then, as we were holding our hot cups of tea, we started talking about our day like old ladies at a tea party. It was only when the tea got cold that we realized we accomplished the goal of a standup with none of the angst. So we kept on doing it.

We bought some white ornate china teapots, teacups and saucers with cobalt-blue designs on them. We bought a variety of rather nice teas… no cheap grocery-store tea. And we have tea-treats: an informal rotation of Jaffa cakes, scones, Hobnobs, cookies, and so on. On particularly indulgent days, someone will bring scones, jam and clotted cream for a real cream tea.

If you think back to basic human rituals, dating back to the days when we were cavemen sitting around the fire, sharing food has been a form of community bonding; something that relaxes that uncomfortable caveman or cavewoman that is taken out of the jungle and stuffed into an ironic t-shirt and pair of jeans and never quite figured out how to handle being a tiny little hindbrain part of a software engineer. So you can be more relaxed about things. Bad news is less bad with a cup of tea in your hand. Just ask your Granny.

The intention is that we are going to take longer on tea time than a standup. We are doing this on purpose. But it is not wasted time; just about all of us start to run out of steam around 3 p.m. After our updates, the discussions we have during tea time are not always related to the project, nor sometimes even to work. But they are all quite valuable to the team (depending on the day and the topic – some more than others!). We’re maintaining culture and esprit de corps while, at the same time, we do those tasks that everybody tends to rely upon a standup meeting for.

It’s been going on for a while now, and it seems to be pervasive at this point. People know that if they want to physically chat with us, run an idea by, or just see what our team is about… they can just drop by and have a spot of tea.

That’s right, community member DeltaEchoTango visited the Rack to get an inside look at what makes us tick.

This is significant because he took some time out of his schedule to come and meet the Open Cloud Community team, take a tour of the facility and generally get immersed in the culture that is Rackspace. We spent about an hour with him and were happy to do it.

We communicate with our members on a daily basis on topics that we are all passionate about:  technology, the Open Cloud, Rackspace products, etc. – this is all done virtually, and sometimes all we know about our community members is what they share in posts or from their User Profile. It was a nice treat to be able to meet DeltaEchoTango (his real name is Donald, by the way) in person and spend some time talking about what we are trying to do with the Rackspace Open Cloud Community.  He left here with a t-shirt, some extra information and perspective, a memory of speeding down our famous slide and hopefully a better understanding of the people and culture that makes Rackspace what it is today.

A thread describing the visit was created in the community here:

https://community.rackspace.com/general/f/34/t/584.aspx

I hope we can meet other community members this way. It made for a memorable experience for all of us, and illustrated the true power of a community.

A team from Groupon got early access to a Leap controller and successfully flew its quadcopter drone with nothing more than hand motions. It was an impressive display of the new controller, which is being unveiled publicly for the first time at SXSW, before it is scheduled to debut for sale in May. That wasn’t the only motion-sensing device in the competition, though. Another group from Austin used a Microsoft Kinect controller and The Chicken Dance to keep its drone aloft. The more team members flapped their arms, the higher the drone went. A few minutes later, another drone did the dancing – to the Harlem Shake – after it received a tweet from a Chicago-based team.

A fourth demo included a drone with onboard sonar that sent back enough data of its flight to create a 3D graphic visualization.

The Rackspace team of Jordan Rinke and Nick Mistry went last and successfully showed how its flying drone could take control of other drones in the room. While none of the drone demos was perfect, they showed how new insights arrive when coders focus on a new problem with open source solutions (The drones run on Linux, and hacks are shared online). Rinke, for one, seems excited about the possibility of combining what he and Mistry learned with the Chicago team’s dance moves to fly a flotilla of drones in perfect sync with each other. Could there be a music video in their future? The same idea could someday have use within a data center or other industries, Rinke said.

Check out the wild competition in this video:

And check out our previous video of Rinke and Mistry preparing for the Drone Games at SXSW.

Drone Games is just one of many events Rackspace is participating in around SXSW Interactive 2013. If you want to find us on Twitter, be sure to keep an eye on the hash-tag #SXRackspace.

There are a lot of things that go on inside the Castle on any given day; the arrival of the StartupBus was just one of them. Today, Rackspace producer and video storyteller Dave Sims captured it all as part of his “Day In The Life” video series – short films shot and edited in a single day to highlight happenings at Rackspace.

This video was shot and edited on Wednesday, March 6, 2013.

Check out more of Dave’s “Day In The Life” videos:

• A Day In The Life: Rackspace UK
• A Day In The Life: Rackspace At (Open) Cloud Expo
• The Open Cloud Company: A Day In The Life
• Open Compute Summit 2012: A Day In The Life
• The Rackspace Open Cloud: A Day In The Life
• Startups, Rookies And More: A Look At A Day At Rackspace
• Day In The Life – Friday At The Rack

That is until now.

Recently, we had a photographer come out to create an inside Google Street View of our HQ so our customers, friends and family – anyone, really – can get a virtual feel for what it is like to work at Rackspace. There’s a ton to see.

View Larger Map

Did you know that Rackspace has a slide to help Rackers go from the second to first floor in style? Or that we have several gondolas that were part of the Sky Ride at San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park? Have you heard about our quirky themed conference rooms (Count Chocula anyone?)? What about our giant word search, which is the world’s largest according to Guinness World Records?

Working at The Castle is an experience, and one that changes and morphs overtime. Walking through our 1.2 million square-foot facility, I always run into something new and exciting. Our surroundings are always in flux, whether it’s the flags being hung above desks, art installations that the real estate team brings in to liven up some of our empty space or clever impromptu things that Rackers post around the office (some personal favorites: a calendar with the word “Hustlin’” printed on every day, printed Minecraft blocks lining the halls and funny things written or drawn on our chalkboard). Seeing so many creative things around me inspires me to volunteer my best each day.

And while what happens inside The Castle each day is motivating; the impact that the Rackspace headquarters is having on the surrounding community is equally inspiring.

The Rackspace Foundation has partnered with seven schools in the surrounding area, dubbed the Magnificent 7, and helps fund school- and afterschool-based programs. Rackspace also supports workplace mentoring through Big Brothers Big Sisters, and has 52 Racker Bigs meeting regularly with Littles from neighborhood schools. The Castle represents one of the world’s largest recycling projects, and, in a recent New York Times article, Graham Weston, our chairman and co-founder, revealed that we plan to break ground for a neighborhood park that will include gardens, trails, fields and a performance venue.

We invite you to take a step inside The Castle and explore our beloved headquarters. There is a lot to see!

If Rackspace looks like the place for you, we’re hiring – hop on over to jobs.rackspace.com for all our available positions.