Robert Scoble interviews Nik Cubrilovic from Rackspace Hosting on Vimeo.

This year, our goal for San Antonio is to feed 750 needy local families – 800 company wide, including all locations. Throughout 2009, the need for food has grown to the highest level since the “food security” report began in 1995. 1 in 7 Americans struggles to get enough to eat, and more than a third go hungry from time to time. An estimated 36.2 million Americans are food insecure. Of those 36 million, almost 13 million are children and 2 million are seniors. Last year, over 25 million people used a Food Bank for emergency food assistance. Our goal may be ambitious, but the need for food is growing.

On Friday, November 20th Rackers in San Antonio will be assembling 750 food baskets. Austin Rackers will be distributing food collected to needy families through the Capital Area Food Bank. On Saturday, November 21st, San Antonio Rackers will be distributing all boxes to needy families to benefit the San Antonio Food Bank.

See below for pictures of last year’s food drives:

For more information on hunger in the United States, click here.

Here at Rackspace, we’ve built a reputation based on service, known to our customers as Fanatical Support®; our anytime, anywhere, any way approach to customer service. And we know we’re not the only ones who put customer needs first. That’s why we created The FANATI in 2007 to recognize one of our customers for valuing customer service as much as we do.

The contest consists of two rounds of judging (judging by a panel of experts and a customer satisfaction survey). Customers first complete the application process located on the MyRackspace® customer portal. The past two years, the award has only been available to our Managed Hosting customers. But this year we are opening it to all US-based customers including Cloud and Email & Apps customers. Those customers will be able to access the application online here.

The other thing we are changing this year is the format of the application. No longer is it just a written application answering a bunch of questions. This year we want to make it personal and with a touch of creativity. That is why we are only accepting video applications! All our customers need to do is create a short (less than five minutes) video explaining what they do and how they exemplify outstanding customer service. It should be interesting none the less.

So if you’re a customer, and you think your customer service is pretty good…award winning even…then log on to the MyRackspace portal or click the link on your control panel, and let us hear from you.

For more information on The FANATI, click here, or leave us a comment below if you have any questions.

No More Servers points to the breadth of hosting services that Rackspace offers – Managed, Cloud and Email & Apps. Hosting allows businesses to avoid massive upfront investments in hardware as well as the extensive amount of time and cost spent deploying and managing servers. It also shields companies from making inaccurate capacity predictions and poor purchase decisions, which exposes them to the risk of limited computing resources or financial waste.

Companies are also finding that buying and managing in-house servers distracts them from focusing on their core business. It is more advantageous to focus on “value-added” differentiators in the marketplace than on IT operations. Hosting frees up IT departments to strategically innovate for their businesses.

Rackspace recently commissioned a survey to measure the effects of purchasing and managing in-house servers. We found that No More Servers speaks directly to the concerns and stresses of IT managers. Click here to see the survey results.

Rackspace offers a full suite of services to address the various needs of businesses who are calling for No More Servers. Whether Managed, Cloud or Email & Apps, we can build and managed a solution that helps companies focus on their core business rather than on managing hardware. For more information about No More Servers, please click here.

The survey revealed some interesting stats:

Selfish Servers Demand IT Director Time
IT teams reported spending 60 percent of their time troubleshooting and managing servers, while only 27 percent of time is spent on strategic and value-add activities.

Poor Purchasing is Problematic
More than half (51 percent) of respondents have made mistakes in their server capacity planning. Fifteen percent have bought too many servers and 36 percent have failed to buy enough.

Attitudes toward Cloud Computing
Thirty five percent of companies identify themselves as ‘proactive and slightly ahead of the curve’ when it comes to describing their approach to new technologies, while 28 percent remain ‘cautious and reactive.’

As with any ballyhooed tech revolution, this one is generating lots of hype and smoke. But there’s real fire underneath this trend. Companies already are using the cloud to save money and become more efficient and creative. Wider adoption of cloud computing will lead to a new burst of productivity in the world economy, including in ways not yet widely appreciated.

Consider what I call “employee-led IT.” Cloud computing empowers employees at every level of a company to unilaterally deploy powerful software tools and resources to do their jobs better and cheaper. Once held strictly to the agenda of the central IT department, employees today are taking matters into their own hands by launching websites, applications and other tools quickly and inexpensively as they need them to get more done. This power is unleashing a creative spirit in the frontline employee that will transform many businesses and spark a new wave of productivity. And it is not just employees of established companies who are getting in on the act. This same freedom to deploy powerful computing is enabling entrepreneurs and individuals to get more done at a lower cost in money and time.

Before I show how this is working, let me first make clear what I mean by cloud computing. At its core, cloud computing is nothing more than the ability to buy computing as a service, paying only for what you use. I often compare it to buying electricity from a power company, rather than buying and maintaining your own generator out in the parking lot. Cloud computing not only saves money for businesses; it allows them to focus on what they do best, rather than on buying and maintaining servers and software.

Historically, if you wanted to launch a new employee tool (like, say, a training system) a big hurdle was access to the computing to run the application that stores the content, tracks who views it, and runs learning tests and certifications. You would talk to your IT department, which would in turn hire more staff engineers, add expensive data center space, and order some servers to be delivered, along with networking and security gear.

This initiative would cost big dollars and consume months of effort, while you wait and wait for its completion. Knowing the high costs, in time and money, most managers would not even consider such projects.

Today, however, a whole new model is emerging. Nicholas Carr, an expert on the Cloud and author of the book, “The Big Switch,” was one of the first to compare cloud computing providers to the types of utility companies that have long supplied us with electricity, water, and telephone service. Like those earlier utility services, the cloud is creating a plentiful and easy supply of a very powerful resource.

Leading cloud providers such as Rackspace (my employer) and Amazon Web Services and allow the purchase of computing totally as a service. Go to these provider’s sites, determine how much computing you need, and order it online. Minutes or even seconds later, you have access to machines called servers, which allow you to run powerful business applications. With just a few clicks you can now upload your own application or website.

As you grow, you simply add more computing as you need it. No upfront capital is required. No time is spent messing with the guts of data centers, racking servers or configuring switches.

Not only is cloud computing faster and more flexible, it is cheaper. By pooling resources across many businesses and using software provisioning rather than human operations, cloud computing forces down costs.

Just as the PC era put powerful computing in the hands of all employees, launching the information age and a period of unprecedented productivity gains, the cloud era is adding exponentially to the tool kit now in the hands of each employee.

Today, if you find software that will help you and your team do your job better, you can launch a cloud server, install it in minutes, and get right to work. This is not a minor change. In most companies today, server provisioning times run around nine weeks. Nine weeks until you can even start your project! Recently, we had a customer run a demonstration of launching a new server on the Rackspace cloud and provisioning a Wordpress blog on that server. The whole demo took 9 minutes! And, it cost 1.5 cents an hour to run – a fraction of the price that customer would have paid to build the same capability on its own, or through traditional hosting.

And it gets better. You can now easily and cheaply use software from companies that have built their businesses on cloud computing. This new model of delivery, called software as a service, offers a turnkey option of delivering applications (think of that training program or blog software) bundled with computing. Now, you don’t have to set up anything. Want a new tool? Find a vendor, sign up online and you are off and running. Given the cost savings inherent in cloud computing, the tools are accessible for extremely low rates. Need a team area where your employees can share updates, store documents and chat? There are hundreds of tools available you can launch now for a few dollars a month.

This vast expansion in access to computing and software tools can profoundly enhance the productivity of a company that adopts it – and the productivity of the world economy. IT can now reside, literally, everywhere in a company.

What does this mean to you, if you’re an executive or manager? If you don’t have teams experimenting with new cloud-computing tools, they are falling behind. What does this mean to you as an investor? If the companies in your portfolio aren’t embracing the cloud, they will lose out to competitors who are.

At my company, Rackspace, we are seeing an exponential increase in the number of tools, and advances in their use, that are percolating up from frontline employees. And, the results of those innovations are real and tangible. Let me give you a few examples.

Our marketing team has a problem. It needs more information, faster, about what on our website is working to attract customers, and what is not. Once team members have that information, they need the ability to respond in a snap. How do they do it? They use cloud computing.

Today, they tap into Omniture’s online suite, which they can set up with just a few clicks. From an online dashboard they can see virtually real-time stats on which pages and features customers are viewing on our website, and which ones tend to drive them away. With this data, our marketers can change the design and content and navigation or the site, add new headlines and text, try new promotions — and see the results in minutes.

Next, our marketers need to figure out what our customers and potential customers are thinking. How about a survey? Today, our employees can craft a questionnaire in seconds, using the survey tools online at checkbox.com, and send it to our user base. The
results are available almost immediately, as responses flow in, and are presented complete with graphs and breakdowns that help our team make decisions.

Now, it’s time to act. Want to run a new promotion? We can build a quick promotion site and host it rapidly on Rackspace Cloud Sites. It takes about 5 minutes to get the infrastructure up and running and robust enough to handle even the most viral and successful offers.

Want to send and track an email campaign? Icontact or Newsberry have us covered. In minutes and for a few dollars, our promotional email is out, and results start coming in with stats on every click that it produces.

Our marketing team is smaller than it was 5 years ago. Yet it is handling more spending and more data, and is generating far more revenue, than the old, larger team — all thanks to tools made possible by cloud computing.

Name any function in your company and you can perform it more effectively and less expensively using cloud computing tools. At Rackspace, customer service is our lifeblood. We call it Fanatical Support. Walk the floors of our company and you will see support teams using all sorts of cloud-computing tools to serve customers better and faster.

When we need a knowledge base to ensure that vital common knowledge is shared and that new employees can be brought up to speed quickly, PBWiki has us covered. Teams can put all their shared knowledge there (e.g. how do you add a new server to a secure network?) and have it accessible and searchable to the team in minutes.

Want to shoot a video of how to use a new online product or tool? Demo-builder.com will record the actions you take on your computer screen, along with your oral instructions. You can add the video to a website where your customers can see for themselves exactly how to solve a common problem with their servers or email.

At Rackspace and other companies that are embracing cloud computing, we constantly see fresh examples of bottom-up innovation happening on the fly to solve real problems faced by our customers and employees. Thanks to cloud computing, every employee now has the power to take control of her work, improve it and make her customers happier.

This is no small trend. Cloud computing is spreading rapidly. Costs are plummeting. Tools are proliferation. And IT departments are scrambling to adapt. How do they add value to this new way of delivering computing? They can help validate tools, integrate them to core systems, and manage the cloud computing relationships including the contracts. But IT departments need to change their focus. Though computing is more distributed today, each company’s needs to evolve its own IT strategy, by a core group that spends its days thinking of and working on nothing else.

In the early days of adoption, IT departments should focus on bringing cloud-computing ideas to the employees who might not know how the new tools can make them more effective. The key task for IT employees is to make cloud-computing easier for everyone in the organization, while keeping it safe and secure. The winning IT organizations are figuring it out.

Cloud computing will not only make companies more productive; it can do the same for individuals. It is accelerating a trend already underway: the rise of the “free agent” business. Daniel Pink wrote about this trend in his book “Free Agent Nation.” In the US some estimate that 50% of employees will be self employed in the coming decade, most working as free agents selling their expertise. Cloud computing makes this outcome much more likely. It has never been easier to go online and set up a business.

From online templates for legal contracts to email services to web-based invoicing and accounting capabilities, the tools needed to run a business are more plentiful, easy to use, and affordable than ever before in human history. To take just one example: Some 10,000 small businesses, including many one-person companies, are using Freshbooks, a powerful invoicing and bookkeeping tool that costs less than $20 a month.

The power of this development is that the capital needed to start a business, and the risk of doing so, is now at an all-time low. Individuals in between jobs – or weary of jobs — can simply set up an entity, launch software to invoice and track their clients, set up a website in minutes, and get right to work. The results will be many more small businesses, the engine of economic growth.

Finally, the cloud is not just for businesses and employees. It is changing our private lives just as profoundly. The Apple App Store is a product of cloud computing. Today, individual developers are creating tools cheaply and easily that help us get more done. Need directions to the birthday party? Wondering if your flight is delayed? Dying to check the to do list on your computer? Well, as Apple would say, there is an app for that. Cloud computing makes it all possible, and makes it easier to do anything that you want to get done. Google for it, and you will find a service that helps. Groceries lists? Family calendar? Soccer league organization? Fantasy football management? The cloud has a tool for you.

Whether it is making established businesses more productive or helping spawn the next wave of new companies, or giving us back an hour a day that we once spent on chores, cloud computing is already having a measurable impact on our world. It offers, I think, a great reason for optimism about the global economy, and the quality of our lives.

Napier: The New Edge in Tech
By: Lanham Napier, CEO, Rackspace US

Things go wrong in computing. Anyone who uses a laptop knows that. It doesn’t matter whether the computer hardware and software you use are located in your home or office, or miles away in the data center of a hosting company that allows businesses to buy computing services cheaply by the hour, the way they buy electricity. Things go wrong either way. Why is it, then, that so many of the sellers of computer hardware and software and hosting blame their customers and hide from them whenever there’s a major service glitch?

To continue reading the entire article, please follow this link.

All power has been restored and devices are being brought back online. The PDUs were down for a total of about 5 minutes. We have aborted the maintenance for the remainder of the evening and will reschedule this for another date.

Service to Cloud sites has been restored and we are continuing to work with Cloud sites customers to bring them online. We will continue to update the Cloud Server and Slicehost status on their respective websites, which you can access through these links:  Cloud Status and Slicehost Status.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact a member of your support team.

Sincerely,

Rackspace

See below for pictures of the event:

For more pictures, check out our Flickr Photo stream here.

Rackspace Solutions Engineer Gregg Stout and Rackspace partner VeriSign will talk about eCommerce and the ways that businesses can effectively support this area of revenue generation. The topic is “Defining Security and Reliability within your eCommerce Infrastructure.”

We will also discuss topics such as the typical environment needed for eCommerce, security considerations required for compliance, and scaling a solution to handle changing volumes of traffic.

All Dallas Road Show events are free, fun and informative. We hope to see you there!

“Defining Security and Reliability within your eCommerce Infrastructure”

A Rackspace Road Show Event

November 5, 2009

4:30pm – 6:30pm

House of Blues

2200 N. Lamar Street, Dallas, Texas

To register for this event* or to see other topics during the Dallas Road Show, click here or call toll free: 888-571-8963.

*Please register for the Rackspace eCommerce event by November 4, 2009.

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