I was invited by Techvibes to write a blog post about the first ever Structure 08 conference hosted by GigaOM, which I attended and my company PEER 1 sponsored. It was held on June 25th in San Francisco at the Mission Bay Conference Center:

Just got back from the Structure 08 conference hosted by GigaOM and headline sponsored by my company, Vancouver-based PEER 1. The sold out event was a tremendous success with over 600 people in attendance representing companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and VMWare. A third of the conference room was allocated to media alone.

Making the decision to sponsor Structure 08 was an easy one. It is so rare to have a room full of the brightest minds discussing and debating the latest technology impacting IT infrastructure. “Cloud Computing” was by far the topic of the day, a buzz term that seems to encompass anything related to virtualization or on-demand scalable web hosting, which is sometimes, well, cloudy.

The line up of speakers included Jonathan Yarmis of AMR Research, Mendel Rosenblum of VMWare, and a heated discussion that included panelists from Google, AT&T, GigaSpaces, Mosso, Joyent, and XCalibre. Read more

PEER 1 will host a free webinar with partners OnDemand Solutions and Mural Ventures, Tuesday, June 24 at 2 p.m. EDT. In this first-time event, industry experts will share their extensive experience and innovative methodologies that have helped ISVs build successful and profitable Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Attendees will learn how to escape pitfalls that have hobbled other ISVs, potentially saving their businesses thousands of dollars.

SaaS is here to stay, with an estimated 25 percent of all software delivered in the next few years expected to be SaaS, according to Gartner projections. As successful SaaS companies know, in order to take advantage of the considerable benefits of this delivery method you must run your company in a completely new and different way rather than rely on the traditional methods. This webinar will help companies avoid many of the more common mistakes.

What: Free webinar on “The Seven Deadly Mistakes of ISV SaaS Offerings,” which include:

• Cannibalizing your current revenue by providing your existing offering to the same customers
• Underestimating the power of and need for customer service in the SaaS model
• Offering free trials that don’t convert prospects to customers
• Underestimating the importance of web-centricity for marketing, sales and support

Who: Featured speakers

• Mike Jalonen, CEO, OnDemand Solutions
• Jeff Hagins, Partner and CTO, Mural Ventures
• Robert Miggins, Vice President of Business Development, PEER 1

When: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 – 2:00 p.m. Eastern

To Attend: For more information and registration visit http://www.bulldogsolutions.net/Peer1/PER06242008/frmRegistration.aspx?bdls=15176

“We are very pleased to be offering this valuable webinar along with our partners,” said Robert Miggins, vice president of business development for PEER 1. “Through our experiences we have found there are many reoccurring key issues that business owners and developers alike are unaware of. Through this presentation we will give listeners practical steps and insight to address these issues and in turn increase customer reach and satisfaction.”

About PEER 1
PEER 1, a leading online IT infrastructure provider, believes in the limitless opportunity of the Internet and the business growth and continuity it provides for its more than 10,000 customers. PEER 1 delivers highly scalable managed hosting and co-location solutions to ensure customers’ online presence is always fast, always available. Since 1999, PEER 1 has grown to include data centers and network points of presence in 17 major cities across North America and Europe. Serving a variety of companies, PEER 1 offers solutions that grow through every stage of web commerce, regardless of company size. The company’s headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and the stock is traded on the TSX under the symbol PIX. For more information visit: http://www.peer1.com.

About ODS
OnDemand Solutions provides business and technical services to established and startup organizations who are already using, or who are looking to use, the OnDemand or “Software as a Service” (SaaS) delivery model. Our services and best practices are designed to rapidly develop and launch new OnDemand and SaaS businesses, accelerate growth for organizations with a current SaaS offering, and assist independent software vendors (ISVs) to convert from a perpetual license model to a subscription revenue model.

About Mural Ventures
Mural Consulting is a specialized team of Software-as-a-Service experts. We work with ISVs and Service Providers to create SaaS strategies that drive real actions, and then execute those actions side-by-side with our clients. We deliver business success in the fast-changing, competitive SaaS environment. Mural has conducted over 300 executive SaaS business design sessions globally. From that experience, we’ve assembled 8 Key Success Factors for SaaS success. These KSFs form the foundation for all of our strategy and execution services.

Om Malik is reporting today that the Structure 08 event on June 25th is almost sold out… in fact at the time of his post, there are only 25 tickets remaining. PEER 1 is the proud headline sponsor and we’re ecstatic with the enthusiasm in this event. Om is right, the lineup of speakers and panelists is simply outstanding and we expect the discussion to be lively and very, very informative. Panel topics include:

• Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs
• The New New Stack: Re-examining the Internet Platform Chain
• The Race to the Next Database: Overclocking and Analytics Augment Your Data Layer
• Harnessing Explosive Growth: Infrastructure Strategies and Tactics
• Infrastructure On Demand: Should You Build Your Future on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)?
• Eyes Wide Shut: Why is the VC Community Keeping Its Wallet Shut to Infrastructure?

Read more

PEER 1 Growing Pains Episode 3 - ‘100% Downtime’.

Janet is at Todd’s bedside in the hospital while he lies in a coma. She speaks to him and he appears to be responding, until things get unplugged…

PEER 1 is very proud to announce our record Third Quarter results, our seventh consecutive quarter of record profitable growth, and that we will start trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) main board beginning Tuesday, May. 20th.

“The listing of PEER 1’s shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange will be a major milestone in PEER 1’s evolution” said Fabio M. Banducci, PEER 1’s president and CEO. “We look forward to the increased visibility that our graduation to the TSX will deliver to the company and to our shareholders.”

This is certainly a major milestone for our company. We are excited to see what the future brings and looking forward to the next milestone, whatever it may be!

Official Press Release.

PEER 1 will be sponsoring Pangea Day by supplying free managed hosting services, systems architecture, database failover services, and on-site, day-of-event technical support for the Pangea Day IT network.

On May 10, 2008, Pangea Day will use the power of film to help bring the world together to share a unique experience through live broadcast venues in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro and thousands of self-organized events planned in over 100 countries.

The Pangea Day event will feature around 24 short films and includes a number of exceptional speakers and musical performers, such as Queen Noor of Jordan and Iranian rock phenomenon Hypernova.

Pangea Day was created in 2006 when documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize, at the Technology Entertainment Design conference in California. The prize aims to grant the winner a ‘wish to change the world,’ and Noujaim chose to use film to bring the world together.

PEER 1 is sponsoring the first-ever Structure 08, presented by GigaOM. Focusing on the innovations of internet infrastructure, the conference will bring together the most influential leaders of the industry at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on June 25, 2008.

PEER 1 will host a private press event as well as a private VIP dinner, hosted by Om Malik while at the conference. Presented by GigaOM, Structure 08 is a significant one-day event that will sort through the emerging and disruptive computing technologies which are now becoming the building blocks for the next generation of the Internet. The conference will cover and examine many topics of technology innovations, such as virtualization, SaaS and cloud computing, associated with the current Internet infrastructure build out and the companies leading the way.

PEER 1 is committed to offering the smartest, most reliable solutions for its customers, engaging in every stage of IT infrastructure development while providing the needed platform for innovation.

Did you know that PEER 1 is one of the only hosting providers to offer all three types of web hosting under one roof; co-location, self-managed and managed hosting? All of these solutions are backed by PEER 1’s fully redundant network that delivers high performance bandwidth through 15 state-of-the-art data centers and 17 points-of-presence (POPs) across North America.

The full conference web site is available at http://www.structureconf.com.

PEER 1 was featured in a CTV News story televised on April 30th, 2008 about Revenue Canada’s issue with people uploading their tax returns over the Internet through NETFILE, which was logjammed due to lack of IT infrastructure capacity. PEER 1 appears at the 4:10 mark of the video.

PEER 1 has launched today a new video contest and is giving away $10,000 in prizes to the winner! Along with the contest, the company has released the second episode of it’s award-winning short series “Growing Pains” which follows the trips and follies of a home-based business startup that grows quickly out of control causing new employees and servers to take control of the home.

PEER 1 is giving it’s viewers of the episode the opportunity to create their own growing pains video that shows their personal experiences for a chance to win a prize package of 12 months of free managed hosting, a 15-inch MacBook, and a Sony HD camcorder, at a total value of $10,000.

To watch the new episode of Growing Pains and enter the $10,000 Giveaway Contest, go to www.peer1.com/growingpains

Good Luck!

Episode 2 – “A Walk in The Park.” Some time after being tossed out of the house, Todd and Janet try to mend fences over a nice walk in the park. All seems well and the moment feels right, or so Todd thinks.

“It turns out that the Internet has worked pretty well,” industry mainstay Marc Andreessen told an audience at the Web 2.0 Expo. Andreessen’s keynote interview with Federated Media chief John Battelle was a little bit of a history lesson - taking a glance at the Web many years ago, followed by the requisite speculation about an uncertain future.

“It was a very confusing time,” Andreessen said regarding the Net’s early days. In the beginning days of Mosaic, the browser Andreessen created, that eventually grew into Netscape, that then grew into Mozilla , and eventually Firefox, “the conventional wisdom in the business world and in large parts of the press was that interactive television was going to be the future - the Internet, and the Web and Mosaic were really sort of renegade academic research projects.”

But Andreessen’s current project, Ning, couldn’t be less renegade. Ning, which taps into the social-media trend by letting it’s members build their own networks without requiring them to be technical gurus, has been fueled not only by Andreessen’s Valley popularity but also by a recent $60 million funding round that the exec said was for an economic “nuclear winter.”

Read more on his “history lesson” over at CNET.

On Mar 16, 2008, Ning crossed 200,000 social networks.

For those unaware, PEER 1 also has a community on Ning. Head on over to our community, take a look around, and discuss anything and everything about online business and technology. We look forward to seeing you there!

Visit PEER 1 Community