Dedicated Server Reviews

My introduction to this Fall ISPCON's program, and one of the sessions in the 9:00 a.m. opening slot, was a presentation delivered by Tom Millitzer – M&A expert, president of New Commerce Communications, WHIR blogger and all-around entertaining gentleman.

I have my suspicions as to the freshness of the material, which seemed like it may have included parts of previous presentations – not because it was dated, but because it was a very sort of general-purpose primer to buying and selling ISPs. Also, Tom said parts of it were from his presentation at FISPA last week.

But I've never seen Tom present at an event like this before, so the freshness of the material is really beside the point

The presentation, "Positioning Your Internet Company for Sale - and Making More Money," was, unsurprisingly, a discussion of the ins and outs of selling an Internet company. And Tom, who makes his living helping companies with this sort of transaction, makes it sound simple enough.

Rule number one, for instance, is "be honest." There's a process a buyer goes through, which he describes in a series of categories labeled: identify, qualify, value, negotiate, structure, validate, close, integrate.

Never having personally bought or sold a company, I am nevertheless able to make sense of those categories intuitively. As a seller (which we'll assume you are for the sake of this blog post), you'll want to make yourself apparent to the buyer as early in that process as possible – around the "identify" or "qualify" stage. That makes a lot of sense too.

In fact, the process of selling a company ends up sounding awfully similar to the process of selling a product. That is, you have to identify your buyer. You have to figure out exactly what it is they want. You have to work to position yourself in that light. And you have to put the product in front of that buyer in a way they're going to appreciate.

Interestingly, Tom says the "big secret" about this sort of acquisition (and I feel I should stress here that he made an awfully big deal about the secret) is that "greed tanks more deals than anything."

Tom says he's seen more deals fall apart as a result of either the buyer or the seller getting greedy (and it goes both ways, he says), than for any other reason.

In the seller's case, they may decide after negotiating a deal almost to its conclusion that they want to raise the price. Or they may assume too soon that they've concluded a deal that isn't quite done. 

For the buyer it's much the same. Greed, as he sees it, can mean becoming so enamored of the idea of being somebody who makes deals that they start pushing the price down just to see if they can do it.

Anytime Microsoft's hosting roadshow makes a stop on our home turf in Toronto (yes, we're proud Canucks) I always get the assignment of going to Microsoft's mall-like Canadian headquarters to check out a day packed with sessions and tutorials on Microsoft's latest contribution to the hosting industry.

And admittedly, I was expecting much of the same this time around, except things were a little different. We weren't at Microsoft's headquarters for one, having been relocated to the Novotel Hotel in Mississauga (due to an overlapping of internal event schedules) and the second difference (the main difference) was that there was a lot less talking and a LOT more doing at this event.

Being there in the conference room, looking at the rows of tables lined with laptops, I really felt like I was back in university, sitting in a classroom full of eagerly anticipating students, patiently listening to the prof outline the lesson for the day before unleashing us to dig our hands into the latest task. The buzz in this workshop, from presenters to attendees, was noticeable.

Rob Kent, a hosting technology specialist for Microsoft, says stirring up some excitement was part of the point with the roadshow this time around.

"This is a far more hands on event than in the past. Attendees will come away from this with the tools and knowledge they need to take IIS 7, quickly build it out in their own facilities and go into production, all well before Windows Server 2008 is officially launched in February. The hosting industry's becoming more and more commoditized and many hosts are finding that any edge they can get over their competitors, they're willing to take."

Rob took about an hour discussing Microsoft's hosting vision of platform, services and experiences, the movement towards functional hosting and of course, the plethora of opportunities and advantages available to Web hosts through the launch of Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7, before letting Brett Hill, senior technical product manager of hosting services for Microsoft, lead the labs.

Microsoft also heavily pushed its IIS 7 Go Live program, which enables hosts to develop and deploy IIS 7 on their infrastructures and offer it to end users before its officially launched on February 27, 2008. "We've already got hosting partners like Rackspace and HostMySite who've launched it into production and others are clamoring to get it. They want it and they want it now," says Rob.

Rob says some tips to best utilize your time at these events is to go through as much as the labs you can, but more than that, to take advantage of the fact that you have Microsoft's team right at your fingertips. He also says to try collaborating with some of the attendees, work through the labs together and really make the most out of the "classroom-style" environment. And, don't be afraid to grill the folks from Microsoft; that's what they're there for.

In an effort to encourage and embrace this feeling of community the hosting industry is really starting to develop, Microsoft is also ending off each workshop with a networking session and highly encourages attendees to fill out a feedback form to take home a DVD full of extra IIS 7-related labs as well as an opportunity to win a Zune.

If you haven't already registered for the event, go to the events page and check out whether its traveling to a city near you.

Microsoft

"Windows Server 2008"

"IIS 7"

ISPCON: Exhibit Hall Setup The exhibit hall opens up at 3:00 today (and frankly, I'm a fan of the scheduling, mostly because I'm not a fan of missing sessions because I'm at the booth, or vice versa), so at the moment folks are just getting set up.

I took a few behind-the scenes photos of the exhibit hall, and since they're already up on our Flickr account (where I'll be posting pictures regularly for the next few days) I figured I'd post up something here as well.

A view from the Exhibit Hall entrance. Tuesday morning. 

Exhibitor booths arriving in shipping crates.

The Hostopia booth in "bundle of plastic" mode. Of course, we'd love to have you stop by the WHIR booth, which is booth 213, right between the big ON DEMAND SERVICES sign: 

And VoIP CITY:

The WHIR is here at ISPCON Fall 2007, and while things are just getting started around here, I thought I'd take the opportunity to offer a bit of an intro to our blog coverage of the event. Fall ISPCON is usually, in my experience anyway, held in Santa Clara. But this year's event is going on in San Jose itself. So far, I haven't felt the effect much more than in the form of a considerably shorter cab ride from airport to hotel. Score one for San Jose, I suppose. 

The venue - the San Jose McEnery Convention Center - seems a little more confined than last year's venue - the Santa Clara Convention Center. Whether that's good, bad or totally irrelevant remains to be seen. The exhibit hall is definitely smaller.

After a first pass through the session schedule, there are a few sessions I definitely intend to check out.

Tuesday I hope to be in attendance at (WHIR Blogger) Tom Millitzer's "Positioning Your Internet Company for Sale - and Making More Money," "Strategies for Growing your Hosting Business" with groupSPARK's Ravi Agarwal and EasyStreet's Rich Bader and the keynote "Neutrality's Linchpin, is Bandwidth a Commodity?" with Cogent's Dave Schaeffer. 

Actually, Tom's presentation has already happened, and I'll post more about it later.

On Wednesay, I hope to stop by the "Negotiating the SaaS Minefield" session with (WHIR blogger) David Snead at 8:45, the keynote "Beyond Hosting: Unlocking Profits with On Demand IT" with The Planet's Douglas Erwin, "Virtualization: The Need for Green Data Centers" with Acronis's Bob Thaler and "Guerilla Marketing for Service Providers" with Larry Loebig of the Guerilla Marketing Association. That's the plan as it stands right now, anyway, after that first pass. By all means, let me know if you think there's something can't-miss on the schedule. 

More to come from ISPCON, and if you're here at the show, hopefully we'll get a chance to meet you.