Texas Marketing and Ukrainian Football

Last week i visited San Antonio, Texas for JMP Discovery Summit - conference for statisticians interested in exchanging best practices, learning proven statistical techniques and spreading the power of analytic excellence across their organizations.

Decision to visit came from BigData buzz going on for awhile in IT industry. While BigData is mostly approached today from perspective of computational parallelism for terabytes of mostly unstructured content the alternative is to approach it with complex statistical techniques. And desktop software JMP is best market response for in-depth statistical analysis of data.

But this post is about pivot that happened last week. Few weeks ago I signed up for trial version of distributed database as a service - CloudAnt. After few email exchanges with account manager I was offered to visit CloudAnt office at San Antonio, conveniently co-located at Rackspace - one of the biggest hosting and cloud provided in USA (and most probably in the world). With JMP Summit ending around noon on Thursday i had few spare hours and agreed. It turns out to be most exciting event of the whole trip.

Rackspace office is former shopping mall, that was purchased and transformed into technology mecca. Read more from NY Times article.

While million plus square feet office is amazing by itself the true wow moment came when Rackspace employee told me that he got confused that my record as prospect in SalesForce is like years old.
 
It reminded of small engagement i had with football club Arsenal Kiev back in 2002. Team was purchased by then Kyiv mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko as city municipal club and he invited as head coach Vyacheslav Hroznyi from famous Moscow club Spartak. With new head coach club set very aggressive goals and to support the excitement management create PR plan to grow number of raving fans. Part of the plan was also redesign of club's website that was struggling with less than 100 visitors per day. I already had agreement to support FC Arsenal Kyiv IT infrastructure - compliment to old friend from Uzhgorod. So naturally offered my service to run website redesign project.

First major decision was whether to go with established design studio or individual web designer. As our goal was to create public buzz about FC Arsenal I offered to run public competition. Idea was accepted and Vyacheslav Hroznyi became head of jury (plus 2 representatives from club administration). While over dozens of web developers competed in building new web design for FC Arsenal i went on search for quality  hosting. After internship at ISP TexasNet i had very fond feelings for San Antonio, Texas so young hosting company from same city - Rackspace - became immediate favorite. That is when i contacted them and asked for quote for dedicated hosting.

At the end of competition i got better offer from ISP in Ukraine and didn't purchase hosting from Rackspace.

11 years later they still had record of that old inquiry, the record successfully migrated from old marketing system to new cloud based one - SalesForce, and was updated last week with new business opportunity in BigData.
 
Huh, the fact that company keeps prospects for so many years was "jaw dropping" experience - Texas style marketing.

To Be Continued...

September 14th, 2013