HostingCon 2012 has been a very refreshing experience for Leaseweb USA this year, attending such an important industry event with our entire team was an amazing opportunity. We shared and learned about industry trends, shook hands with our customers and partners – but most of all we got completely hyped up to bring a fresh breeze from Boston’s Bay with us!
The event was definitely a success in my opinion. The venue (Hynes Convention Center) was conveniently located right in downtown Boston. I just loved it. HostingCon is a full-on international event with people from all around the globe attending. But on the other hand, what’s more American than going to watch the White Socks vs. Red Socks at Fenway park?
Most of the time was of course spent at HostingCon itself. Whether you’re on the sales side of the business, a tech guru, part of strategic management or all of them combined; there were a lot of educational and inspiring sessions to match your interest. Here are a few sessions that stood out for me:
- The ‘Lightning Talks during the Rapid-Fire Technology Sessions’ on the first day were fantastic. I loved how John Curran from ARIN made it dead clear that if you don’t adapt to IPv6 soon, you will find yourself out of business very quickly. This correlates exactly with the effort Leaseweb has put in being IPv6 ready
- On the same day, hearing onApp’s Ditlev Bredahl speak about ‘Competing Against Amazon in a Commoditizing Cloud Market’ was very inspiring. He was very passionate about all of us coming together to compete with the cloud giant.
- Liam Eagle from the WHIR explained a lot of do’s and don’ts during ‘How to Pitch Your Company’s Story to Publications’. He gave good suggestions for interesting information to share, like mergers and acquisitions, change in management, customer surveys, client cases, work environments, what makes us different, unique green approach, and more. By the end my notebook was full of new information and ideas.
Outside of the sessions there were plenty more opportunities to learn from. For instance, while walking around the hallways you would hear lots of talk related to cloud, mobile, market growth in managed hosting and software as a competitive advantage over PaaS providers. It’s becoming clear that a customer’s choice of hosting provider is no longer based solely on the hardware, network and the facility. They also factor in their dependency on service, support and software. We can specifically see this with our VAR’s (value-added resellers), who partner with payment solutions, mobile website options, security service providers and more to compete in the market.
I also spoke to quite a few of our Latin American customers. We are investing a lot in our connectivity to that part of the world, so it was very motivating to hear from them that they really notice the difference.
All in all it was a great event, and we’ll definitely be at next year’s edition in Austin as well. In fact, we already picked our spot for HostingCon 2013.
By the way, we wrote about giving away a few of our cool Leaseweb Helicopters through Twitter, and our followers didn’t let us down! Of all the people that participated in our HostingCon retweeting action we randomly drew two winners: Congratulations @FreshRoastHost and @jb_ma! Thank you for participating, your helicopter will be sent to you shortly.
I’ll leave you now with few pictures we took: