Darren Rollett's Weblog

Rackspace, Jungle Disk and the Acquisition Dilemma

Darren Rollett — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 09:12:37 +0000

Rackspace Cloud Files is effectively down for some Rackspace customers, in this case it is customers who use Jungle Disk and moved their data to Cloud Files. I was one of those customers; my primary reason for using Jungle Disk was its acquisition by Rackspace so when Cloud Files support was announced I moved my data (This is still work in progress, which has been halted). The reason for the move was that it is Rackspace who talk about fanatical support and 100% network uptime etc. and we use Rackspace for Hosted Exchange and have had good support and no downtime.

This brings up one of the perils of acquisitions; Customer Expectation. Customer Expectation is something that no company has direct control over, although they set the tone of the expectation. So when Rackspace acquires a company, existing Rackspace customers will have the same high expectations of the acquired company as they do of Rackspace. Customers will also completely ignore statements like “our sister company” and “things will be the same”. From the customer point of view you are one company which is called Rackspace and all customers know things will change.

Why do companies say the things highlighted in the previous paragraph? The main reason seems to be the fear of losing customers, which is completely irrational as an acquisition does not change the benefits of the products or the value propositions so why would customers leave. Granted you will get some customers who leave on idealistic grounds and these customers will blog, tweet and post about why the acquisition will bring down civilisation but these are a minority.

Another reason is the acquiring company wants to create a distance from the acquired company just in case some major disaster happens, this is a vain attempt to protect “The Brand”, but as previously stated customers do not care that it is a small part of the acquiring company or that it is “separate entity” it is still part of the acquiring company and therefore will impact the “The Brand”.

How do you mitigate the problems? Honesty is the key, if you are honest with customers they cannot argue against it, they may disagree but if they still believe in the products they have purchased they will understand. The acquiring company also has to treat all customers equally, as soon as it looks like the new acquisition is losing out to the established acquiring company customers you are going to create problems which will be difficult to overcome.

Most of these issues are symptoms of people’s behaviour and resistance to change. Managing change and specifically the people aspects of change is critical, the key to this is talking to each other and not blaming the other person for problems.

This post is just my current thoughts as someone who has been through many acquisitions and whose day job is a product manager for products which have been acquired, so I know how difficult this dilemma is to solve. Hopefully Rackspace will sort the issues out quickly and stop blaming each other as Jungle Disk and Cloud Files are currently doing.

#char[140] – 140 characters to write a useful bit of code

Darren Rollett — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 12:14:50 +0000

My thought for today is:

What is the most useful piece of code you can write in 140 characters?

Inspired by Twitter, which started me thinking back to when using less code was better. In these days of software bloat and descriptive languages it is easy to forget what we use to be able to achieve in very few lines of code. So if anyone is listening, what are your thoughts or examples of useful code in 140 characters.

#char[140] Guidelines

Any language allowed
Can call external applications and APIs but external call should not replace core logic on the 140 character program
Must do something useful, Hello World although useful as a learning tool is not in the spirit of this challenge

I will try to think of something and post an example.

PHP Frameworks Update

Darren Rollett — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 12:01:04 +0000

Just a quick update on the PHP Frameworks investigation.

After reviewing a few frameworks we have decided to give Drupal a go as it seems to offer most of what I was looking for. We will be porting the main Room 108 website to Drupal shortly. Stay tuned for more updates.

PHP Frameworks investigation

Darren Rollett — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:34:38 +0000

It has been a bit longer than a few days but here are the key criteria that I want from a PHP framework.

Allows designers to use standard HTML and CSS with minimal impact from framework
Takes care of the basic security requirements
Provides extensable modules for user management
Helps build dynamic navigation
Provides modules for things like sitemaps
Needs to be installable on shared hosting

These are just the initial requirements and I suppose I am using ASP.NET as my benchmark.

My initial investigations have not been that promising. I am not looking at things like Joomla, Drupal etc I am looking more for a programming framework as this is for custom projects. The designers can handle the off the shelf CMS type systems without input from the technical team.

Technology Platform

Darren Rollett — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 12:42:03 +0000

Having just attended the Abode CS3 Creative License Tour in Edinburgh it occured to me that I really should sit down and think about platforms for web based applications. Eventually over the next few days I will update this post with my thoughts on the subject.