As I sat down to write this year’s annual wrap up blog I thought to myself, “last year’s blog is going to be hard to match. What did we even do last year?” A job is a lot like a relationship. After a while, it’s easy to find yourself simply going through the motions and taking things for granted. And just like a relationship, it’s important that you take a step back every so often to reflect on the all the great things you have done together and accomplished as a team. No, this is not a Sex in the City monologue, this is the 2017 Was So Bigly End of Year Yuge Wrap Up Self-Congratulatory Blog.
So how would we top 2016, a year that saw us complete the build out of 2 new data centers, TPA2 and ATL1, totaling over 35,000 square feet? The answer to that came to us on September 15th when Hivelocity completed its acquisition of Los Angeles based IaaS provider, RackAlley.com. With this acquisition came 2 data centers, hundreds of new customers and an incredible staff of technicians to support them. Our new LA1 and LA2 data centers are located in downtown Los Angeles just across the street from each other and within some of the most network connected buildings in the world. To punctuate this point, how is this for a statistic; over 30% of all network traffic between the US and Asia passes through the One Wilshire Building (i.e. Coresite) where our LA2 data center is located. Now if that isn’t bigly I don’t know what bigly is.
Come to think of it, what the hell is bigly?
While opening up new data centers and completing acquisitions is certainly something we are proud of, it is actually not the thing I am most proud of from 2017. If you have followed Hivelocity for any time at all you should know we like to, or at least strive to, provide an exceptional customer experience. So when the results of our customer survey back in August returned a bigly Net Promotor Score of 73 we were ecstatic. For those of you not familiar with Net Promoter Scores or NPS, a 73 is not a C like we are trained to think. NPS scores can range from -100 to 100 with anything above a 50 considered excellent and anything above a 70 considered “world class”.
As important as customer satisfaction is to us, we would only be pleasing half the people who are important to us if our employees aren’t happy. And how long can you provide a “world class” customer experience if you have unhappy employees interacting with them all day. It is our philosophy that a happy employee begets a happy customer, which is why we were thrilled to be named the #2 best company to work for in Tampa Bay (companies 50-99 employees). Obviously, we would prefer to have been named the #1 best place to work but that is what 2018 is for.
Our Dev Team remained busy throughout 2017 and there was not bigger project on their list than launching myVelocity 2.0. The first iteration of myVelocity was introduced years ago and both a UX and UI refresh was long overdue. So on November 2nd, after many months of work we unveiled the new myVelocity to our customers. So far the enhanced intuitiveness and cleaner aesthetics of myV 2.0 has received high praise amongst our customer base. Our focus in 2018 is to focus on adding new tools to further empower our customers and simplify their lives.
Bigly Statistics from 2017:
- 34,694 – Support Tickets Closed
- 11 minutes & 30 seconds- Average Time to Reply to a Support Ticket
- 129,600 – GB of RAM deployed
- 1,782,000 – GB of SSD storage deployed
- 3,996,000 – GB of HDD storage deployed
- $127,847 – Average combined monthly power bill across our 5 data centers
- 100% Network and Power uptime at each of our TPA1, TPA2, ATL1, LA1 and LA2 data centers
Before I wrap things up, I want to thank each and every customer for helping us make 2017 such a success. Some 70% of our new business comes from existing customers and referrals. We are extremely grateful for your business and trust over the years. I am excited about the things we have in store for you in 2018 and can truthfully say, this coming year may be the bigliest ever. Look for some major announcements coming soon!
