Data Centers are HOT right now. The telcos – WIND, C-Link, AT&T and VZ – may have their data centers on the market, but the pure play data center companies are booming.

“Colo Atl has another fiber tenant at ist 55 Marietta Street. Southern Fibernet has built into the facility where it will find easy inter-connection to the 80+ other network operators in the facility’s Meet Me Area and the SNAP internet exchange.” [Ramblings]

“Zayo is expanding again in Atlanta in response to the needs of a major customer. They will be adding another 11,000 square feet of space to the data center they acquired back in July of 2014, then known as AtlantaNAP. Zayo says that since then revenue and EBITDA at the facility are up 60%, which is an interesting growth data point for the company’s zColo business.” [Ramblings]

Many small colo providers have switched to selling VPS and cloud computing to make more money per rack. (And it brings them back to the days of selling Hosting!) Selling colo is much like being a Realtor – you are selling location and real estate. Selling hosting or cloud computing is a different kind of sale. You are selling a virtual service. You have to project Trust, Reliability and paint the picture of the Digital Hands that will provide fantastic customer care.

Ask The Right Questions Before Choosing A Colocation Provider from CyrusOne.

CenturyLink: Gigabit Marketing Helps Sell Slower Speeds.

“When customers called and weren’t in the fiber footprint and realized they could get 20 Mbps or get 40 Mbps and when they did they were willing to switch. I think it was the fact that it was unknown to them that they could get speeds they could get from us.”

I wrote on this topic recently – Building Your Own versus Buying. I also wrote a little about what technology you sould be working on HERE.

At the Open Source session at ITEXPO, someone in the audience talked about open source use because he could control it more, customize it more and offer stuff that maybe the commercial softswitch couldn’t. I didn’t rebut him because it had to percolate, but I don’t see too many of the 2000+ VoIP providers offering anything cool. They all offer about the same thing. So if you are going to build it, build something cool like Slack, not a hobbled together cheaper version of Broadsoft.

People aren’t really buying technology. They are buying outcomes. It is about getting to market fast; not getting to market eventually. There are a couple of ISPs that talked and talked and tinkered and came to market months later. The window of opportunity that they would have had shrunk.

The window of opportunity for a lot of stuff is shrinking, especially for UCaaS. To many players in the space and two giants that will soon be battling it out – Cisco and Microsoft.

Also during the Open Source session, many expressed a small problem: finding talent is becoming harder. Talent to run the open source software is getting expensive. Just another thing to think about.

Seth Godin this morning had a post about Loose/tight, thoughts on management. When to hire employees, when to outsource. It is the same concept I am trying to convey but he does it better.

I know it is McD’s (in the image below), but they know what business they are in. Do You? Hint: You are not in the Internet business. Nor the voice business. You are in the technology delivery business coupled with making the tech invisible to the user business.

I wrote in my TMC blog this morning about all the acronyms we use and all the jargon we use. It is all Charlie Brown’s Teacher to the prospect, to the marketplace.

I did a webinar about having the Best Year Ever and some of it is about time management. So how do you manage tasks, projects, time? Here are some apps and lists of apps.

Time Management: Best Apps for ADHD Adults. This list includes the likes of Listastic, 2Do, 30/30 and 24me, a reminder app.

Top 15 Time Management Apps and Tools.

10 Time Tracker apps.

10 Great Time Management Apps for Adult Students.

I know 2 million people swear by Slack every day, but Quip is like Slack and used internally at Facebook. I think the key is to be able to add functionality. In this case, both Slack and Quip have integartions. Read more about the Quip integrations here. Comparing Quip and Slack.

You can add integration with platforms like Zapier or IFTTT

Toggl track how much time you spend on different projects.

Mindmapping is a great productivity technique, and Mind42 is the best free mind-mapping app.

MyLifeOrganized – Powerful To-Do list, task management & personal organizer software

Boxer – email client and to-do list maker.

Email overload?
Mailbox
Sanebox

More productivity apps from LifeHacker.

Tech That’s Revolutionizing Your Daily Chores

Get stuff done for you:

• TaskRabbit
• Fiverr
• ThumbTack
• RedButler
• Fancy Hands
• Virtual Assistants

Need some ambient sound while working? Supposedly increases productivity. Coffivity.