So over the past few days I have been at the FoWA expo supporting Flexiscale. I have to say, it is the first time I have been to a tech expo for a company I have been working for and it was an eye opening experience!
On Tuesday we all got down there to get the stand setup. We got to the airport at around 10 which was much nicer than the usual early morning starts when I am heading down south going to our data centres 
So all of the usual boring stuff happened, we dropped off our bags at the hotel and got to ExCeL. We then got the stand setup and I have to say I was very impressed not just with the new Flexiscale website but the stand as well, all very clean and professional (then again design is not really my thing, I don’t think I ever got past that using crayons stage ) We did have a few things missing and it turns out that DHL have decided to black list E16 (despite have a depo there) so I guess we were luck to get everything we needed….the MySQL guys were not, but more on them in a later post.
So we all went back to the hotel, Phil (COO), Tony (CEO) and Christine (Marketing, Gupta Partnership) all went to a few of the parties happening that night however Gavin and I decided to have a quiet one in the hotel bar and have an early night to be ready for the busy day ahead (well that was the intent anyhoo, I ended up until the bar closed, but that is another story). I have to say I am glad we did take it easy as we really did have no idea what was about to come next!
So we got to the expo nice and early in the morning, we had the plasma display to get up and running and I still had some video editing for the demos to do which we all got finished in plenty of time for the very sudden rush we had. It turns out that listening to your customers really does pay off, everyone really does appear to love the concept of Flexiscale and the facilities we are not able to offer them with the platform we have built. That morning we got on Techcrunch (also Techcrunch UK) and everyone has been talking about Flexiscale every since.
That night we went back to the hotel to grab some dinner and have a chat about what had happened. Everyone had been so busy up until that point that they did not notice they were on their feet all day and their feet were aching, however with my wonderful new rock boots I have to say I really did not have this problem While they might not be what everyone goes to the office in they are amazingly comfy. Then we decided to head over to the FoWA party that night and that all went really well we had some drinks chatted to some good people and I even met and existing xcalibre customer who was extremely happy with the existing service we provide and was also very excited about Flexiscale. Now I think at this point I should mention, xcalibre has been doing web hosting for 10 years now, while Flexiscale is an amazingly exciting new product for us, it is not a startup and we are not going anywhere.
So some of us made it to bed later than others (I know I had a last drink in the hotel bar) we all got up in the morning and were not sure if we would be any where near as busy as we were on the launch day. Well FoWA had quietened down a little and so did we but not by much, I was still on my feet all day, still talking to people about the product and some people even came to FoWA just to see us, it was excellent…ah yea, and I did manage to make it to a few talks over the course of things
This talk was kinda surprising because I expected it to just be about how Matt had managed to scale out the wordpress.com site, however it was so much more. Before I go any further let me say how much I liked loved his presentation style, the black slides with just one or two words in white were excellent as they were just heading for what was he talking about, all substance which was really easy to focus on. Matt talked mostly about how he managed to scale the business, things to consider when hiring people and the important things to focus on if you are doing a start up…very edcuational.
Now I have to confess I really did not know much about Simon before I went to his talk, however Phil was able to fill me in (no Pun intended at all, not even close……those jokes are for the office only ). It was in total contrast to Matt’s minimalist style, all the pictures were slides were pictures from around the internet and very fast paced. However that really did carry across his point that new products quickly become commodity and it is important to focus your business on developing products on top of your existing solutions and knowledge or be left behind with no growth opportunities (which I hear is good for ducks some how).
Finally came day three, we did on day two go out to a hotel at the other side of ExCeL hoping to be able to thank the Carson Systems guys and girls for the excellent work they had done however sadly they were very tired from all of that hard work and went to have a quiet night. On the final day I did make it to two of the workshops which were both interesting, the first on securing web applications and the second on scaling the LAMP stack. On the second one I had someone ask “should you really be here, don’t you know this stuff already”. Well yes, I did know most of it however I am really not that arrogant to think I cannot learn from other people doing the same thing as I and I had met Daniel in the hotel the night before so I knew it was going to be a fascinating talk (he also knows Pi to far more places that my boss 
).
Over all it was an excellent time and I was very glad I went, Carson Systems really worked hard and it paid off, I did not speak to anyone who was not having a good worthwhile time at the event. I think everyone learned something. Once again, thanks guys (and girls!).
Now on to the hard (but enjoyable) work of getting all the additional capacity added to Flexiscale and helping everyone use it to help them with there new ideas and existing businesses……speaking of which I really need to be at at data centre in about an hour.
Take care
