Hello World!

Please allow me to introduce myself in this inaugural blog entry. My name is Duke Skarda, and I have the privilege — and challenge — of running the IT and Development organization here at The Planet. Prior to joining The Planet last summer, I spent 15 years working in the telecom industry as a software developer and architect, enterprise architect and as an executive leading development organizations. I love the challenge of leading technical teams to develop and apply technology solutions to tough problems. The telecom and hosting industries have proven to be great hunting grounds for me in that respect.

I plan to use this blog to talk about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and what we will be working on next. We have great plans for our systems and our business, and I want to let you in on them. My goal in this is two-fold: to keep you informed and to get input from you. I’ve taken a few months to settle in and get my arms around our opportunities for improvement and the resources at my disposal. I now have a good understanding of where we are and where we’re going. It’s going to be a great ride with lots of new ideas. We plan to share those ideas and get your feedback along the way, and I’ll keep you informed as we work our way through them.

When I took this role, the number one goal I was given was to improve our internal systems. We’re working to enhance our back-office systems with the application of new inventory management, billing and product catalog solutions. These platforms provide a foundation for our business, and are very important in our day-to-day operations, so as they are updated, our customers will notice subtle and continuous improvements in our service. We have a lot of resources focused on these improvements right now, and we’re making some great progress, so I look forward to sharing our successes with you.

However… what I’ve come to discover is that there is an even more powerful punch: Automation. “We want to automate everything!” That was the second goal our CEO gave me. We have a great automation engine we’re working to improve, and we’re embarking on several initiatives to add new functionality and better cycle times. Our customers will see these improvements directly in improved server delivery times and as new functionality on our portal.

So that’s the journey here at The Planet for the near future. I have a lot of people on the team helping me out. A few of them will also be writing blogs, so let me do some quick introductions. First, Stephen Johnson and Kyle Smith will each be talking about various aspects of our self-service portal, Orbit 2.0. Both Stephen and Kyle joined the company in the fall of last year and have been working hard to build a new plan and some cool new interfaces for our portal. Second, Marc Jones joined us at the end of last year and is currently driving the development of some great new products that are focused on cloud services. So look for some inside-baseball blogs from those guys.

In my next entry, I want to provide a little history and some context. The Planet development team has been working for the last few years to bring a lot of disparate parts together as one unified system. I will talk about that and I will also focus in on the most recent release of our self-service site, Orbit 2.0. There’s an interesting story behind that …

With that … engage …

-Duke