SoftLayer isn’t a publicly traded company, but in the interest of transparency, we do our best to share as much information about the business as we can with our customers. Earlier this week, we released our revenue and operations growth for the first quarter of 2011, and while we’re happy to reach so many amazing milestones, we can’t take any time to rest on our laurels.

It’s no secret that we’ve gotten to where we are today because our 26,000+ customers trust us with their businesses. We can quantify success with revenue numbers and server counts, but at the end of the day, our business will be successful when we provide a platform for our customers to be successful. The growth of our customer base is a testament to the hard work the team has put in behind the scenes, and it also presents an interesting challenge: We need to continue to meet the needs of 26,000+ different businesses in 140+ countries around the world.

Given the amount of hair-pulling you might encounter by something as simple as setting up dinner with a group of friends, it’s a pretty daunting task to incorporate thousands of disparate perspectives in our road map as we move forward, but with that challenge comes great opportunity to build SoftLayer into an even better business. Whether the request is for something as straightforward as a hardware product or as complex as geographic expansion into specific international markets, the feedback we get from our customers shapes our internal conversations (and ultimately our long-term plans).

Understanding that need for constant feedback, we’re doing our best to listen to what our customers have to say. We’re listening to conversations on our forums, watching updates from our customers on various social media platforms, and monitoring our sales and support customer experiences to ensure we’re moving in the right direction. Recently, we incorporated a Get Satisfaction widget on our site to give our customers a platform to share their ideas, questions, problems and praises. Additionally, users can vote on existing suggestions to give us a sense of our customer base’s priorities.

To all of our customers, thank you for trusting SoftLayer with your business. In response to your past requests, we’ve opened a new data center in San Jose, christened new pods in Dallas and Washington, D.C., launched our managed hosting service and released servers powered by the latest and greatest Intel Xeon “Sandy Bridge” and “Westmere EX” processors … And all of those accomplishments have come since we closed the books on the success we shared from Q1.

As we continue to improve our feedback loops, you’re going to see even more impressive numbers from SoftLayer, and that success will fuel our ability to continue growing the business to meet more of our customers’ requests. Because we officially completed our integration with The Planet in Q1, we’re able to shift our focus completely to maintaining and growing the combined business. By the end of the year, you’ll see SoftLayer data centers in Europe and Asia, and as new products and technologies are released, you’ll see them first from SoftLayer.

What else can we do for you? (And no, that’s not a rhetorical question.)

-@gkdog