Rackspace and me

You’ve probably heard by now, but SharePoint911 was acquired by Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com/blog/newsarticles/rackspace-acquires-sharepoint911-to-provide-industry-leading-sharepoint-expertise/)  Some folks have been sending me various messages asking “Congrats! Is this a good thing?”  I thought it’d be good to take to the blogosphere to share my thoughts on this.

The week after Christmas our fearless leader, Shane Young, called a very mysterious meeting on Friday at noon.  We have meetings all the time, but the phrasing and wording of this meeting request made us all a bit nervous and I probably got IMs from everyone on the team with various theories.  But the news came down then that Rackspace wanted to buy us.  Everyone had a million questions and I can’t actually remember most of that meeting — all I remember is that we needed to all book flights immediately to head out to San Antonio to head to Rackspace the following week.

I’ll spare you all the nitty gritty details, but the next week or so was one of the most stressful of my life.  Initially I was very excited about the news but there were so many open questions.  The whole SharePoint911 crew came down The Castle (Rackspace’s home office which is a renovated old mall) on January 4th and 5th.  I was completely blown away from the sheer coolness factor of their offices — they have a slide! But slides alone aren’t enough to give warm and fuzzies.  During our time there we had a chance to meet upper management and the rest of the SharePoint team as well as a cast of characters from across the organization.  One of the best parts about working for a small company is that “start up” feeling and at SharePoint911 we always worked hard and tried to have a lot of fun doing that.  Walking around the Rackspace offices, they’ve figured out a way to keep that same “start up” feel in a company with more than 4,000 people.

Last Friday as we were doing final preparations for today’s annoucement, I mentioned that we might want to move our website out of our current “datacenter” over to some servers at Rackspace.  I think the whole process of creating the servers started at about 4pm EST.  Somewhere in the middle I went to dinner with my wife, then came back and had everything moved over to Rackspace by about 11pm EST.  It was the first time the teams from SharePoint911 and Rackspace had worked together on something like this and it was pretty awesome to see what we were able to do in such a short amount of time.  For me, that was a little glimpse into what the future holds and I’m excited.

I left my last job more than 4 years ago to go to work with Shane and Nicola Young at this company called SharePoint911 that they ran out of their house.  I’ll never forget when I told my wife this guy wanted to hire me that had never even met me.  We were pretty sure it was some type of scam.  But Shane and Nicola both came down to Orlando and went out to lunch with my wife and me.  I decided to make the jump to go work for SharePoint911 and I’m sure some folks thought I was a bit crazy.  At the time, the idea that one day we’d be acquired by a company like Rackspace wasn’t even close to something I thought was ever possible.

I’m so proud to work with such great people at SharePoint911 and excited to join the team at Rackspace.