Our hardware order has finally been placed! It’s been a good solid month of price competition, quote modification, and lease arrangements. As of about an hour ago the purchase orders have been issued from our leasing companies to our hardware vendors. The bulk of our hardware order is being placed through CDW thanks to their cut-rate pricing. The rest of our hardware is a couple of Cisco 6506s from Recurrent, a Cisco reseller based out of Santa Clara.

Dirk & I are heading out to Seattle from January 8th -> January 15th, so if anybody would like to get together during that period, let us know. We’ll be working furiously racking hardware, running cables, and building our new network, but we’re trying to set our evenings aside for dinners with friends, colleagues & customers, plus we’re going to spend Saturday & Sunday exploring if we make enough progress.

  Yup, that’s me.  I’m the New Guy here at BitPusher.  It’s been a good ride so far, what with there being plenty to keep me busy. I’m rather excited about the buildout up in Seattle, and am looking forward to seeing it completed. Planning is going well, and I feel good about the project.

  BitPusher’s been treating me quite well, and I’m glad to be onboard, especially as it looks like things are goin’ up. The hat’s great, though it’s sittin’ kinda high on my head in the picture. Like I’m trying to hide a cone or something. That’s not the case, I assure you.

  It’s very pretty (and somewhat wet) up in Seattle. I hear that the Thai and Korean food is great, but to stay away from Mexican restaurants. We’ll see. It’s hard to screw up Mexican without putting lettuce into a quesadilla. Who does that, anyway? Why would they?

We began our datacenter deployment “officially” three weeks ago by signing with Fortress in Seattle. A week later, Dirk & I flew to Seattle to survey our new space and meetup with a sales lead. For posterity’s sake, I photoblogged our journey.

Our day began with taking off from Oakland Airport at 7:20 AM, arriving into SEATAC at around 9:30 AM. We picked up our Cadillac DTS at about 10:15 (we figured if we’d be driving around a wet, cold, rainy, unfamiliar city all day we might as well be in something huge, unwieldy, and comfortable) and headed to the datacenter.

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Dirk is one of BitPusher’s newest employees. He’s been with us on a part-time basis for about 6 weeks, and becomes full-time January 1st. To celebrate this, I jumped the gun a bit, and took him to The Hat Guys in Oakland, for his blue fedora.

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The year isn’t over yet, of course, but in the process of planning for the opening of our new data center I’ve spent a good deal of time taking stock — to make sure that I understand the true state of the company (financially and otherwise) so as to make informed decisions about the investments we’re making in our expansion.

At our executive team meeting yesterday I went over our preliminary financial numbers for 2006.  Our 2006 revenue will be 2.5 times more than our 2005 revenue.  Measured by monthly recurring revenue, our managed services customer base in December 2006 is 2.87 times what it was in December 2005, exceeding our informal target of doubling every eight months.  (As for profitability, we’ve never taken any outside investment and our debts are about the same as they were a year ago, so we’re more or less at break-even.)

Those financial numbers are in line with what I consider to be the real story of the state of the company.  In addition to delivering more services, our customers are happier, we’re more organized, we understand what kinds of customers we can serve most effectively and we’re getting pretty good at finding them.  We have a fantastic team of people who work remarkably well together.  We also have a clear understanding of our costs and (for the most part) how those costs will change as we expand.  In general, the company feels a lot more mature than it did a year ago.
Perhaps most significantly, I’d be happy to have any of our customers talk to prospects or to the public about their experiences.  We’ve delivered well on technical measures (e.g. median customer downtime was under one hour for the last year) and have customer service that our customers consistently say good things about.
Of course, behind the scenes this hasn’t an easy process, and isn’t getting any easier.  Because we’ve gotten more organized there’s slightly less of that “bursting at the seams” feeling, but that’s counterbalanced by the fact that there’s more pressure because we have more customers and there’s generally more at stake.  And we constantly feel limited by our financial resources, both in terms of our ability to expand and in terms of our ability to make improvements.

That said, I’m very proud of what our team has accomplished in 2006, and I look forward to the challenges coming in 2007.

As of 9PM last night, one of our newest customers, Tangler out of Sydney is live on BitPusher’s infrastructure. Finishing a customer deployment is one of the best feelings I know, and this is no exception!