It’s a weird moment when you sit down to write, having been asked to do a little piece for Compare The Cloud, and all you can think of is one Andrew McLean’s best Scrooge face on their Christmas podcast flyers…
Personally, I quite like Christmas; generally speaking everyone is in high spirits and for the briefest of periods Reading, one of the places that Pulsant calls home and my own professional base, stops being one big traffic jam.
Using the definition of Christmas from everyone’s younger years of “that time of year you get new toys,” Christmas for me professionally was many months ago. As one who frequently beavers away in the background, behind the cloud, most of my new toys arrived during summer.
The massive boom for a lot of our customers in the run up to the festive period caused a lot of nervous conversations in Autumn around planning the capacity they would need to stay up and running. I’m told it’s always tricky! But we know that… We have to make a good estimate of how much capacity our customers will estimate they need to survive Christmas and get it in before they ask for it!
Our Enterprise Cloud, in providing that flexible capacity our customers enjoy running up to Christmas, actually causes Pulsant quite a headache. Turning that bad problem of “we’ve run out of capacity because our sales were stronger than we predicted” into the good problem of “we needed more capacity because our sales were stronger” in a matter of minutes is great for our customers but it takes Pulsant several weeks, if not months, to put in large quantities of blades, storage systems and network devices. As a result, and at the risk of highlighting that I’m a massive nerd, I got loads of those cool new toys quite a while ago.
So, Christmas for me at work is a relatively quiet affair. Our customers are booming and my esteemed colleagues are helping them boom, on the infrastructure we prepared ages ago. I guess my Christmas present is that warm and fuzzy feeling that actually… we are really quite good at this! That or socks.
If you’d like to know more about how our Enterprise Cloud helps our customers cope with the demands of Christmas you can read all about it on our website. It is however, with regret, that I must inform you that we do not sell socks!
Head of Cloud Services - Pulsant