Saturday, August 8, 2009

Ms. Kendra Borrego, Interim Head of Finance

Ms. Kendra Borrego, Interim Head of Finance

Ms. Borrego joined Immersion in August of 2009 as Interim head of finance. Prior to Immersion, Kendra served as chief financial officer of VoiceObjects where she provided financial leadership in successfully converting a software company based in Germany to a US led business, while guiding continuing operations in the EMEA region. In this position, she oversaw all controller functions as well as human resources, legal affairs, IT, facility management, investor reporting, and bank relationships. Earlier in her career, Borrego was chief financial officer for IMPAC Medical Systems where she led the finance and administrative team from initial public offering through several acquisitions, through revenue growth to $100 M, and successfully sold the company at a $250M valuation. Borrego holds a B.S. in business administration from the University of Nevada, Reno and an M.B.A. from San Jose State University.


from Linkedin:

Kendra Borrego has accepted a new Interim CFO position for the next few months, but is still looking for an exciting permanent CFO position. - 1 day ago


Kendra Borrego

Internap outage in Boston, twitter...

various twitter sources...

neilschelly Internap BSN is back online and my servers never went down. They were certainly inaccessible, but uptimes indicate they never lost power.

maractwin #internap boston appears to be back online

n1zyy And just like that, Internap in Somerville (BSN) is back online.

rustyszurek #Internap response - At this time we are investigating a connectivity outage to the BSN and BSN003 faclities.

westher @librarythingtim I'm not really a techie, does #internap explain why I can't get to any LT servers?

maractwin Waiting for #internap in Boston to come back online. I've got a dozen servers that are dark.

n1zyy @johndalton: "InternapNap" -- finding that way too funny as I sit here twiddling my thumbs waiting for Internap to come back online.

hndalton Finally received email confirming a total #internap #outage in Boston. #internapnap

neilschelly I just got confirmation (took awhile on the phone) that Internap BSN is down and has no idea when power will be back or why it went away.

n1zyy @johndalton: Yup, same findings here: Nagios going off the hook because Internap in Somerville is offline.

johndalton Seems that #internap may have DC-wide #outage in BSN003 - can anyone confirm?

fps81 hosts within 69.25.205-69.25.207 appear to have fallen off the internet. Good job Internap. I wasn't interested in sleep tonight anyway.

librarythingtim @slack2daze @JSatrape @johndalton Share anything you find out about the Internap nap?

librarythingtim Apparently our colo—the ironically named "internap"—is down for everyone. http://twitter.com/#search?q=Internap

JSatrape @slack2daze Internap isn't even answering the phone. :(

JSatrape Anyone else having massive issues with Internap's Boston colo?

---

(Actually I suspect it was a drastic equipment failure - they said "The power event was limited to DC power systems that provide power to the Internap PNAP and not customer UPS systems." Still waiting to hear the full story..)

previous blog entry.

CDN Business May Get Worse Before It Gets Better, Further Details On Pricing

from Dan Rayburn:

>>With Limelight reporting earnings last night, it's now clear that the major players in the CDN space, the vendors that control the vast majority of the market share for video delivery, are all experiencing no growth. Akamai's M&E business was down and Limelight, Internap and Level 3 all reported no revenue growth for their CDN business. And with Q3 typically being a weak quarter for the CDNs and some of them setting guidance that shows no growth over Q2, we may have yet to see the bottom.

Steve Kiene

more...

>>Where do you get this "millions of dollars" statement?

No one but a few Internap employees know the CDN engineering budget, so you're just making up numbers. Do you know how many people comprise the CDN engineering team? A lot fewer than you think. I can ensure you that the work we did resulted in cost savings far in excess of the cost of salaries for the CDN engineering team.

Ask companies like Ustream and Softlayer what we accomplished while I was at Internap. None of those companies would be customers today if not for the work of my team.

We rebuilt nearly the entire CDN in a year at a cost of less than 1/100 of what Dan Rayburn says it costs to build a CDN. We rebuilt things so that they actually worked for our customers in a reliable manner, resulting in landing many new CDN customers.

And, in case you forgot, I quit- I was not fired or asked to leave. In fact, I was asked more than once to reconsider my departure- to the point where the door is open for me to return if I so choose.

I was the largest individual shareholder and I didn't waste the shareholder's money. I ran a team as lean as I could and we did as much as we could to reduce operating costs.

I spent over $28k of my own money on things like taking folks to conferences, buying development tools, desks, computers, and lots of other things that the company could have paid for- but weren't considered essential so I didn't feel right in making the company pay for them.

To claim that I just siphoned money from the company is plain wrong.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Craig Vachon's blog

Craig Vachon is Immersion's senior vice president and general manager of its Touch line of business. HT to cellodude on the IV MB. It's even more interesting given the existing relationship between Immerion and Vosteon, Ford's main supplier:

>>Haptics - touch feedback concepts

* Feedback through touch happens faster than through other senses.
* The response to touch is usually strong, visceral and can evoke emotion.
* Objects that have a solid feel may convey an emotional response that ranges from a feeling of high quality to an enhanced sense of security.
* Consumer perception of what constitutes a "high quality" feel falls into a fairly narrow range that is measurable through consumer testing.

[Derived from a Ford research report on Haptics]

more from Steve Kiene...

the guy feels like talking a lot... emphasis added... the part I agree is the following:

>>My biggest worry is that the person who was the driving force behind acquiring Vitalstream is still in the same position at Internap. If anyone should have lost their job for making a bad decision, that's the person.

>>I only have opinions. I think Internap is full of politics and it's a challenge to be part of a team when you're remote and the folks who don't like you are local. They get face time with management, et al a lot more often and can continually attack people behind their back.

Maybe Eric recognizes this and is only hiring in Atlanta- I don't know. Their job site would probably be a good indication.

>>I think most of the company wanted to stay status quo and JD deciding to expand the business into software as a service/cloud-like stuff (that's really what CDN is) was probably viewed as a betrayal of the company "DNA".

Another issue is Internap's crazy religious belief that Linux is the only viable option for anything. Vitalstream was based on Windows and that caused a lot of bad blood.

I also think Phil Kaplan and team's near fraudulent (or completely fraudulent if you ask me) representation of the Vitalstream assets was also a problem. Once folks realized that the VS folks were smoking crack (not literally), it was too late. That upset a lot of folks- quite understandably.

I think JD maybe isn't the best CEO for some folks. For me, he was great. I was hired to do a job and I was trusted to do it. There was no micro-managing, no second guessing. Sure, I was questioned and challenged, but that's a lot different.. I think most of the folks at the company needed more direction because they didn't want to be leaders.

I'll bet in hindsight, he would have hired a few more strong leaders and let them do their thing.

Remember though, the position Internap was in when he came in. He righted the ship and fixed the financials. He took a risk (CDN) and I respect him for taking that risk- daring to make the company more than it was. Sometimes risks pay off, sometimes not.

You also have to look at the CDN market at the time- rates were high and were climbing. It was fair to expect them to continue to climb for awhile longer. No one- not Akamai, not Limelight, predicted or was prepared for the massive drop in CDN pricing.
My biggest worry is that the person who was the driving force behind acquiring Vitalstream is still in the same position at Internap. If anyone should have lost their job for making a bad decision, that's the person.

>>
Well, I think they have to write down most of the remaining goodwill. The CDN has been almost completely re-written and there's little value to be extracted from what Internap bought. What they are selling today is not what they bought- it's virtually all new. I'm no financial expert, but if there's $60M+ in goodwill remaining, there has to be $60M in value to be extracted, right? If not, it has to be written down (minus the value that has been realized). I think.

That's not to say the CDN business should be "written off", i.e. dumped.

I have read the public filings on Eric's compensation package and have drawn my own conclusion what he's likely to do. Folks can read it themselves and draw their conclusions. He does stand to make a lot of money if he sells the company and walks away. You can calculate how high the stock price will need to rise to in order to make him more money by not selling.

Then again, maybe his comp package is just a reflection of what he was able to negotiate- not any indication of what he's going to do.

I'd think that if the board's intention was to sell the company, then one of the board members would have taken over as CEO vs conducting a long search to find someone to come in and act as CEO.

>>No, it's a selling point. The competition always hammers on the fact (wrong) that the Vitalstream CDN was junk. Well, it's not the "Vitalstream" CDN anymore. This is stated on most sales calls, and that information is not confidential.

This information has been told to customers at tradeshows as well.

Limelight Networks comments on CDN pricing

from LLNW conference call, transcripts by Seeking Alpha (emphasis added):

  • David Hilal - FBR Capital Markets
  • Okay and on pricing, Jeff, your comment on aggressive pricing or it is pretty comparable to what Akamai had said last week and I do no think it is probably a surprise to anybody at least in common sector but maybe you can talk to us about the pace of that aggressive pricing and I mean pricing war sometimes can last a long time and sometimes can be short and you obviously need to manage your business based on how you forecast that. So, when you think add over the next year or so, do you think the pricing environment stays equally tough or starts to improve or could possibly get worse from what you have seen recently?
  • Jeffrey Lunsford
  • Sure, so let us give you some historical context here. So, three years ago, we were modeling about 20% to 25% annual unit price decline and about a year ago, we started looking at and talking to investors about probably you should model 25% to 30% annual price decline. What we saw in Q2 was in between 30% and 35% so if you want to be conservative, you would model a 30% to 35% going forward.
  • If you look back over a decade, that is much more rapid price decline than the industry has historically had and so, we do think that that will improve. We think we should return back to 25% to 30% and then ultimately back to 20% to 25% per year and we think there is two root causes for the compression going to this level.
  • Number one, the business environment, the economy customers are putting dramatic pressure on all of their vendors, CDNs included. Number two, which we have talked about in the past is that large telcos that began to offer CDN services are able to get paid when they deliver those bits on the ISP side and so to try to establish themselves in the business, they will subsidize CDN with other big delivery services. The effect of that second one, the entrance of the telcos into the market, we believe has now being felt and absorbed by the industry and so we believe that from here forward, we should be looking at a more return to normal.
  • What happened is that has caused a shakeout effectively. It is no secret that there are many smaller companies that were trying to make a run at the CDN sector have given up, shutdown or sold for $0.20 on a $1 and we now have a market that as I said earlier is solidifying around two or three market leaders. So, while at short term pain, we believe there will be a long term benefit and that this is a business that requires global scale and the analogy that we used is the package delivery business where you have that actual GPS and DHO and if you are going to build a global infrastructure to deliver anything where there is packages or bits, you only need two or three platforms.
  • And so with the way of a traffic that continues to grow and with the complexity of all the new devices people are accessing content with, we think that those two or three global platforms will going to have an amazing opportunity and an amazing amount of work ahead of them and so the shakeout when you look back a couple of years from now while short term painful, you will look back and say, "Well, I was a good there winning in shakeout and the markets are now really healthy around these two or three platforms."

A new cyberknife is coming soon to Omaha

from the IV MB, by yyy60:

>>A new cyberknife is coming soon to Omaha

** this will be the second cyberknife in Nebraska **

Creighton University
Omaha, Nebraska

Urology Job Opportunity #190240
Assistant or Associate Professor


Exciting Academic Opportunity at Prestigious Midwestern University!

Creighton University, ranked for the sixth consecutive year as the #1 Comprehensive University in the Midwest, (U.S. News and World Report) has a faculty opening for a BC/BE urologist at the assistant or associate professor level. We require fellowship training in general urology, advanced laparoscopy and robotic surgery. Urologic oncology training is requested but not required.

As an academic medical center, you will have access to the DaVinci Robotic Surgical System and full support and referrals from our 250+ Creighton medical team. We seek diverse minimally invasive procedure skills which include mastery of advanced laparoscopic techniques with nephrectomies, pyeloplasties, prostatectomies and radical prostatectomy. In addition, surgical experience with cryotherapy and brachytherapy of the prostate, KTP laser TURP and holmium laser ablation of prostate (HoLAP) are desired. If you are interested in teaching the next generation of surgeons or would like to explore your clinical research ideas, this could be the position for you. Our cancer team welcomes innovative ideas about urologic cancer follow-up strategies.

The latest Cyberknife technology will be available in 2009!

more by Steve Keine...

having said I believe management shouldn't write on a message board, here's the latest from the Yahoo MB:

>>I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Sullivan. He allowed me to build and run a team the way I felt was best and he always tried to drive things forward at Internap. He spent a lot of energy "running interference" for me so my team could get things done. Everything he told me was true, he never played political games, and he was determined to bring focus to the CDN. His departure made me absolutely confident that I made the right decision to leave. If I hadn't resigned prior to his departure, I would have done so immediately after his departure.

I'll work with him again in a heartbeat if the opportunity is available.

I'm purposely not answering your question. If folks think Tim leaving was a good thing, then they probably should view my leaving as a good thing too. However, if they think my leaving was a bad thing, then they would probably view his departure as a bad thing as well.

The current direction/future of the CDN happened because of Tim's direction- it started last year. Of course, he'll get no credit for it because most folks think major shifts happen overnight. They don't realize when you're fighting uphill it takes months to make headway.

One thing that no one has noticed- there's no management left outside of Atlanta. Everyone in management who wasn't in Atlanta is gone.

>>I don't think there's a clear answer, and not being in Atlanta meant I couldn't observe most of the folks.

My morale dropped to an all-time low- to the point where I dreaded coming into work. Contrast that with a few months ago when I was working 100 hours a week and enjoying it.

Folks can say what they want about DeBlasio, but the man never lied to me, never hid facts from me, treated me with respect, and virtually always approved the things I asked for to do my job. He knew he wasn't a visionary in the CDN market so he let me quietly lead the direction and supported it in other areas of the company. He never made a hasty/reactionary decision. Hard for me to ask for more in a CEO.

Fisher Plaza update

from the Yahoo MB:

>>Heard back from Inap on the Fisher SLA...looks like we are getting about a 20% credit for the month. I'm a bit underwhelmed (as expected). FWIW, as of this week, the facility is back on 'interim' city power. We got hit with another power event that affected half of our gear as they transitioned from the generators to the temporary city feed (thank goodness for the redundant power drops / servers). Still no ETA on when the final redesigned power solution will be in place. I really wish they could keep the lights on!
We're down to a short list of new colo options...Inap's Tukwilla (Sabey) facility is still in the running but at this point I'd guess we'll be contributing to next quarter's churn.

Water Main Break Near Key NYC Telecom Hub

worth keeping an eye on. This is from Data Center Knowledge:

>>Water Main Break Near Key NYC Telecom Hub

A major water main break in New York has flooded streets near 60 Hudson Street, one of the most important communications buildings in Manhattan. Early reports from New York television stations indicate there is water in the basement of 60 Hudson, which houses data centers and telecom hubs for more than 100 communications companies. New York emergency officials are aware of the building’s strategic importance and said to be using sandbags to try and limit water damage at the building.

Internap Somerville - 70 Innerbelt - Offline?

just one source, no reply:

>>Internap Somerville - 70 Innerbelt - Offline?

fog fog is offline
View Beta Profile
Web Hosting Master
Join Date: Jun 2002
Posts: 1,322
Looks like they're back up now. The email itself alludes to "reports of possible power issues on site" but looks like our machines never lost power.

Steve Kiene on Internap

Steve Kiene is back on the Yahoo MB and says his final word about it:

>>About the only thing I should say is that I owned 1.5 million shares (purchased with my own money- no grants or options) and I sold everything (within the trading window for executives) after I decided to leave.

Saying anything else would be just my opinion and is pretty much meaningless at this point. I'm no longer an employee so nothing I say should mean anything. Current employees with a vested interest in the success of the company are the ones whose opinions matter.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Internap peering in Europe

DE-CIX, as expected, 10 Gig port:

Company Information
Company Name Internap
Also Known As Internap Network Services
Company Website http://www.internap.com/
Primary ASN 22212
Public Peering Exchange Points
Exchange Point Name ASN IP Address Mbit/sec
DE-CIX 22212 80.81.194.45 10000

A closer look at some Akamai data

Rob Powell, at Telecom Rumblings, was kind enough to publish a small article about Akamai:

>>A closer look at some Akamai data

SEC Expected to Limit ‘Flash’ Trading

from Data Center Knowledge, impact expected on Equinix and SAVVIS (and probably Switch and Data):

SEC Expected to Limit ‘Flash’ Trading

Securities and Exchange Commission chairwoman, Mary Schapiro, said Tuesday that she would seek to ban a type of high-speed financial trading known as “flash trading” as the first step in a broader review of activity in the markets for automated low latency trading. Schapiro said she had asked the agency to devise “an approach that can be quickly implemented to eliminate the inequity that results from flash orders.”

Low latency trading has become a big business for a number of players in the data center space, especially Equinix (EQIX) and Savvis (SVVS).

Immersion says CFO Stephen Ambler has resigned

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/afx/2009/08/05/afx6745618.html

here's the filing. Daniel Chavez, Immersion’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Medical Line of Business, leaving as well. No mention of any relationship with the ongoing investigation:

(b)
On July 31, 2009, Stephen M. Ambler, Principal Financial Officer, Chief Financial Officer and Vice-President, Finance of Immersion Corporation (“Immersion”), resigned from his employment with Immersion. Immersion agreed to pay Mr. Ambler approximately $105,000, representing six months of his current base salary. In addition, Immersion agreed to pay him six months of COBRA payments and to extend the exercise period of his currently-vested stock options.
Immersion is currently undergoing a search for a permanent Chief Financial Officer. In the interim, Immersion has retained an outside consultant to assist in managing its finance and accounting organization.
(e)
Reference is made to the severance arrangement for Mr. Ambler described above.
Item 8.01 Other Events
Daniel Chavez, Immersion’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Medical Line of Business, will resign from Immersion effective August 7, 2009.


Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Patient education video for CyberKnife

Patient education video for CyberKnife

Patient education video from Accuray Inc. which makes the CyberKnife Robotic Radiosurgery System. It is one of several machines that can deliver stereotactic body radiotherapy or SBRT.



http://www.philly.com/philly/video/52380647.html

Monday, August 3, 2009

More demand than supply seen in data centers

from inquirer.net:

>>More demand than supply seen in data centers

MANILA, Philippines – Data centers are in a renaissance in recent years with increased Internet usage, spurred by the growth of online services

Samuel Lee, president of data center company Equinix Asia Pacific said the sheer size of Asia -- with its tech-savvy population and the number of industries, from small, medium, and large corporations -- is creating new demand for data centers.

“Outsourcing growth, Internet data traffic, and electronic trading in Asia can be attributed to the rise in data center growth. With this, many Asian companies are looking at new business models to keep up with operational capacity while maintaining customer satisfaction,” Lee said.

But even with data centers popping up in different regions, Lee said the introduction of Internet-ready devices, as well as the use of social networking services are pushing demand farther away from the supply side.

The use of video is also one of the reasons for increased bandwidth usage and storage space among telecommunications providers and digital media portals, who would constantly look at data centers for more space and connection speed.