If someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would say “SoftLayer!”. I’m impressed by their focus, their open architecture, and their frictionless business processes. SoftLayer probably looks like another me-too Internet hoster to a layperson. But to someone in the business this company is a shining example of how to do-it-right. I own and work at a hosting business and companies like this keep me awake at night — not out of fear, but because they prove what is possible in our industry. And I think everyone needs to identify a business in their industry that they look up to.

I love the fact they provide an open API that customers can leverage to manage their computing resources. Customers can use the API to integrate internal business processes with their service provider’s processes. As service providers become more of an extension of corporate IT’s internal resources these types of APIs will become more critical.

SoftLayer engineers also designed a network architecture which provides both performance and management benefits. They can easily connect multiple dedicated servers using a private internal network. The big benefit of a private network is that customers don’t have to pay for bandwidth consumed by servers talking to one another (i.e., web app server talking to a database server). Hosters like The Planet used to make oodles of cash off of companies that had heavy bandwidth utilization between servers. This kind of bandwidth effectively costs the service provider nothing.

SoftLayer’s frictionless business processes really separate the company from the pack. Take the service ordering process for example. You can go from an online order to a fully provisioned dedicated server in minutes. You can manage that server remotely using KVM-over-IP functionality. Need to reboot the server? No problem. They provide managed power port access. Need to rebuild your server? Again, no problem. You can rebuild your server using one of their server imaging systems.

SoftLayer didn’t invent anything new in the sense that most of these technologies have been around for years. Their success is based on their ability to elegantly bundle these technologies in a way that can be fully managed by their customers. The company recently announced a partnership with Citrix to build a cloud computing infrastructure. I plan to follow this new effort very closely.

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