Tag: Rackspace (Page 2 of 7)

Rackspace Launches Linux for Ladies Training Program

March 19, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

At the Women in Tech Networking event at South by Southwest Interactive last week, Rackspace Hosting launched its new training program, Linux for Ladies, aimed at helping women get top jobs in the IT industry.

“Because of our rapid growth we want to make sure we have talent in the pipeline,” said Vivian Tate, Rackspace diversity program manager.

Currently, women occupy only 26 percent of computing-related jobs in the U.S., according to a recent survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rackspace wants to increase the number of women in technology jobs at its company, Tate said.

The jobs pay well too. According to Glassdoor, the national average for a Linux Systems Administrator I is $57,000.

“Rackspace has a very competitive starting salary and offers Rackers multiple opportunities to advance their careers,” according to the company.

The Linux for Ladies training program will be delivered through Rackspace’s Open Cloud Academy. It’s designed for women to achieve the right skills and certifications for IT jobs.

Rackspace plans to provide scholarships to 20 women in the first class. The scholarship will allow them to take the Linux System Administration training for free.

Rackspace’s Open Cloud Academy, based on the sixth floor of the Weston Centre downtown, launched a year ago. Its mission is to provide students with affordable IT certifications to bridge the IT skills gap and build San Antonio’s tech workforce.

Since its launch, the Open Cloud Academy has graduated 110 students and Rackspace has hired 31 of them. But 49 students just graduated and Rackspace is expected to make some offers to some of them too, said Deborah Carter, Rackspace Open Cloud Academy manager of operations.

Rackspace is holding a session on March 26th at 6 p.m. at the Open Cloud Academy for more information on the Linux for Ladies program.

The Linux for Ladies program, which trains women to become Linux system administrators, costs $3,500. Women must be 18 years or age or older and have a high school diploma to participate. The program begins June 2nd and lasts eight weeks. It runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Applicants must have a CompTIA network plus certification to participate. Rackspace offers a self-paced program to achieve that certification.

SmartHost of New York Wins the StartupBus 2014 Competition

March 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

“Sweat equity is the best startup capital” – Mark Cuban

A banner bearing Mark Cuban’s quote hung on the wall at Rackspace’s event center Thursday as it hosted its third annual StartupBus event featuring teams from all over the country and Mexico.
All of the StartupBus participants riding on the eight buses for the past 72 hours put in plenty of sweat equity.
They arrived at Rackspace ready to pitch their startups. Some of them had working prototypes, apps and websites ready to go and a few already had customers. Rackspace hosted working sessions, semi-finals, finals and a mini-conference.
The conference featured talks by Guy Kawasaki, Elizabeth McBride, an intellectual property attorney, Robert Scoble with Rackspace and Michael Johnstone from Mark Cuban Cos.
StartupBus, a competition that started in 2010 with one bus headed from San Francisco to SXSW. It has since grown nationwide and has branched out internationally.
Smarthost, an android app that aggregates and analyzes the market for short-term housing rentals on sites like AirBnb and HomeAway, won the StartupBus competition. The five person team met on the New York City bus and came up with the idea and built and deployed it within the 72 hours, said David Redding, the Android developer.
“It’s live in the Google Play store right now,” he said.
As the winner, this year, SmartHost has the option of spending three months at the StartupBus house in San Francisco further developing its product. Redding said all the team members have jobs and they’ll meet later to consider what they plan to do.
Bridgefy, a four-person team out of Mexico City, won runner up in the competition. Bridgefy created an Android app that allows people to chat privately without an Internet connection, said Jorge Rios, with the team. He said the team plans to seek investment and continue to develop its product.

Students Showcase Engineering Skills at FIRST Robotics Super Regional Championship

March 1, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST Robotics, at Alamo FIRST Regional Robotics Championship

Want to see some of the best and brightest young minds in our country in action?
Go to the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center Saturday for the finals of the FIRST Robotics Super Regional Championship, a three-day robotics competition with more than 3,500 students and more than 200 teams from across the U.S. and Canada.
Rackspace is sponsoring the event.
The FIRST programs are important because they are creating the STEM workers the U.S. needs so much, said Dean Kamen, inventor and founder of FIRST Robotics. He attended the event Friday.
“Everybody has finally figured out that the future of our country, our competitiveness, our ability to deal with problems like healthcare, environment and energy, requires way more kids to get involved in science and technology and inventing as a career,” Kamen said.

Kids need more role models so they can envision themselves as scientists. “Particularly, young women don’t think about it as a career because they don’t see women in science and technology on TV,” Kamen said.
There are very few jobs in the world of sports and entertainment compared to the millions of jobs available in technology, he said.
Kamen founded FIRST, which means For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, 25 years ago to provide four hands-on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math focused programs for students in grades kindergarten through high school. His goal is to make FIRST available in every school in the country.
“The great thing about FIRST is not that we teach anything, that’s what teachers do, that’s what schools do,” Kamen said. “What we do is create a whole movement, a generation of kids excited about participating to learn, to become part of the tech community.”
FIRST also appeals to women and minorities, Kamen said. Through the robotics program he’s hoping to reach students everywhere, he said.
“So that over the next ten years I hope through FIRST the U.S. will re-emerge as the country in this world that has the most and the best scientists, technologists, engineers, inventors because that’s what raises the bar of every generation, compared to the last one.,” he said.
Every field that has seen improvement, it’s because of technology, Kamen said.
“We used to pretty much be the only country in the world focused on technology,” Kamen said. “But now the rest of the world has figured out that the key to the future is tech and their kids are focused like laser beams, which we invented, on technology and our kids are distracted by things that are amusing and fun.”
The U.S. focuses too much on sports and entertainment, he said.
“I think they are great too. But they are a pastime,” he said.
The kids in this generation have got to start with technology early at the FIRST Lego League competitions and stick with it and develop their skills.
“They’ve got to come out ready to be the best in the world.” Kamen said.

Rackspace CEO Graham Weston also spoke to students about the importance of STEM education at the opening ceremony on Friday.
“We think FIRST robotics is the cornerstone event for getting future geeks and getting more kids into science and technology,” Weston said. The FIRST programs develop critical thinking and problem solving at a young age, he said.
“It’s much better to start tackling these engineering challenges when you’re young,” Weston said. “When you’re mind is still open and ready to tackle big questions. This is a competition but it is one of the most intellectual and toughest troubleshooting and engineering competitions in the world. It takes real skill to win these prizes.”
Rackspace also considers FIRST to be a great place to “hire future Rackers,” Weston said.

Sean McDonald, member of the Purple Gear team from North Carolina, holding up one of the team's patents

Sean McDonald, member of the Purple Gears team from North Carolina, holding up one of the team’s patents

In the mechanics pits before the competition, Sean McDonald, programmer for Purple Gears from Raleigh, North Carolina, showed off his team’s two pending patents. And they’ve got another one in process, said Sean Greene, the team’s modeler.
“We’ve got a patent on the wheel,” Greene said. “So we’ve reinvented the wheel.”
Their robot was competing in the FIRST Robotics Tech Challenge in the “Block Party” game in which their robot has to place plastic blocks into goals in an arena competition. The teams also can raise their team alliance flag up a pole and pull their robots up on a bar to earn extra points.
“We’re learning a lot about engineering in this process,” said Jessica Bayeh, junior at Cinco Ranch High School in Katy. She’s a member of Cryptonite 624. All of the team members wore spiked up green hair. Cryptonite’s robot, Sidewinder, is competing in the FIRST Robotics Competition game Aerial Assist, in which large robots must score as many balls in goals during a two minute and 30 second match.

Libby Perego, freshman, and Jessica Bayeh, junior at Cinco Ranch High School in Katy.

Bayeh attended a special lunch to honor women in technology on Friday. She wants to pursue a career in engineering.
Her teammate, Libby Perego, a freshman, said she loves engineering. The robotics program has taken most of her time after school and on the weekends, but it’s been worth it, she said.
“I’m really interested in engineering in general,” Perego said.
Susan Pope, assistant director in the department of space science at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, gave the keynote address during the Women in Technology luncheon. More than 200 students and mentors attended.

Code for America Hosts CodeAcross in San Antonio

February 23, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Think of this group as super heroes for the city of San Antonio.

They’re a brigade of citizens seeking to solve the city’s problems through technology with an empathetic twist.

Together, they seek to tackle issues around transparency, information about school closures, creating customer service portals, discovering cultural secrets of San Antonio and city council hot issues.

Those are just a few of the ideas for city web and mobile applications generated from a massive brainstorming session at Rackspace on Saturday. More than 50 people attended Code for America’s CodeAcross daylong event.

They are part of the Open San Antonio brigade, known as OpenSATX. They met in five groups with city officials and looked at San Antonio data sets and ways to use them. And they created lists of problems on yellow sticky notes the city should be addressing.

The event also raised awareness for the local Code for America program.
San Antonio’s Code for America fellows include Maya Benari, David Leonard and Amy Mok. They have been here for three weeks meeting with citizens and city officials. They have one more week to go. Then they’ll take their research back to San Francisco and choose a project to work on.

Benari, a web designer and developer from Los Angeles, wants to make technology more human and empathetic.

“When people think about government it’s not an easy system,” she said.

With events like CodeAcross, the goal is to start with the users and focus on solving their problems, she said. So much of government creates the solutions first, she said.
Benari signed up with Code for America to help people.

“I thought it was an incredible opportunity to have a bigger impact in influencing the things people deal with every day,” she said.

Kyle Rames, a software developer advocate at Rackspace and organizer of San Antonio’s CodeAcross brigade, said the goal of the event is to empower citizens to make change in their communities.

“I think this is an opportunity for people who have questions about how their city works and how they can get involved with it,” Rames said.

The Code for America fellows can’t do everything, he said. So the local brigade will choose projects citizens can work on, he said.

“I think there are a lot of exciting things going on in San Antonio right now and it’s changing right before our very eyes,’’ Rames said. Those initiatives for change include SA 20/20, the decade of downtown and Geekdom, a coworking and technology incubator and now the CodeAcross brigade, he said.

Rames would like to see more of an open data policy from the city.

“So developers can interact with it, especially with the rise of places like Rackspace and Geekdom where people can take that data and apply it very creative ways,” he said.

The city has a finite budget so the ability to tap into the creativity of citizens will provide more solutions, said Hugh Miller, San Antonio’s Chief Technology Officer.

He attended the event to get fresh ideas on how to solve the city’s problems.

The event sought to get customer feedback on city services and how the city in partnership with citizens could create better applications, Miller said.

“How can we make what we’ve already done more simplified to find,” Miller said. “We have this large volume of really cool bits of data but they’re not marketed and consolidated in ways they are easy to consume.”

Collin Beck, Koedal Inc., an iPhone and iPad app company, attended the event because he wanted to help improve San Antonio, particularly its transportation industry.

“I wanted to see how I could help out with my skills to make San Antonio a better place,” he said.

San Antonio can do more to make the downtown area more accessible to its residents particularly by providing more parking, said Wayne Hartman, a mobile app developer.
He attended the event to donate his skills.

“I’ve been blessed with a lot of opportunities,” he said. “My ability to give back is somewhat limited. But I really like what Code for America is doing. This is a way for me to give back to the community.”

Hugh Donagher, storyteller for the Code for America San Antonio brigade, said the organization needs all kinds of skills. The group is publishing its information under the OpenSATX brand. It has a Facebook page and a Twitter account under that brand and it’s has created a OpenSATX.org website.

“I came to Code for America to check out awesome civic engagement in action,” said Joey Lopez, Convergent Media professor at Incarnate Word University.

Today’s event was about finding knowledge, he said.

“I want to learn how we can improve our roads, improve safety and improve education,” Lopez said. “Those are core issues our city is having fundamental issues with right now.”

Robots in the Spotlight at Rackspace

February 9, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 5 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

From right, Ronald Reagan High School Morganne Blaylock, junior on the Reagan Robotics Rattlers team with Chilli Kellaway, junior.

Coaches in wizard’s hats, kids in bunny ears, others donning purple and yellow vests made out of duct tape.

A student riding a bike to recharge all of the electronics from his high school team to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics Alamo Regional Championship.

A line of mascots and kids doing a conga line to hip hop songs around groups of students hunched over displays tinkering with robots. Roped off arenas for robots to compete. Spectators cheering wildly.
The scene at Rackspace’s headquarters on Saturday looked like a Lollapalooza for high tech high school students.

Rackspace transformed its headquarters’ event center into an arena where 60 teams of more than 750 students from the southern region of Texas battled their robots in the FTC competition. Fourteen winning teams earned spots at the Super Regional competition to be held at the Henry B. Gonzalez convention center from Feb. 26 to March 1. Rackspace is the title sponsor of the competition.

“Rackspace is a strong supporter of STEM education in San Antonio,” said Daniel Sherrill, spokesman. “We just think this competition is a way for us to connect with the community. And we provide a venue for an awesome competition for students to show off their skills in science, technology and engineering. The collaboration among so many teams coming together makes this a really fun place.”

The students had to compete in two qualifying matches to make it to the competition on Saturday. Their robots, about the size of a laser printer, must perform tasks during rounds of competition with other teams in an arena. This year, the robots, which the students build and design on their own time, had to take yellow blocks and put them into baskets and then climb a bar at the end and hang from there.

Students also competed in business plan, marketing and social media competitions.

“We’ve got a lot of good competition here,” said Patrick Felty, Alamo Regional Director for FIRST. “We’re having a hard time judging.”

Inventor Dean Kamen founded FIRST, which means For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, 25 years ago to provide hands-on learning opportunities for students in the STEM fields. The program now serves more than 350,000 students nationwide, supported by more than 130,000 volunteers and 3,500 sponsors.
“As a business leader, these are the kids that are going to be our employees in the future,” Felty said. “They may be our bosses in the future. This program inspires them to become the technology leaders of the future.”

The kids build the robots, tackle the problems and find solutions. They compete, but they also have fun.

They also use the latest technology to help with their projects. For example, the 27-member team from Ronald Reagan High School has its own Maker Bot 3-D printer. They use it to custom make parts for their computer, said Morganne Blaylock, junior on the Reagan Robotics Rattlers team.

“It’s a lot easier for us to make our own parts,” said Chilli Kellaway, junior.

They brought the printer with them, set it up at their booth and printed different components at the competition on Saturday.

Shambots team members Alexandria Garza, junior, with Megan Isabella Rodriguez, senior, at Incarnate Word High School

For three years, Megan Isabella Rodriguez, senior at Incarnate Word High School, has competed with the all-girls Shambots team. She was a founding member.

“The first year there was only three of us,” Rodriguez said. Now the team has grown to more than 20 members. Rodriguez plans to go on to study biomedical engineering in college. She loves competing in the robotics competition.

“The environment is fantastic,” she said. “Everyone here is so passionate and creative. It’s a chance to use your brain and stimulate it.”

First year Shambots competitor, Alexandria Garza, a junior at Incarnate Word, programs the robot and drives it.

“It’s so gratifying to be given a problem, create a solution, and run it and test it in actual situations,” Garza said. “It’s amazing to see other people’s brilliant ideas.”
Robotics is only the beginning of what Garza hopes will be a long career in engineering.

“I definitely want to become a programmer or a mechanical engineer,” Garza said. “I love it so much.”

For the all girls team, Toxic Green Hornets, from Flour Bluff High School in Corpus Christi just making it to the regional competition was quite an accomplishment, said
McKenzie Graham, sophomore.

“This is our first year,” she said.

The team of six met during their lunch hours, after school and on weekends to build their robot.

“Hopefully next year we’ll have an actual class,” she said.

Toxic Green Hornets team member Kasey Majek, a sophomore, wants to go onto study electrical and mechanical engineering.

“We’re all into science and math and this is a fun thing to do with your friends,” she said.

It’s also the first year to compete for Alamo Heights High School. Fifteen students make up the robotics team, said John Munoz, the school’s computer science teacher who started the program at the school.

“We did really, really well,” Munoz said.

The Alamo Heights Mules team qualified for the finals through two previous competitions and right after the second one, the students re-designed the robot and added on to it, Munoz said.

They had a few ups and downs at the competition on Saturday. The robot’s motor burned out during a battle.

“Immediately they came over here and fixed it up,” Munoz said. “They’ve taken apart the robot so many times. We’ve got a great programmer, Zane Witherspoon.”

The competition means more to the students than just robotics, Munoz said.

“They are able to open up and see themselves in a different way,” he said. “In the classroom, we only get a little sense of that.”

The competition also allows classroom work, like text-based programming, to have real-life applications, Munoz said.

“They can see a really cool design come to life,” Munoz said. “They also get to meet new people and be exposed to new ideas.”

A video made by one of the competitors.

Rackspace Hosting Appoints Taylor Rhodes as President

January 14, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting has filled a top spot in its executive ranks.
On Tuesday, the company announced the appointment of Taylor Rhodes, formerly its Chief Customer Officer, as its new president effective immediately.
“Taylor is a proven operational veteran with outstanding strategic and leadership skills,” Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier said in a news statement. “He has generated strong growth in all the businesses he has led. Our international business, for example, grew 30 percent a year under his leadership. His relationships with customers and his deep understanding of the market and where it’s headed will be invaluable as he steps into this new role. Taylor’s promotion represents a successful example of the company’s long-term talent-development plan.”
Last summer, Lew Moorman stepped down as Rackspace president, citing family reasons. Moorman had been with the company for 13 years. He still serves on its board of directors. Napier has served as acting president until Rhodes appointment.

Rackspace Cloud Predictions for 2014

December 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

John Engates, Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace Hosting in San Antonio

John Engates, the Chief Technology Officer with Rackspace, has made some predictions for cloud technology trends in 2014.

The cloud ushers in a new era in wearable technology.

Under Armour’s late 2013 acquisition of mobile workout app MapMyFitness and Nike’s continued sponsorship of TechStars Nike+ Accelerator validates that wearable technology is heating up and here to stay. Athletic apparel manufacturers will attempt to catch up with one another in a war for data about users’ exercising habits. This will also continue in other areas such as smart watches, glasses and goggles, and other medical devices. This staggering amount of data generated by the growing number of these devices need to be stored and analyzed somewhere and what better place than the cloud, where it can be seamlessly transferred between device and server? This will also usher in other ecosystems of app developers and plugins as these devices emerge as platforms and APIs are exposed. The vendors that help users make the most of this data will be the winners.

Specialized clouds will emerge in 2014.

Until now clouds generally fell into two buckets: public and private. In the new year, the idea of workloads running where they perform the best will prevail as new clouds that focus on specific application tasks and workloads will rise. There will be a cloud for high I/O needs, CPU performance, GPU, etc.

Open source projects will get even more prevalent and popular.

As the world begins adjusting to new realities around online privacy, developers will gravitate more and more to open source projects where source code is immediately available for anyone who so wishes to check on anything suspicious by inspecting the code directly. The NSA spying scandal and the lack of trust of foreign and even domestic technology will drive more and broader adoption of open source. With the added benefit that the community propels innovation faster, it’s hard not to feel good about the future of open source in this day and age.

IT will soon mean Information Transformation.

More and more enterprises will need to adopt tactics normally associated with startups (e.g.: devops, continuous integration and delivery) in order to handle the need to support ever-changing digital fields such as mobile application development, web analytics and social media. In this transformation, system administrators will need to brush up their coding or get left behind with the legacy applications. Database admins will need to make the jump to Big Data and NoSQL. The enterprise CIO who realizes how to make devops and agile work in their organization will lead the way. This will take root in 2014 and continue to grow over the next 5-10 years as applications are replaced.

Small packages, big time-savings.

Container technology such as Docker and ZeroVM will begin to simplify the way application deployment and portability works, allowing applications to be spun up and down at break-neck speeds. Containers will be used heavily in production starting in 2014 and beyond.

Techstars Austin’s Jason Seats on Startup Grind San Antonio

November 29, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Jason Seats, managing director of Techstars Austin

Jason Seats loved playing with Lego blocks as a kid and even did college projects with Legos as a young adult.
His heroes were Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman growing up and the fictional Indiana Jones. At the age of eight, he thought he wanted to be an archaeologist.
But even as a little kid he dreamed of running his own business, which he would call Seats Enterprises.
He grew up in St. Louis. His older sister is a nurse and his younger brother is getting his Phd in physics at Stanford.
He graduated in 2001 from St. Louis University with two degrees.
In 2006, he co-founded Slicehost, an early cloud hosting company, with Matt Tanase, a college friend. Two years later, they sold it to Rackspace for millions.
Seats served as managing director of Techstars Cloud at Geekdom in San Antonio for two years. He moved to Austin earlier this year to head up the inaugural Techstars Austin class.

Startup Grind Features Graham Weston of Rackspace

November 27, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

Graham Weston, co-founder and chairman of Rackspace Hosting, grew up in the greater San Antonio area.
At his first job, he worked in his dad’s cookie plant balancing the books from delivery drivers and occasionally packaging cookies. His dad owned Grandma’s Cookies and later sold the company to Frito Lay.
Weston’s first venture into entrepreneurship in grade school involved selling organic pork from his family’s ranch through advertisements proclaiming “Go Hog Wild” in the local newspaper. He also ran a photography business in high school.
In college, he would drive back and forth from Texas A&M in his VW Diesel Rabbit listening to get rich quick tapes in his cassette player.
His junior year at Texas A&M, Weston launched a successful real estate venture while going through college. He successfully protested his family’s property tax appraisal and then figured that there might be a business doing that for others. He founded a company that protested commercial property taxes.
Because of his property tax business, Weston was well positioned to see opportunities in real estate during the financial crisis of the late 1980s.
After school, Weston ended up buying one of the tallest buildings in downtown San Antonio, later named the Weston Centre at the age of 27. The building had fallen into foreclosure and then bankruptcy during the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s. He wanted to buy the KCI Tower, but wasn’t able to do it. Later the former National Bank of Commerce building came open. It was way more than Weston wanted to spend. But he raised more money and then bid against real estate mogul Sam Zell and won.
The Weston Centre later contained one of the first data centers for Rackspace. It housed some of the first websites on the Internet for YouTube and HotorNot and other Internet pioneers.
Rackspace, now a multi-billion dollar company, had a humble beginning.
Weston and his partner, Morris Miller, met three college students who bid to wire the Weston Centre with high-speed Internet access. The students didn’t get the contract, but Weston and Miller liked them. They asked them what else they were working on. That’s when Pat Condon, Dirk Elmendorf and Richard Yoo told them about their hosting business, which would later come to be known as Rackspace.
Weston recounted how they invested $1 million and in less than a year another company wanted to buy the business for $20 million. That deal fell through. But they knew they had a solid business, which was making money every month. They grew Rackspace by adding more servers and data centers and in 2001 they planned to take the company public, but the dot com bust occurred. They went through a few tough years, but they were able to persevere and succeed where many failed largely through Rackspace’s focus on providing “fanatical” customer support.
In 2008, Rackspace went public at $12 a share. Its stock closed Wednesday at $37 a share. The company has a market capitalization of more than $5 billion.
Today, Rackspace has more than 5,000 employees worldwide and is San Antonio’s largest high-tech employer with close to 3,000 employees in Central Texas. Rackspace also has an Austin office.

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