Well, we are now back from HostingCon 2007, Kegal and I flew back in last night.  This year it was held in Chicago at the Navy Pier and I think that it was a lot more productive for us as opposed to last year in Vegas in terms of meeting new vendors as well as touching base w/ old ones. We definitely met a lot more people and I think that we had more networking opportunities which was good, so kudos to the guys at Interjuncture for another job well done!   (I am going to be posting photos to my photoblog soon!)

Enom (Demand Media)

It’s not often you find yourself in a small intimate gathering with a company like Enom, especially if your business model is like ours but somehow we did. Chris Sheridan, VP of Enom welcomed us into the group of about 30 or so people at an upscale Chicago Sushi Bar called Sushi Samba. It was there that we met and hung out with Richard Roseblatt, the founder of MySpace.com, who recently sold MySpace to Fox for an astronomical figure, and a person that I consider to probably be one of the true pioneers of social networking on the web. Also at the small gathering was Carson Daly, who has partnered with Demand Media to help roll out the channelme.tv product, which is an upscaled version of myspace.com. Carson also made a few appearances during the show to help promote the product. FYI, Pleth will be making an announcement in the very near future about a special partnership that Pleth will be making with Enom, Richard Rosenblatt, and Carson Daly to start offering the channelme.tv product. We also had an opportunity to hang out w/ a lot of Enom’s management during the trip and I have to say they were probably the most fun group we ran across during the whole trip. Juliette, Elida, John, and Chris are all class acts. (there are some photos linked up from www.cottonrohrscheib.com)

Smarter Tools

In and out of the sessions we often found ourselves paired up with the Smarter Tools guys and also spent a lot of time w/ them at the After Hours Networking Party. We were already familiar with their products pretty well because they are extremely eyecatching.  In case you haven’t seen their products yet, you really should take a look. Their email solution, stats, and ticketing systems are definitely in a league of their own.  I expect to hear a lot out of their company in the very near future, if you would like to also follow along w/ their company, here’s a link to their press releases.

Techpad Agency

We sat in on an SEO session conducted by Ben Fisher of the TechPad Agency and Neil Patel, another SEO Expert. As luck would have it, the Pleth website was chosen as the site that they would take a look at and critique. It just so happened that for the term “Managed Web Hosting“, Pleth came up on page four, which is a pretty impressive feat in my opinion. They offered us up some good advice as to how we can improve our rankings but all in all Ben said that our site looked pretty tight. We walked away from that meeting with a pretty good bit of information. We also met w/ Ben and Derek Vaughn at the exhibit booth and discussed the possibilities of us contracting with them to help us rollout a new product we have in mind for 3rd or 4q 2007. I heard Derek speak last year and have followed some of his writings off and on throughout the past year and he is also very knowledgeable so we look forward to being able to possibly work with them sometime down the road.

SWSoft, Inc.

We also attended a session held by SWSoft, Inc. CEO Sergeui B. about virtualization and the future of web hosting SaaS. Sergui is a great speaker, even though some folks in the room might struggle with his thick accent I thoroughly enjoyed it. I don’t know of anyone else in the industry that has a better grasp as to where the industry is going than Sergui. We also stopped by the SWSoft booth and spoke to our salesperson who demo’d the Virtuozzo software for us. We are going to take a deeper look at virtualization in the near future.

Ubersmith

Ubersmith offers a nice backend accounting solution that ties into existing server software.  We have been looking into this solution for a while and spent quite a bit of time w/ Ubersmith at HostingCon and previewed their product and talked with their Software Architect Dan Chec who assured us that they would be able to tailor a solution to meet our needs when we were ready.  This is a super nice group of guys if anyone is interested in a backend accounting solution.

I am sure that I will be blogging more about the sessions we attended and the products that we previewed at the conference later so keep checking back…