By John Casaretto
Codero Hosting has added a third company office in Austin Texas. The announcement also includes the addition of SVP of Product Development Chandler Vaughn to the company. In a recent conversation with Vaughn, the strategic opportunities for Codero were made clear, from setting a base in Austin to a peek into the future of the company; the moves herald the beginnings and remarkable transformation of a well-run company stepping up their cloud game where excellence in every respect counts.This is Vaughn’s third hosting company, having previously worked at Sungard and Rackspace. His role at Codero as Senior Vice President of Product Management has additional elements of marketing and engineering that will pave the way to the next generation Codero. The company is about to relaunch all its products to an entirely new level that include cloud offerings, managed services, and its dedicated server line. This technology, services and pricing refresh that will make some big waves in the industry. Vaughn’s ties are deep with Austin and that is an additional strategic advantage for the company. He previously worked with Austin-based CEO Emil Sayegh at Rackspace and that prior experience is part of what helped bring him to the company.
“Emil doesn’t know how to lose. That’s part of what attracted me to Codero”“I am fortunate to have worked with Chandler at Rackspace so I know first hand that he is a great team builder, a strong leader, and I am confident that he will add to Codero’s rich, vibrant culture,” said Sayegh. “Chandler will spearhead our world-class product development strategy and team to accelerate our growth and success. His work ethic and experience in building enterprise-grade private, public, and hybrid clouds will bring enormous value to Codero.”
Vaughn also considered the fact that Codero’s Net Promoter score is really high for in the hosting business. That classification really tells the story of what customers think of your services, and Codero ranked in the top 3 of companies that Vaughn had even heard of. The takeaway is that this translates into long customer retention times and sustained growth. Typical turnover of hosting customers tends to happen at 2-3 years and that isn’t the case with Codero Hosting. This is accomplished in part through a highly automated support system that integrates throughout the products and services. With active feedback and consistent delivery and support, the winning formula is self-evident. Codero’s hybrid vision is another great effort. By giving customers the ability to leverage their systems they are able to integrate into disparate environments, whether on cloud or dedicated gear, in their own datacenters or on premise, the experience is marked with exceptional ease and value to the business.On to the future- Codero’s forthcoming reboot and messaging will center on the value as an automated scalable hosting for tech-dependent SMBs. With a low cost scalable product platform built for customer self-service and provisioning, the customer can interact with everything in the environment based on their own requirements. That wave of product will form one of the core tenets of Codero as a company, and focus on the ease of these hybrid cloud opportunities.The Austin location is an ideal Texas-based incubator and resource of talent, which Codero projects they will need in the next year. The planned headcount growth will almost double the company’s size, with Austin representing a good chunk of that. Vaughn was involved in a joint effort to launch the Cloud Computing Research Center, based at the University of Texas at Austin and still maintains those strong relationships. Codero will be tapping a specific infrastructure of talent development and available pool of talent, and Austin is perfect for that. With the right kind of people available and willing to pour themselves into a great launch, the alignment couldn’t be better. In addition with industry giant Dell up the road in Round Rock, there are great opportunities for that relationship to benefit the effort.It looks like Austin Texas will be a major spot on the cloud map, so we’ll be tuned to see what that next level looks like.