For nearly two years, I've been conceptualizing and developing an application for my business. It began life as a sort of "line of business" application to track customers, orders, services being provided and the assets used to provide them. What it's turned into is essentially an Enterprise Resource Planning system. It's extremely flexible, deriving its nature from modular code. It was designed from the ground up to be adaptable. I looked as far as I possibly could into the future, at services which are on the horizon and beyond, and I made provision for every foreseeable (and hopefully many unforeseeable) scenario(s). This particular design goal was paramount. In 2008 companies are made or broken by their software and the things that come along with it; things like flexibility, software costs, evolving business rules and requirements. These days it's all too common that companies either have to change their business to match their software, or (often more painful), change their software to match their business. I believe we've found a good balance of business rules and software. I've accounted for the fact that when business rules change, software needs to change, and not necessarily the other way around. What we have isn't perfect, but I believe it's better than anything currently on the market.

To that end, the first plugin I wanted to write was for our Virtual Private Server offering. It seemed like a good time to do it since we're rolling out a new Storage Area Network to accommodate more speed and flexibility with VPSs. In its current form, it supports automated provisioning and billing. It also allows for access to vital functions through our Customer Portal which is a front-end interface to the same back-end data that the ERP system uses. Customers can reload their OS, edit reverse DNS, reboot their VPS and obtain bandwidth graphs/statistics. In the future, we'll allow customers to do all kinds of neat things with IP addressing and routing, load balancing, high availability and the like. Although the app doesn't sound like much in its current form, its best attribute is the extensible framework it provides for describing, configuring and provisioning any kind of hosted service. Expect to see more plugins/service offerings built on our framework in the future.

For now we'll be playing with VPSs extensively. I'm hereby calling on beta testers to try out our VPSs under the new SAN and the Customer Portal, and report back any issues or change requests. We'll limit this trial to approximately 30 users. To qualify for a trial, you'll need a compelling application to run on the beta VPS. Preference will be given to current and former BigVPS customers first. You'll be given a new VPS with 512MB of RAM and 25GB of SAN storage to test with. To throw your name into the hat, email beta@bigvps.com describing the nature of your workload, number of IPs required (between 5 and 32), along with any other relevant information. The beta is expected to last for approximately three weeks; customers will be assimilated into the SAN/portal thereafter.

I look forward to working with you all.

Sincerely,