We booked some tickets today, to Singapore. Since the entire country and government is purpose built for business, it has earned the nickname “Singapore Inc”.
We’ll be setting up a regional headquarters there over the next several weeks.
At the end of the month, Mike V (our VP of Development) and Dr. Beevers (Development Lead on VoxCAST), as well as yours truly will be headed out there. We’ll join Anthony W (Singapore employee number zero), who has been doing a great job getting up to speed on all things Voxel the last couple weeks.
While we’re not looking forward to the 24 hour flight (especially since we’re not flying Singapore Airlines), we are very much excited about getting Voxel Singapore off the ground.
Singapore Skyline
Singapore has been criticized in the past (rightly so), for being a nanny state. Some people find it too clean and too orderly. Too antispectic. Too strict, even.
A semitypical reaction I get when I tell people that I’m going to be spending a lot of time in Singapore is: “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get caned?!”. Not at all. Although I did go to high school in Singapore with Michael Fay, the American teen that hat made all the news.
One of my favorite authors, William Gibson (best known for Neuromancer), wrote a hilarious article 15 years ago for Wired Magazine about Singapore called Disneyland with the Death Penalty. In it, he writes:
“Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it? Singapore’s airport, the Changi Airtropolis, seemed to possess no more resolution than some early VPL world. There was no dirt whatsoever; no muss, no furred fractal edge to things. Outside, the organic, florid as ever in the tropics, had been gardened into brilliant green, and all-too-perfect examples of itself. Only the clouds were feathered with chaos – weird columnar structures towering above the Strait of China.”
“Singapore is a relentlessly G-rated experience, micromanaged by a state that has the look and feel of a very large corporation. If IBM had ever bothered to actually possess a physical country, that country might have had a lot in common with Singapore.”
Well, I don’t think that Voxel has too much in common with IBM, from a cultural perspective.
And I know Voxelites generally don’t like settling for “G rated experiences”!
There’s a running joke that Singapore is a ‘fine city’ 
As amusing as all this is, things have changed significantly since Gibson wrote those words.
I have a pretty strong opinion on that, having lived in Singapore for 14 years. I’ve also visited at least once a year since a I moved to New York in 1998. During the last decade, I’ve seen a heck of a lot of change on the island-city-nation of Singapore first hand.
TIME magazine reported last year, about this transformation of Singapore:
“Change it must. Faced with challenging long-term economic prospects and a flagging birth rate, Singapore’s leaders have determined that the future of its 4.4 million citizens depends upon attracting multinational corporations along with hundreds of thousands of ambitious, educated (and preferably wealthy) foreigners to work and live there.”
“In 2002 nightclubs were allowed for the first time to remain open around the clock, an attempt to inject some oxygen into the tourist trade and nightlife (lawmakers also repealed a law barring dancing on tabletops). Two years ago, city officials stopped tinkering and got serious: over considerable public objection, gambling was legalized. The government subsequently struck deals with major gaming companies to build two casino/resort developments, each costing about $4 billion.”
“Pinchin Kwok chose to return to her native Singapore last year after living in New York for five years. The 28-year-old banker says she came home for “the good life” and that she’s excited by the changes … she expects Singapore will become “more of a melting pot like Manhattan, but at the core will be the heartlanders who’ve lived here for a long time and can pass along their values.
So maybe Lee Kuan Yew was right when he compared this new Singapore with Venice, London and New York. Those cities grew into giants not by copying blueprints of other capitals, but by being open to fresh ideas and unfamiliar DNA. “Yes, we should study best practices and features from other great cities,” says Cheong Koon Hean, CEO of Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Agency. “But, ultimately, we need to seek out answers that best suit Singapore. To find our own soul.”"
So why Singapore? And what is a Managed Hosting company from New York doing on the other side of the world, anyway?
Well, the short answer is that we feel that Singapore is the best place in the world for us to expand into internationally. The World Bank ranks it as the easiest place on the planet to do business (the United States is third). Our industry is in a war for talent, and we want to be able to hire the best and brightest from all over the world; and it is purpose built to help us do that.
It’s also a great place to bring our IP backbone to, and we’ll be expanding our network and CDN into Asia via Singapore.
And why the international expansion? It’s a big priority for Voxel in 2009.
We have a global network. It’s a global market, with many of our existing customers based in Europe and Asia.
It’s time for us to be a global company.
For Voxel, that means more than having a backoffice and a network node. It means replicating what we do and live and breath here in New York, and a lot of cross polination with key people from both locations.
Singapore Airlines will benefit. I’m not looking forward to thinking how much of a tab we’ll run up with them over the course of the next year or so! Their service is impeccable and the stewardesses tend to be easy on the eyes, so it makes things a bit more tolerable I suppose 
It’s an ambitious plan, and has been in the cooker here for many months.
We’re going to be doing everything there. Follow-the-sun support, sales, as well as Managed Hosting and CDN services in the local market.
Equinix Singapore is the fastest growing Equinix Asian market. Our build out there will bring the same levels of performance and reliability that Voxel is known for in the US and Europe. It will also extend ‘onnet’ to include Asia, for our existing customers.
All this is just part of our constant pursuit to deliver your valuable content and applications better than anyone else.
None of this ‘outsourced low quality low cost support’ stuff that is common with our competitors. With a cost of living that is similar to Manhattan, Singapore would be the wrong country for that. It has one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world. With it’s progressive immigration policies, we’ll be able to bring in the best talent from all over the world. This is something that we’ve had a tough time doing in New York, especially post 9/11.
As I’m sure most of our competitors would agree, it’s very challenging to consistently staff, train, and scale the graveyard shift with the best people. Since Singapore is 12 hours ahead of New York, it helps with our vision of providing truly ‘expert’ support 24/7/365.
Maybe as we expand our server footprint in Singapore, some of our support can follow the sun (to be able to reach expert people), and some of our servers can follow the moon (to take advantage of lower power rates and free cooling). Now that’d be cool.
So, Singapore, here we come. I’ll have more updates as D-day gets closer, and I’m sure we’ll have a lot of interesting happenings to report back on once we’re on the ground on the other side of the world.
Live from downtown New York City (for now),
Raj Dutt
Founder/CEO
Posted in General Posts | 2 Comments »
Nice to hear.. Give me a buzz when you do come over to Singapore
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