Each week, Atlanta Business RadioX features interviews with Atlanta, Georgia’s top business professionals. As a successful member of the growing Atlanta business community, Internap was recently invited to participate on the show.

Hear Mike Higgins, our SVP of Data Center Services, discuss the business of Internap, our recent award-winning Atlanta data center expansion and the opportunities presented by hybridization of the data center.

To learn more and listen to the full interview, click here.

Image courtesy of Atlanta Business Radio.

Formula One kicks off the 2013 season this weekend with the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne. As Sahara Force India’s Official Supplier for Online Performance, we are geared up for an exhilarating season!

To get you in the mood, turn up the volume and immerse yourself in the imagery and sound of F1.

“CONGRATULATION THIS STORY IS HAPPY END” (Ghosts ‘n Goblins)

Last month, when we saw that Athens, Greece based artist and developer Pelikan13 was gunning to resurrect the classic ‘90s-style first-person Arcade Racer on Kickstarter, we had to back him up. Not only had P13 clearly made some serious progress on the game before he sought funding as evidenced by his slick trailer, but the category and genre itself were irresistible to us.

If you ever strolled into an arcade and sat down to play Sega’s Indy 500, you know what this racing game is envisioned to be. Totally blinged-out graphics, adrenaline-fueled bends and curves, cool tunnels and a choice of some very interesting (if unlikely) racetrack locations. It also seems to faithfully recreate some of the details that made these games so popular among 12 – 24 year old males back when I was that age, namely the meagerly-attired and unnaturally-proportioned race chicks that kept us motivated to feed the machine even as our precious supply of quarters dwindled. Thanks for that, Pelikan.

Add all this to the fact that Nicalis, publisher of some of the sweetest indie games out there, has thrown their experience into the ring, making successful development and marketing of the game highly likely. Can’t wait to see this one go live on Linux, PC/Mac, Wii U with an Internap branded car (can we get a Formula car?) later this year.

At the end of the day, because we make it our business to support some of the largest, most played online games in the world, we just want to see good ones, like ‘90s Arcade Racer, developed and deployed. Know any other games we should be backing? Let us know – we’re on the hunt…

YouSendIt is a leading cloud file collaboration service that gives users anytime, anywhere access to content via web, mobile and desktop applications. In this customer spotlight, Sumeet Rohatgi, Sr. Director of Engineering at YouSendIt, shares his vision on current technology trends, cloud security, performance and building a successful team. To stay successful and meet the demand for comprehensive content collaboration in the cloud, YouSendIt relies on Internap’s Managed Hosting services, scalable storage solution and global Performance IP connectivity.

Q. What are the biggest technology trends that will affect your business in the near future?

A. The current phase of technology is marked with a rapid expansion of mobile computing capabilities and applications, which are increasingly dependent on the cloud to provide rich content and functionality. Along with the rise of these productivity applications, users’ content is getting fractured and spread over multiple cloud repositories (sometimes referred to as the ‘personal cloud’).

YouSendIt provides cloud content collaboration governance tools for enterprise IT, such as remote wipe, centralized policy management, compliance reporting and encryption. To help end-users search, use and control content spread across their personal cloud, YouSendIt is rapidly incorporating cloudnostic search technology gained from a recent acquisition, Found. Cloudnostic is the idea that anyone can access their content no matter where it is hosted.

Q. How do the growing concerns about online privacy and internet security affect your business strategy?

A. The astonishing influx of new mobile devices in the market brings new capabilities and applications that pose security threats. To secure IP, especially as it relates to enterprise content, some CIOs resort to draconian measures, and limit content collaboration capabilities like MDM (Mobile Device Management), MCM (Mobile Content Management), and even block access to entire sites within their internal organization networks. However, these devices can and often do connect to multiple networks, and IP (content) easily leaks out.

As a result of these concerns, we offer a toolset to build a secure and safe environment for content collaboration. Our solutions put control of shared content in the hands of professional users with features like password protection and file expiration. Our enterprise offering complements this toolset with a single sign-on for enterprise users, both from within the enterprise network and outside. Additionally, governance features like whitelist/blacklist enterprise domains provide a safe and trusted environment for collaboration. We encrypt all content at rest and perform virus scanning on files before downloading. Our cloud operations are PCI compliant and our processes are SOC 2/3 compliant. All communications to user devices and our cloud are encrypted and secure.

Q. Tell us why performance is important to your business.

A. The ability to access your cloud content anywhere, anytime and the fact that we have over 40 million users puts an enormous performance requirement on our infrastructure. Downtime or inability to access content even for a brief period is an immediate loss of trust, and at times a loss of business. Our applications (web, desktop and mobile) use Internap’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) to ensure content is delivered rapidly. We also have storage servers in multiple locations to help make content transfer faster to our users no matter where they are globally.

Q. Your CEO has discussed the importance of building a great team. What do you think is the most essential ingredient for successful technology teams?

A. Successful technology teams start off by having a set of shared foundational values — namely, respecting and trusting the judgment of every team member. In today’s cloud technology environment, a broad range of skills needs to be present on the team: setting up/maintaining cloud servers, being polyglot in writing platform specific applications and architecting solutions that can scale and be flexible at the same time. To counter a rapidly changing environment, being agile is another necessary ingredient. The team as a whole needs to be able to quickly understand and take advantage of features being added by the platform manufacturers. If you do not have respect and trust in your team, none of the above can happen.

From the rest of the organization, the team demands a high level of support and trust in their decision making. Technology teams should be empowered to make and conversely be held accountable for their decisions. The organization needs to be tolerant of risk and comfortable with the possibility of failure, as this creates a culture of innovation which can lead to subsequent higher returns.

Watch the video to learn more about how YouSendIt controls their IT Infrastructure.

Trend 5: HTML versus Flash
Even though HTML5 is quickly becoming the programming language of choice for web developers, digital publishers still need to maintain Flash websites and online applications during the transition. This will require content owners to broaden their development toolset by simultaneously increasing their knowledge of HTML5 while maintaining websites that use Flash.

Private or custom cloud infrastructure platforms offer a cost-effective way to test out new content deployments, HTML5 or otherwise. To ensure mobile content is delivered to end users around the world, global content delivery networks (CDNs) and route-optimized IP services will continue to be critical.

Trend 1: Online privacy concerns
Trend 2: The rise of the multi-tablet household
Trend 3: OTT platforms opening floodgates
Trend 4: Mobile and the demise of the content schedule