Last time we met the Ott-ermen Empire, Team Ozone and, of course, the Thunderchats (HOOOOOOOOOOO!).This time around, I want to focus on a couple teams – Spartans and Blue Team, and also tell the tale of the now-disbanded A1 team. Enjoy! View Post
Spartans, by Josh Thielbar
“The Spartans started off from an idea from Chris Pierce I believe. I forgot who else contributed, but the reasoning behind them is because of the corporate sales segments relentlessly driving towards our sales goals.
“For example: in the last few days in November, we were only at 70% of our goal. There was little hope, but we had alot of Rackers put in some serious hours, and crazy work efforts to get us to our goal literally in the last several minutes of the day before midnight.
“We never give up an inch of ground, and we fight until the end to hit our sales goals.
“We’ve got some cool gear too. People compliment our flag and our wicked awesome shirts all the time.”
Blue Team, by Annalisa Rodriguez
“ We are a part of the “Sales Spartans.” We wanted a name that coincided with the Spartans theme, but was outside the box – “Blue Team” was made famous and renowned because it was the designation for a prestigious Spartan-oriented squad from the popular game, Halo.
“Much like the Halo characters, members of our Blue Team are heroes, masters of battle, strong, persistent, achievers but more importantly, we work together. It’s key in Victory. We have our Master Chief (aka Manager) and the rest of us are respected Officers/Lieutenants.”
A1, by Mark Melin
“Our team, A1, was chosen for a special mission when CCM launched. The charter of the team was to not only provide Fanatical Support, but also to identify, consult with and migrate customers that were considered to be cloud ready. A1 ran as a support team and a migration team until September of 2011. Starting in October of 2011 we became a migrations only team called Cloud Ready. A1 still lives as a support team within SMB.
“A1 was composed of passionate Rackers that were chosen to take on a new mission for Rackspace. A mission that was somewhat difficult being that migrations were, at that time, not advertised or offered to our customer base. The mission required a team of Account Managers as well as Technicians that could think outside of the box in order to accomplish our goal.
The Account Managers made sure to set the right business expectations and coordinated both our traditional support requests in addition to the migrations we were responsible for. They also helped build the support model for how migrations would be handled.
The Technicians took on the task of figuring out how to logically move our customers from physical to virtual devices. This was an interesting challenge that was met with many obstacles, but they figured it out. They created a process known as the “rescue mode migration” which has been used to move hundreds of servers.
The team worked hard and embraced the spirit of treating fellow teammates like Friends and Family. It was a privilege to be part of it.”
