Enterprise spammers, corporate shuysters, and how the mighty have fallen in this economy.

In the past three months, our world has fallen apart. Banks have crumbled, VC has dried up, and the Fed has thrown about hundreds of billions of dollars willy-nilly, hoping we wouldn't notice. These are tough times for most industries, and it appears that ours is not immune.

Billions of dollars worth of datacenter build-outs have been postponed or canceled in the past six months. Credit grabs and further public offerings of large REITs have dominated headline. Some combination of the shrinking global economy, decimated credit markets, and cloud-induced paradigm shifts is inducing a rash of desperate short-term decisions in an industry that thrives on long-term strategy.

Those are public, headline grabbing results. The day to day impact has been much more subtle, and annoying. During my average week I'm working with at least two or three datacenters and ISPs, either negotiating contracts for customers, performing build-outs, or going through daily exercises of service additions/deletions/changes.

This seems to be an especially bizarre week. Yesterday, upon informing XO how un-competitive their pricing on a point to point circuit was, my sales rep insinuated that if we went with a CLEC, that there would be a heavy cross-connect fee for bringing this circuit into my customer's cage. So much for carrier neutrality.

Sadly, this was not the only unsavory sales tactic I was slammed with in the past 48 hours. Last night I received a rather bizarre email from an Internap sales rep I'd never spoken to before. I used to love Internap, having had the same rep for about 9 years, who I followed as he transitioned from MFN to INAP.

When we opened our Seattle datacenter, we lost our favored rep, and began the shuffle between three reps that systematically insured I would probably cease engaging in business with Internap after mine and my customers' contracts came up for renewal. The economics of IP billing changed dramatically after the Telecom rebound, which began in 2004, and Internap just failed to remain competitive on price while in conjunction, their quality story slowly ceased to remain a differentiating factor.

Pardon my divergence, back to my rant. Last night, I received a SPAM from Internap. Spam tactics like this are common, often employed by anonymous pushers of Viagara and vitamin supplements of dubious claims. It's just not really common practice amongst public companies serving high-end enterprise customers.

For your amusement, here's the seemingly simple, but annoyingly unethical email in it's entirety.

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From:
Subject: Internap follow up
Date: February 25, 2009 2:21:44 AM PST
To:
Reply-To: Scott_Coleman_dtiyr_ubraov@cp20.com

Hi Michael,

I hope you are having a great week!

I wanted to follow up with you about my previous email to see if you may have a few minutes to speak with me later this week, possibly Thursday or Friday afternoon?

Please let me know what time works best for you or the appropriate member of your team and I will send a calendar request with my conference bridge information.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Scott Coleman
National Account Executive
INTERNAP NETWORK SERVICES CORPORATION
Direct: 408-501-3970
Mobile: 650-280-4500
eFax: 408-516-5994

http://theultimateonlineexperience.com/revealed
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Note that I am already a customer of Internap, and at least 4 of my customers also contract directly with Internap. They had no need to spam me, let alone spam me through a commercial spamming service, cp20.com. They're already getting my money. I'm already assigned to 4 different sales reps on different accounts.

Is what Scott did illegal? I don't know? Is it unethical? I think it is. Is it an effective sales method? Not with me. Will I ever engage in business with Internap again?

No.

• Data Center
• economy
• Internap
• spam
• XO