When the Danish King Harald Blatand—Harold Bluetooth—united the disparate warring factions that divided Denmark and Norway in the late 10th century, he could have had no inkling of the extent to which his name would be remembered one thousand years later. Today, this erstwhile unifier is the King of Connectivity. Associated with the broadly adopted wireless communications standard, the Bluetooth name appears on more than 2 million devices sold each week—from wireless headsets and cellular phones to wireless medical telemetry devices, global positioning system devices and more.

But supporting the development of the Bluetooth wireless communications standard—and the more than 3,500 companies building Bluetooth devices—was not always an easy task. As the interest in and the adoption of the Bluetooth standard increased, so did the load on the Web sites and Web applications run by the Bluetooth special interest group (SIG)—so much so that the SIG's original systems and service providers could no longer provide the level of support that the Bluetooth community had grown to require. Key online systems would go offline without warning (or notice)—which not only made it difficult for the SIG’s 30,000 registered users to share information and work together, but also left an amateurish impression when the press or companies thinking about building products with Bluetooth capabilities looked to the SIG’s sites for information.

The SIG knew it needed to improve the manageability, availability and reliability of its Web infrastructure—and quickly—yet with a full-time staff of only 16 people, it knew it needed help. It contacted VA Software, whose SourceForge product it had chosen to provide consolidated capabilities for tracking and archiving all the discussions and correspondence related to the development of the Bluetooth specification, and asked the key question: who in the hosting community would you recommend to provide truly world-class managed hosting services? The answer was prompt and unequivocal: the experts at Rackspace. Based on the strength of that recommendation and their extensive due diligence of Rackspace's managed hosting platform, the Bluetooth SIG began to move key Web sites and Web applications to Rackspace—and quickly began to see the results it needed.

Since moving to Rackspace, availability and reliability of their sites have climbed to nearly 100 percent—and if there are any hiccups on the servers, the Rackspace team, with its philosophy of Fanatical Support is there to keep things running smoothly.

"Our chief goal and mission," says Brandon Nott, Online Programs Coordinator for the Bluetooth SIG,"is to raise the overall level of awareness of Bluetooth technology, to facilitate the growth of the specification and to support our members. Rackspace is at the heart of all three of those critical functions."

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