About
Jim Sokoloff
Senior Director, IT Operations @ VistaPrint
A veteran of 3 startups prior to VistaPrint (2 with successful acquisitions by public companies, and 1 that “ran out of money”), I joined VistaPrint in May 2003 as a software developer working on the port of our ASP site to ASP.Net (version 1.0). I’ve since done stints in Release Management, Problem Management, served as our DBA, and now run the external (end-customer-facing) part of our IT organization, reporting to the CIO. My groups comprise Network, Security, VoIP, DBA, Data Warehouse, Problem Management, Data Center Operations, Network Operations Center (24×7 monitoring), and Disaster Recovery. My teams work closely with our IT teams supporting the call centers and our 2 print production facilities.
About this blog
This is a personal blog, but will share some details about how IT is run at a profitable dotcom, specifically VistaPrint. VistaPrint is the world’s largest online print shop, by far. In one sentence, we allow customers to design and order printed products online, and we ship the physical products from one of our two manufacturing plants. We offer other services to help small business market themselves in an effective and cost-efficient manner as well. More info is available on WikiPedia.
As a public company, and a company with a substantial amount of proprietary technology, I will be somewhat limited in what I can say at times, but I think there are still way more than enough interesting topics to discuss, even if I can’t share 100% of the details on 100% of the topics. And I have to stress again, this is a personal blog. What I say here are my words and thoughts, not VistaPrint’s. As head of the customer-facing part of IT, I’d hope and expect that there is significant overlap there, but you can’t rely on perfect accordance. Similarly, if you are a customer of VistaPrint in need of design help or other assistance, please contact our Design, Sales and Service team for assistance.