An Interview with Aimee Sanders, eCloud Managed Solutions CEO: ‘With Our Cloud Expertise, We can Identify Application Dependencies, Resource Utilization and Network Impact by Application or Workload’

“We help our customers select the logical landing pod for their application, and thinking through the risks, business cases, scenarios, compliance, security, business continuity and advise on legal terms and conditions.”

As organisations continue to rationalise their time and resources to focus on innovation and growing their core business, most are moving from on-premises infrastructure to a service-based model with cloud infrastructure, known more popularly as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

eCloud Managed Solutions provides a vendor agnostic and expert approach to helping customers navigate complexity of identifying applications and workloads that make business sense to be deployed in a private, public or hybrid cloud.

The company was established in 2016 and is headquartered in Milton, Georgia.

Aimee Sanders, eCloud Managed Solutions CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Why was the company set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

We started eCloud Managed Solutions in order to help customers navigate the complexity of identifying applications and workloads for their business success and to determine whether they should be deployed in a private, public or hybrid cloud environment. We provide a true consultative approach in selecting the logical landing pod for your application, thinking through the risks, business cases, scenarios, compliance, security, business continuity and even advise on legal terms & conditions. We have agreements with the all of the major and niche cloud providers in the industry, enabling us to be 100 percent vendor agnostic.

How successful was your first project implementation? Share the experience.

Our first project was a little nerve-wracking as it was a new customer and we were just starting our partnership with our most important provider. We just went into the project knowing that a failure is never an option so success was inevitable. We always ensure that our projects are in our wheelhouse and if it’s a project that we haven’t tackled before, we are overly transparent and honest with our customers and partners.

What challenges did you face in your initial years?

Everything takes twice as long and costs twice as much as you budget for, fact! We started with no status with AWS, Azure, GCP and frankly everyone else. We underestimated how long it would take to get to a level, with AWS for example, for them to be willing to work with us. Once we achieved this level, they have been a fantastic partner, but we still have work to do on our side to maintain a competitive edge over the other providers in the ecosystem. You have to really work harder at sales, marketing and execution than your competition because you are establishing your brand and expertise.

What kind of responses have you received from your consumers over the years? How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?

We came from a publically traded systems integrator where we constantly heard feedback that we needed a better understanding of the areas where customers needed focused guidance and support. When it was apparent that our hardware-centric company wasn’t taking the cloud revolution seriously, it became the catalyst for starting eCloud. We recognized that IT, as the enabler of business, was quickly migrating to the cloud and that customers needed experts to help guide and support them through those transitions. Our CCoE (Cloud Center of Excellence) is at the core of our business and encompasses: a business request, ROI, timeline/deadline, and an idea of how they would like to see their project implemented. From there, we design our recommended solution, provide a cost back to the business and then obtain sign-off. A core part of our process is that we enable the CIO/CTO with being a profit center vs. being seen as a cost center.

Building a culture of sustainability within an Organisation is very important to maintain a reputation in the global market. How is it true for your company?

Culture is critical to any organization, especially in a startup environment. With our success and growth, it is has been key for us to stay true to our roots of keeping our customers at our core and being easy and flexible to work with while maintaining a high level of integrity. We continually strive to provide innovative solutions that enable our customers’ businesses all while incentivizing our team to push the boundaries of our partners’ platforms.

A company’s behavior is as important as its economic performance or the quality of its products. How do you interpret this saying?

It’s all about integrity and doing the right thing, no matter what. We help our customers receive funding for migrations, platform credits and incentives to move to a particular platform. We pass 100 percent of those dollars onto our customers, where some of our competitors don’t. Our partners realize this about eCloud and we are completely transparent with our customers about these funds. Let’s just say we have a lot of repeat business and our partners typically call us first.

Is your company a leader or a follower?

We take a servant leadership approach to our customers and employees by listening to their feedback, educating them on the journey (both good and bad), help them conceptualize how this will change their organization, and not asking them to do something that our executive management team wouldn’t do or hasn’t done themselves.

‘Leaders cannot optimize results by themselves; they need employees’ support and assistance.’ How does your company interpret this saying?

This is a team effort and you are only as strong as your weakest player. Thankfully we don’t have any weak team members and have built a culture of thought leadership and if something doesn’t seem right, or could be done better, speak up. We cultivate an open culture where no idea is a bad idea, let’s discuss it and figure out together as a team how we develop the right solution and optimize our operations more efficiently. In an industry where innovation is a huge driver of success, you have to be constantly open to new ideas.

Where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

We will continue to grow responsibly for our customers and hire exceptional people to help us maintain excellence in our organization! We are continuing to invest in our partnerships by moving up in their program status levels and become increasingly a go-to partner for them over our competition. We also have a commitment to always educate our team to be abreast of the latest technologies and trends.

eCloud Managed Solutions: Leadership

Aimee Sanders is the Chief Executive Officer (Cloud, B2B, R&D, and Retail) of eCloud Managed Solutions.

Eric Sanders is responsible for R&D, Hardware/Software/Hybrid Cloud, Software Development, Managed Services, and AWS/Azure/GCP.

“We mitigate the risk of moving to the cloud by performing an application-centric grouping of the applications dependencies related to the OS, hardware, virtual, services and related databases. We then provide a cloud strategy and roadmap with cloud migration services based on this information to avoid breaking anything as we move it to the cloud platform destination.”