The Leading Cloud Service Brokerage and Cloud Management Solutions Provider: CloudFX Group

The Silicon Review

Rise above the Clouds with CloudSelect

2010 was the year where expansion of cloud took place with better solutions and new innovations. Many companies and tech giants certainly made its mark but it was CloudFX that really made an impact in the market. The company initiated its corporate life in Singapore in late 2009 as a professional services company providing high-end support for large IT vendors and financial institutions, as well as telecommunications and major enterprise clients. By 2013, the firm had become a leading provider of virtualization and advisory services and how now grown into a substantial organization. The company has constructed a leadership team that is made up of experienced, mature industry executives with an average of 20+ years of experience in various executive roles across the technology industry. Thus, backed by pioneers, highly experienced individuals, and the new Group CEO, Walt Mayo with the mastermind - Damian Crotty, CloudFX is certainly creating history by providing the best solutions available in the market.

In conversation with the founder, Damian Crotty

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

It was clear that the industry was on a precipice on unprecedented disruption as we transitioned from physical computing assets and perpetual software products to virtual and cloud-native infrastructure services, on-demand software as a service and platform as a service products, that where highly attractive substitutes from a cost and utilisation optimization perspective, their ability to scale up and down as demand dynamics changed within a company.

Originally, CloudFX was focused purely on business and data center transformation advisory, consulting and infrastructure design and implementation services and whilst successful, attracting the likes of Cisco and Intel Capital as investors, I was convinced that there was a superior way for CloudFX to truly make a more impactful difference, thereby accelerating the transformation journey and realization of cost, service level and operational improvements by building a platform that incorporated all of the key elements of transformation – Multi-Cloud and Multigenerational infrastructure Service catalogues, E-Commerce based User Self Service, IT Service and Solution provisioning and Automation, Multi-Cloud Service Management, Cloud Life-cycle management, Consumption-based analytics across the IT assets base and finally aggregated billing across all consumed IT assets - legacy, physical, virtual cloud, and public cloud-related.

Can you brief us about the history of your company?

We led the professional services for companies like VMWare, Cisco, EMC, NetApp, HP focused specifically on virtualization and complex infrastructure transformation, specifically in the banking and telecommunication verticals.

In late 2013, Cisco and Intel Capital purchased 25% of CloudFX and that working capital was used to transition the business into a Cloud and Digital Services-Solutions Platform Company. In 2015, a 3-year strategic plan was developed to transform the platform – CloudSelect into an open source, intelligent, multi-functional platform, supported by consolidated global shared services function based in India and most importantly, commence the globalization of our business with and through partners.

What are your product and service offerings?

CloudFX offers Digital Service Market Place Platforms (Multi-Tenant), Digital-Cloud Service Management Platforms for Intelligent and Secure IT (Single Tenant) and professional and day 2 operational management services. Within both, the product and services portfolios are a range of customization capabilities to ensure both the platform solutions and services are curtailed around each partner of customer’s specific requirements.

What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful CEO?

Strategic agility – The ability to see trends and industry changes impacting customers long before they happen so the business can respond proactively to these and help customers navigate them positively.

People Management – The ability to identify the right talent for the right position in the business and motivate them to realize their greatest potential so they achieve self-actualization and support customers through a disruptive period where each decision has significant consequences.

Command Skills – We’ve been in the era of Insight selling for the majority of the past decade and unless a company can communicate how the trends in the industry are likely to impact their customers business and quantify that impact than their not the right partner. It’s also important to be able to clearly articulate to business priorities and keep everyone aligned to that “critical few” as opposed to the “trivial many”.

What other CEOs do you look up to?

I’ve worked for some incredible people, in fact, there is no way I could have ever realized even part of my potential had it not been for 5 exceptional leaders – Scott Wambolt (Dell), Amit Midha (Dell), David Schmoock (Dell) Bill Amelio (Dell) and Milko Van Duijl. These guys where all incredibly generous with their time, very supportive, all exceptional executives in their own way and helped me immeasurably not only tap into what skills I had but created a certain belief that I could make a difference, so I owe much of what I’ve achieved to these 5 executives, who have all gone on to achieve incredible success.

Meet the promising leader

Damian Crotty, Founder

Damian was the CEO of the CloudFX Group and his position is now taken by Walt Mayo. Damian is a highly experienced Technology executive and entrepreneur with deep global experience in Sales, Consulting, Operations and Marketing leadership in the Enterprise Solutions, Cloud and Data Centre Computing industries. He has led Sales, Consulting and Operations organizations responsible for P&L, Strategy, Innovation and the overall growth agenda for Global business and technology leaders around the world.

Damian has a diverse, global background and proven track record in leading high growth, mature and start-up technology businesses. He has vast experience in managing large, complex organizations in demanding, result orientated business environments and over the last 8 years has built one of the fastest growing Cloud Platform Solution Company’s in the world as its founder.

Recognition - Damian was voted in the Top 30 Most Influential Executives in the WW Technology industry in January of 2017, one of the 50 Most Admired CEO’s in November of 2017 one of the Top 30 Entrepreneurs in the World in October of 2017 and again in August of 2018.