I recently had my annual visit to the optometrist, where I sat in a chair and she patiently flipped the lens asking “is this lens more clear or this one? Number seven or number eight? Seven? Or eight?” The differences in the lenses at times were so minute that it seemed to make no difference. But then I realized that by looking at those tiny differences, catching and addressing them early, you are actually setting the foundation for proper vision of the future.
To me, it is not much different when looking at business strategies. The smallest differences in strategies can make or break a company. As a new year is upon us, AllCloud has been carefully studying the details and setting up the foundation for hyper-growth in 2020. This revolves around three key areas, our employees, our customers, and our partners. Specifically, we will be growing the company by continuing to invest in our employees’ professional growth; we will present further specialization into our offerings to meet the ever-changing challenges of our customers, and we will work with our partners to expand both in current markets and to new territories to fill gaps for their customers.
A People’s Company
Crystallizing our vision and core values as a company helped us achieve the focus necessary for crafting the ambitious goals we have set for ourselves. The one thing I’m most proud of, and what I believe will further differentiate us in the future, is including our employees in our vision: To become the best cloud solutions provider to work for and with. Moving forward, into 2020 and beyond, this vision will continue to lead us.
Defining our vision and core values was part of a larger undertaking of cementing the company culture as an essential pillar for our ability to scale. As our SVP of Employee Success recently wrote, “as a professional services company, the human resource is our most important resource.” I’ve always been a strong believer in this and once our senior leadership team started to really internalize this, we put a special focus on supporting and encouraging our employees’ personal and professional development as a vital tool for achieving our business goals.
We Are Defined by Our Customers
We’ve continued to serve and support our customers to the best of our abilities, working hard on expanding our offerings and sharpening our expertise. This is an integral part of our commitment to our customers, always striving to increase the value we provide.
During 2019, we’ve built-up our Salesforce CPQ and FSL specializations, two advanced practices that provide real added-value to companies that understand how to use them. On the AWS front, we’ve focused on modernization through DevOps and data pipelines, separating ourselves from the “lift and shift” approach for which many of our competitors are known and instead focus on helping our clients become truly cloud-native.
By helping our customers gain the knowledge required to optimize their customer journey on the one hand, and streamline their data efficiency on the other, we are enabling them to provide their own customers with better products and services. As we move into 2020 and beyond, this concept of enabling our customers to continuously innovate through cloud technologies such as Salesforce and AWS will be a major driver of what sets us apart.
The AWS & Salesforce Potential for 2020
A special point of focus for AllCloud in 2020 will be further identifying and helping our customers benefit from the true convergence of AWS and Salesforce. We were aware and very supportive of the announcement of a strategic partnership between the two companies that came out of Dreamforce.
As we expand our AWS practice in North America to support the development of innovative new products and services by our customers, we believe the convergence of AWS and Salesforce will be a game-changer for the way organizations capitalize on the seamless integration now available for their front-end and back-end cloud systems. Organizations leveraging these capabilities for automation and BI will be able to accelerate innovation, leading to significant business growth. In speaking about this opportunity with both AWS and Salesforce, there are few partners like AllCloud who have the capabilities to work across both technologies. I feel we are poised to do well in this area and am eager to develop some new POCs this year.
Continue to Support our Employees’ Growth
Looking inward for 2020, to our most important resource, our employees, we’ve only just begun. As an organization that is looking to continue on our hyper-growth path, recruiting will be top of mind. But it goes well beyond recruiting. We are building an organization that provides our employees with the opportunity to not only work closely with major technologies like AWS and Salesforce, but to bring their own innovation into the workplace. To build new and exciting ways to help our customers overcome their business challenges and to grow their businesses.
This cross-company initiative is also contributing to new technology-based solutions being developed for the implementation and the convergence point of AWS and Salesforce by our customers.
Vision 20/20
Back to my optometry appointment – I left the doctors office, I had the fleeting thought that the days of my “perfect” vision were gone. But then I realized that you can’t maintain perfect vision, not forever. Because things change. Things you never expected, get in the way (sometimes in a great way, like the birth of your first child). But as long as you focus on the big picture, and make sure that you look at all the details to set up a perfect foundation, you can weather those changes, both good and bad. I’m thrilled with where AllCloud is and excited about our future growth. And I am hopeful that our employees, our customers and our partners will continue to benefit from the uniqueness we bring to the market in order to make a difference and drive business transformation.