Dan Cox (Interactive)
Almost six months into his newly created role as public cloud general manager at cloud infrastructure provider Interactive, Dan Cox has recognised the changes in the market conditions and the importance associated with up-skilling staff internally.
Within Interactive's public cloud practice, Cox said the company has built a centre of excellence and launched a cloud academy that offers a tiered learning experience geared towards anyone in the organisation that wishes to learn about cloud, from understanding the basics, to developing deep specialisation in DevOps or cyber security.
Cox said the practice has about 20 people and had so far enabled and certified around 60 Interactive staff. Some of its main partnerships include Microsoft and AWS, as well as VMware.
“We’re bringing the business along the journey rather than building a silo of highly specialised people — we’re trying to lift the lid and enable everyone,” he said.
“It’s important for us to grow in the core team as well as the broader capability in the business.”
In particular, Cox said he had noticed clients opting for short term projects that demonstrate quicker returns on investment.
“We’re seeing smaller, shorter engagements being more appropriate to how budget and pressure inside organisations is playing out. They need to get things done, and need to get it done quickly,” he said.
“A lot of organisations have gone to cloud very quickly, mostly around how to enable their work force remotely. There’s a lot of customers looking at their cloud spending, which they weren’t anticipating and are looking to optimise that, or they’ve gone to cloud very quickly, but haven’t had the time to do due diligence at their own pace.
“The goal for us is to help customers around good governance, health check, offer a second opinion to see what they’ve done in a really compressed time period, was the right thing to do.”
Cox said security and compliance were still top of mind for many organisations.
“Our goal is to be very practical and guide customers in those areas of where they’ve spent their money, where they should wisely invest, any savings to be realised through economic returns and evolve their maturity in what they’ve done so far,” he said.
Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan recently laid out top five cloud industry growth opportunities as it shapes the foundation for digital transformation, with the pandemic working to accelerate enterprise cloud journeys therefore ramping up the demand for all things cloud.
