Cloudbakers serves up midmarket cloud solutions
Cloudbakers founder Mitch Greenwald brings a unique perspective to the vision of this three-year-old cloud integrator: he is a former CIO for a midmarket company, someone who has lived through many of the same IT challenges that Cloudbakers' 180 or so customers face.
"I had been using cloud solutions, although they weren't called that at the time," Greenwald said, referring to his last CIO position at a business supporting multiple call center locations and managing applications and infrastructure across 100 locations.
Cloudbakers was founded with the idea of helping small and midsize (SMB) companies make the most out of their Google Apps implementations, but its strategic solutions set has expanded to include the Zoho CRM service as well as a core set of applications that are part of the Google eco-system. Those include the Xero accounting service, ItDuzzit synchronization engine, Esna unified communications application, FlashPanel management platform, Device Magic mobile forms and Spanning backup service for Google Apps. (For my recent story about Spanning's services, see "When it comes to Google protection, Spanning has your back.")
"We work with a set of tools that works really well together," Greenwald said.
Other key services for many Cloudbakers clients include the Hubspot marketing engine, the Amazon Web Services infrastructure offerings, and the UberConference conferencing calling service. Cloudbakers also handles a substantial amount of custom cloud application migrations and development, so it works with Evolve IP's virtual infrastructure offerings.
Philosophically speaking, Cloudbakers approaches cloud migrations and implementations as a change management challenge.
If companies address the processes underlying specific applications first, cloud project are more likely to succeed, Greenwald said. If not, the reverse is true. "You want to get everything baked into the processes, and then get the systems baked together," he said. (And yes, that philosophy is where the company's name came from.)
The main reason that businesses continue to say "No" to cloud solutions today isn't because of security or compliance concerns, it's because they can't make those process changes, he said.
Why are they saying "Yes"? Generally speaking, here are some of the main motivations for Cloudbakers' clients (as listed on its Web site).
- Instable email infrastructure
- Need for a spark or system refresh
- Interest in avoiding large capital IT expenditures
- Staffing and support issues
The typical Cloudbakers client has anywhere from 50 to 750 users to support. Here's the Cloudbakers corporate video, for more information: