AllCloud has, for the past 10 years, been in the business of helping large organizations move to the cloud. They play at both the infrastructure and the application levels having partnerships with cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Salesforce, and NetSuite. The company is headquartered in Israel with offices in Munich and Berlin. and has a fairly Euro-centric approach to what it does.
AllCloud, in its current guise, was established in 2014 by Yosi Frenkel and Lahav Savir. It is an entity created through the merger of Blat-Lapidot, the first Platinum partner of Salesforce in Israel, and Emind, a Premier Consulting Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) and a Google Cloud Partner.
The Euro-centricity of what AllCloud does looks to change with news that the company has acquired a San Francisco and Toronto based company, Figur8. Figur8 is currently a Salesforce partner, but AllCloud is intending to use it as the beachhead for its North American market entrance. The acquisition comes at the same time as AllCloud raised $7 million I new funding.
Service provision in a maturing market
It is interesting to see AllCloud’s moves within the context of a maturing cloud marketplace. A previous company in the space, Cloud Sherpas, was founded around the same time as AllCloud and sold to Accenture for some $400 million a few years ago. Cloud Sherpas grew like topsy for two particular reasons: firstly, it had a huge focus on growth through M&A, picking up essentially everyone involved in cloud enablement globally and thus capturing an entire market. The second reason is that Cloud Sherpas, while global in its operating realm, was very much US-centric. And since cloud adoption is most mature in the US market, the sort of growth, attention and eventual exit multiple it could achieve was commensurately greater.
A more mature global service integrator market
Ten years ago and the large global service providers (people like Wipro, Deloitte, Accenture etc.) really didn’t understand what role they would play in the cloud, or even the extent of how cloud would change their business. Fast forward to today and every service provider is pitching themselves as a strong cloud player. This is understandable since, while huge numbers of workloads still reside on-premises, much of the net-new spend is going towards either creating cloud-first workloads or moving existing workloads to the cloud.
This newer, more mature, posture is both an opportunity for AllCloud, and a creator of a more competitive marketplace. Early in Cloud Sherpas’ days, there was little competition for “cloudy” consulting from the large players, today there is. But the fact of the matter is that some organizations don’t want to use a Wipro or an Accenture, they want a more nimble service provider – which is where AllCloud comes in. And luckily they have some new talent well adept at building this kind of business.
Signing on Eran Gil
Also news from AllCloud today is that Eran Gil, one of the co-founders of Cloud Sherpas, has signed on as the new CEO of the company. Gil has strong networks with the partners and the customer groups that AllCloud needs to convert and his signing will help the company grow. Previous CEO, Ronit Rubin, remains as the GM of the EMEA division of the company, while Gil takes up the global reins. Also signing up is Jon Hallett, an early investor in, and CEO of, Cloud Sherpas, who is joining AllCloud’s board.
An instant globalized footprint and strong Salesforce experience.
With the acquisition, AllCloud’s existing offices in Israel, Munich, Berlin and Bucharest get augmented by ones in San Francisco, New York, Toronto, and Vancouver as well. The move also strengthens the Salesforce offering AllCloud has. Figur8 co-Founders Ojay Malonzo and Richard Lockson worked at Salesforce for many years before starting a company that now totals 40 certified Salesforce professionals. Post this acquisition, Malonzo and Lockson will remain with AllCloud as SVP Sales North America and SVP Delivery North America, respectively.
Some questions for Gil
Via email, I asked the newly minted CEO what is different in the market since Cloud Sherpas was acquired. His response:
At a macro level, there are the obvious trends we all see: the public cloud market is growing by leaps and bounds… In the meantime, the cloud solutions provider (CSP) market has seen a slew of consolidation, starting with the likes of Cloud Sherpas, Appirio and Bluewolf and continuing with dozens of smaller organizations. The confluence of these trends has left a void for global boutique CSPs to not only ‘land grab,’ but further innovate in our space.
On the different expectations that customers have today, he opined that:
The type of innovation expected from CSPs like AllCloud is to further the synergies between the various vendors’ solutions and not just at one layer or another of the Cloud Stack (I.e. within the IaaS, PaaS or SaaS), but across its entirety. CSPs aren’t just expected to deliver project-based services and solutions – customers are looking to them to provide the management consulting services required to assist them with architecting their cloud journey and then finding the solutions that won’t only work discretely in their environment but rather integrate between them. Cloud Sherpas and the CSPs of its time were focused on solving a specific problem within IT or a line of business, regardless of any other technologies already utilized by the customer. We were never able to solve the technical relationship question between our different services/technologies that we provided.
And on the subject of what AllCloud has to offer customers that is different from the competition, as expected his focus was on speed and integration:
AllCloud brings to market a nimble approach – we are looking to provide solutions to customers that have unique synergies. We see it in all three of our core vendor focus areas (Salesforce, AWS and NetSuite). We even have two EVPs (one of which is AllCloud’s founder) whose sole focus is to work on our cloud platforms and cloud business applications competencies and solutions that show the power of their integrations. To that end, most larger, established solution providers don’t focus so much on the connectivity/integration/synergies but rather assisting the customer with their journey to the disparate cloud technologies.
MyPOV
Good funding, a good CEO hire, and a smart acquisition. AllCloud looks well positioned to capitalize on this new style of service provider work. It will be interesting to watch their progress.
