• Acquisition News – Cloud Sherpas Broadens the Franchise and Moves Into ITSM

     

    I’ve been covering Cloud Sherpas since its inception – I’m particularly interested in this new breed of services brokerage that is proving successful despite deriving its revenue from a small sliver of a very small annual charge – this…

  • Cloud Sherpas–$40M in Funding and Another Aquisition

     

    I’ve been following Google Apps and Salesforce reseller Cloud Sherpas since it launched a few years ago – in that time I’ve seen them acquire companies globally and grow into a real force in the space. I’m always a…

  • Okta and Cloud Sherpas Partner to Accelerate GAPE Enterprise Adoption

     

    Identity management is one of the big challenges to be faced in easing the adoption of cloud within enterprise. Okta (more on them here) and Cloud Sherpas (more on them here) have announced a partnership that is squarely aimed…

  • Cloud Sherpas Acquires WaveAdept

     

    Now that someone with lower respect for embargoes has broken the news, there’s nothing stopping me from talking about the latest acquisition for US based Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas. Cloud Sherpas is a company I’ve written about before,…

  • Cloud Sherpas Rolls up Google Apps Reseller Omnetic

     

    I’ve previously held up Cloud Sherpas as a smart player in the cloud ecosystem area. They’re both a reseller of, and a contributor to, Google apps via their service offering and their product, SherpaTools. Today they’re continuing their expansion…

  • Cloud Sherpas Update

     

    I’ve written before about Cloud Sherpas the company that has built an advanced administrator toolset for Google Apps. originally the toolset was an add-on to their own Google Apps reseller business, it seems to have grown well beyond that.…

  • Cloud Sherpas – Raising Money and Enhancing GAPE Admin

     

    Capture I’ve written before about Cloud Sherpas, a cloud computing systems integrator and application developer. They’re a Google Apps reseller that also created SherpaTools for Google Apps, a free app that gives more administrator functionality to Google Apps users.

    Only a few days ago, Cloud Sherpas raised $1 million in funding from Hallett Capital and other investors and, somewhat unusually, one of the investors in the round has taken over the CEO role from Michael Cohn who is becoming VP Product and Marketing.

    The focus of the funding is an acceleration of Google Apps enterprise adoption and a release today will help with that. The enhanced version of SherpaTools is focused on helping enterprises protect and preserve end user data.  Google Apps admins can now delegate access to fellow IT staff, such as help desk workers, without providing the company’s master username and password credentials.  Using a dedicated pin number, a help desk worker can reset an end user’s password, for example, but he or she would not have access to a broader spectrum of employee data. While a seemingly minor improvement, this gives a degree of granularity of user control that is important to enterprise users.

    An interesting new feature, and one that I’ve previously had a real need for, involves the ability to quickly and easily preserve the data of terminated employees.  Usually with Google Apps, all of an employee’s data (spreadsheets, presentations, emails, etc.) are deleted once they’re removed from the system.  In our case, when an employee left we’ve got around the issue by suspending rather than deleting a user from the system.  We then went into the account and manually removed/archived/reassigned the data files we wanted to keep.  Not at all user friendly!  With the new release of SherpaTools, IT admins can automatically delegate all of a terminated employee’s files to his or her manager or another user in the system. 

    Cloud Sherpas is moving beyond it’s free tool and will soon introduce a paid version. In an interesting twist however, users who buy their Google Apps licences directly from Cloud Sherpas will get all the SherpaTools premium features for free – a nice little inducement if ever I saw one!

    In terms of where Cloud Sherpas are at now, they’re reporting around 2100 businesses users serving nearly 300,000 workers. I’ve said before that I think tool like this serve a dual purpose – firstly to drive customers to CloudSherpas service offerings (deployment and migration to Google apps) and secondly to get the attention of folks like Google for a potential future trade sale – let’s watch and see what happens in Cloud Sherpas’ case.

    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by
  • CloudSherpas and GlobalOne Merge–It’s a Services RollUp

     

    I was speaking with some folks in the cloud services game the other day about the state of the industry and the key theme in our conversation was that it’s absolutely a land grab out there. Cloud is a…

  • T Shirt Friday #47 – CloudSherpas

     

    Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with  […]

  • T Shirt Friday #39 – CloudSherpas

     

    Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

    DSC05511

    If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).

    I reviewed CloudSherpas tools for Google apps migrations recently. In highly a highly uncharacteristic move for me (or possibly just because I knew these shirts were black) I agreed to review the CloudSherpa t shirt without actually getting the schwag – gasp! quel horreur!

    Hot

    • I don’t wear black – luckily this T shirt is no more than some pixels on my screen
    • The print.. kind of a combination of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and Wonder Woman – either way it’s pretty cool
    • Reasonably subtle branding… reasonably

    Not

    • Dropping my schwag standards for this review – it ain’t no fun if you can’t actually touch it!

     

    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by
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