What Does #185 Really Mean?

This week, the Cloudnexa team received an award for being the 185th fastest growing company in the Inc 5000. This award is great recognition for our team, investors and most importantly validation for our customer’s decision to allow Cloudnexa to manage their AWS Cloud environments.

Back in 2012, when we were deciding what we wanted to be when we got into the Cloud business, we choose the path of managed cloud, even before people fully understood what that meant. More often the response we got from potential investors was something like; “It’s the Cloud, why would you need a managed services company?” Of course, the complexities of deploying, operating, and scaling were not fully understood to most people back then. Now the Cloud MSP space is well defined with some highly recognizable firms competing in the sector and the complexity of services has grown several fold.

Choosing to be an MSP was only part of the equation, we wanted to be different than anything the market had seen before. Of course, a Cloud MSP was unique, but we took it two steps further. Peaking around the corner, we anticipated the growth in automation and autonomous delivery. We theorized that with some work, our Cloud Management tool, vNOC, could be developed further to automate management, repair environments, and reduce customer costs. This would be offered with no upfront fees, simply a monthly recurring fee tied to actual AWS usage. And like AWS, we wanted our customers to stay with us for the value, not a long-term contract to lock them in.

The second key decision point was a focus on mid-market. In 2012, every firm wanted big enterprise accounts, in fact they still do today. We just did not feel larger enterprises were ready for our brand of MSP, so we fired a few customers, put our heads down and set out to build what is now #185 with a 2348% growth rate! It has been a remarkable rise for Cloudnexa.

Some decisions are easy, others are much more thought provoking. The mid-market case perhaps the hardest. I would be remiss if I did not call out our old Channel Manager at AWS, Josh Hoffman who was a big influencer in that decision. In fact, we owe AWS a huge debt of gratitude for building a world class organization that has enabled Cloudnexa to be what it is.

We are still peering around the corner and have a lot of new service offering that will be released this year. As our name suggests, Cloudnexa is the next generation of Cloud Managed Services.