2nd Watch Doubles Revenue In 2014, Says Best Times For Cloud Partners Still Ahead

While 2014 was a banner year for 2nd Watch, the Amazon Web Services Premier Consulting Partner expects its spectacular growth to accelerate further this year as business leaders increasingly warm to the concept of cloud computing.

2nd Watch not only doubled revenue in 2014, booking more than $43 million in business last year, but also notched an almost 25 percent average increase in instances managed each month.

"We believe we will double again next year," Jeff Aden, the Seattle-based solution provider's co-founder and vice president of business development, told CRN.

Aden's confidence doesn't just stem from wishful thinking -- the trend 2nd Watch sees among its own customers suggests the rate of enterprise cloud adoption is increasing faster than ever.

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"All indications from the enterprise clients is that they will be even more aggressive in 2015," Aden told CRN.

That suggests a tremendous opportunity for MSPs and IT consultants that have invested in the expertise and tools to help businesses get there. 2nd Watch is often held up as an example of the modern solution provider (even getting a nod in the Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant report) -- born in the cloud and reaping the benefits of partnering with AWS.

Which is why the company is now expanding several of its offices across the country and planning moves into two new cities. 2nd Watch also landed several Fortune 500 clients and was behind publisher Conde Nast's all-in cloud move this summer.

Many of those new enterprise customers moved workloads to hundreds of virtual machines and now plan on completing the job in the coming years by spinning up thousands more, Aden said.

Business leaders finally understand the return on investment they get from ditching their data centers and no longer want to invest in on-premise hardware and storage, he told CRN.

Where application development was a big driver of adoption over the past two years, now more companies are interested in migrating existing applications, running cloud-native business applications such as ERP systems, and taking advantage of the tremendous scalability they can achieve with a cloud like AWS for high-power, batch computing.

The cost benefits of virtual servers for those types of short-duration, computationally intensive workloads were always there, but the business community didn't always understand them. But now peer-to-peer communication is changing that -- early adopters that experimented in leveraging cloud tools and products serve as use cases for the next wave of migrations, Aden explained.

2nd Watch has completed more than 30 large-scale mass migrations on multiple continents and has been able to cross-match those projects with additional products and services, he said.

"The momentum we're seeing is clearly with larger and larger projects," Aden said. "[Customers] are starting to see projects from a few years ago deliver multiyear savings, with serious cost benefits that are really changing their business."

PUBLISHED JAN. 16, 2015