Supply Chain Issues ‘Driving Cloud Adoption’: CloudWerx CEO
‘When customers can’t get HPE, Cisco, Dell for months—sometimes we’ve had customers that can’t get it for quarters—then what are you going to do? You’re going to spin it up in the cloud,’ says CloudWerx CEO Jason Geis.
The global supply chain issues that have plagued the IT world are forcing some longtime on-premise customers to move to the cloud as wait times for on-premise infrastructure can be well over six months.
“When customers can’t get HPE, Cisco, Dell for months—sometimes we‘ve had customers that can’t get it for quarters—then what are you going to do? You’re going to spin it up in the cloud,” said Jason Geis, CEO and co-founder of CloudWerx, a fast-growing Google Cloud partner.
Geis said his San Jose, Calif.-based startup has significantly grown its customer base by more than 70 percent in 2022 thanks to being a cloud provider and partner of Google Cloud.
“The major cloud players have become their own contract manufacturers at this point, right? I mean, they make their own stuff. So we see projects of customers who wanted to do their own data centers, they actually haven’t had the choice due to some of the time constraints because of supply chain issues,” said Geis. “So it’s actually pushed them to go to the cloud.”
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CloudWerx’s CEO said some customers do not or can not wait months or quarters to receive hardware infrastructure for on-premise IT environments, “when you can simply spin it up in minutes to hours” via cloud computing.
Supply Chain Crisis Continues
Global supply chain issues initially started due to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting closures of businesses and labor shortages on a worldwide basis.
The industry-wide chip shortage has hampered the semiconductor, PC and hardware infrastructure sectors.
Supply chain issues have yet to subside due to several additional factors including COVID-19 lockdowns this year in Asia, particularly in China, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
With cloud hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google Cloud already having their own cloud infrastructure for sale, customers are choosing the cloud “easy button” to spin-up their IT environments compared to waiting months, if not longer, for their own on-premise infrastructure, Geis said.
“The whole supply chain thing, in my humble opinion, is actually driving cloud adoption,” said Geis. “It’s just driven customers to go the cloud route that much faster.”
Cybersecurity Also Driving Cloud Adoption
Another trend CloudWerx, a cloud consulting channel startup and Google Cloud Premium Partner, is witnessing that is driving cloud momentum is cybersecurity.
Betsy Reed, co-founder and vice president of sales and marketing for CloudWerx, said customers are adopting cloud security solutions at a high rate in 2022.
“Not only is supply chain causing many customers to move to the cloud, but Google’s security is becoming a huge value-add to our customers,” said Reed.
CloudWerx is seeing cloud adoption around Google Workspace with CloudWerx then layering on security tools and services on top for customers along with cybersecurity assessments.
“Security is a huge value-add to our customers moving forward and will increase cloud adoption even more,” said Reed. “We feel that the Google platform is the most secure right now out of the three major players—Amazon, Microsoft and Google—due to its native features. We have to help customers set it up because if you don’t set it up correctly, you can create vulnerabilities.”
Overall, CloudWerx is on pace to increase its revenue by 10-times in 2022 compared to 2021, with Google Cloud sales accounting for most of the company’s sales.
“We’re thankful to be a cloud provider during this ongoing supply chain crisis,” said CloudWerx CEO Geis. “It’s just one of many things that prove to us that cloud is the way to go and will continue to grow [versus traditional on-premises] IT.”