AWS Premier Partner Mission Acquires Software Developer Dozen Software

‘We’re seeing more demand not only from existing customers, but from AWS itself, for application development. We meet on a regular basis with AWS. We have account execs mapped to AWS account execs. And they are telling us they see more demand for application development from their customers,’ says Mark Medina, Mission Cloud Services’ vice president of marketing.

Mission Cloud Services is expanding the cloud MSP and AWS premier tier services partner’s software application development credentials with the acquisition of software specialist Dozen Software.

The acquisition gives Los Angeles-based Mission Cloud Services, which already does application development work for its Amazon Web Services clients, the opportunity to expand its reach, said Mark Medina, Mission’s vice president of marketing.

“We’re seeing more demand not only from existing customers, but from AWS itself, for application development,” Medina told CRN. “We meet on a regular basis with AWS. We have account execs mapped to AWS account execs. And they are telling us they see more demand for application development from their customers.”

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Mission Cloud Services offers a suite of cloud services to help businesses migrate to AWS, and help them operate, modernize, and manage their AWS environments, Medina said.

“With Dozen Software, we’ll be able to bolster our existing application process to help customers modify their applications or create new ones,” he said.

Chris Downs, CEO of Nashville, Tenn.-based Dozen Software and now the application development practice lead at Mission, said his company builds software applications for customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

“We haven’t been industry-specific,” Downs told CRN. “But with Mission, we’ll be focused more on cloud-native development, cloud scalability, and global availability.”

Dozen Software prior to the acquisition did not have an AWS-centric business model, Downs said.

“We were driven by client demand,” he said. “We’ll continue to honor all our existing relationships. But going forward, our focus will be on AWS software application development. We’re not talking application targeting mobile phones. We’re doing enterprise and desktop applications.”

For Mission Cloud Services, its focus exclusively on Amazon Web Services gives customers confidence the kind of expertise the solution provider brings, Medina said.

“We’re a consultative company,” he said. “We want to understand why a customer wants to move to the cloud, and what AWS can do for them.”

Prior to the acquisition, Mission Cloud Services had a team of 286 people across 40 states, all of whom work remotely across the entire U.S., Medina said. “It means we aren’t limited where we look for talent,” he said.

Dozen Software, on the other hand, has 12 employees in the Nashville area, Downs said. Those employees all work remotely, but like to get together every other week just to make sure everyone is doing well, he said.

As for the company name “Dozen Software,” Downs said the company was formed with the 12 current employees. “Literally, we had 12 engineers,” he said. “We didn’t get creative with the name.”

While Dozen Software was profitable, it saw in an acquisition by Mission Cloud Services the opportunity to work within a larger company whose culture was in alignment with its own, Downs said.

“It’s like Mission is running a bigger version of Dozen,” he said. “They’ve built a company that is employee-centric and customer-centric, like we did. And we saw a lot of excitement in what mission is doing to make application development be part of something bigger than what we were doing.”

Medina and Downs declined to discuss the value of the acquisition.

The two met via a common friend who worked at Mission and knew the work Dozen Software did, Downs said.

“As Mission decided they wanted to add an application development competency, that friend stood up and said he knows somebody who could help, and made the introduction,” he said. “We met, and then we skipped the preliminary partner phase and pushed straight ahead to the acquisition.”

Mission Cloud Services was founded about five years ago when a private equity firm acquired three small consulting partners who then merged their businesses, Medina said.

Dozen Software is Mission’s first acquisition since then, but likely not the last, he said.

“There’s always research being done on what other acquisitions we could make,” he said.