KCOM deepens cloud commitment

KCOM has taken steps to seal the sort of relationships that will give weight to its rebrand as a cloud player.

The firm has spent the last two years transforming the business into a cloud and comms player and in that time has built on its position as a Microsoft gold partner and a premier consulting partner to AWS.

The firm is now building on that by becoming a well-architected review partner for AWS and an official member of Google's cloud partner programme.

KCOM is now in a position to deal with customer workloads that are going through AWS and as part of the Google programme can provide access to the web giants tools, particularly data analytics and machine learning.

Commenting on the AWS relationship Stephen Long, enterprise evp at KCOM, compared it to, "having an F1 pit team look over your saloon”.

“There are very good reasons why you committed to that car and invested in the spec and features you needed at the time but a team of experts can look under the hood and quickly tell you how to improve efficiency, get a more comfortable ride and made the right adjustments for the future. So it is with the public cloud," he said.

Long said that the Google move had been in response to the increasing demand from customers to choice about public cloud provider.

“For many business users Google Cloud’s enterprise offering is a natural fit. No two cloud journeys are the same, so a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. Today, customers have a choice of public cloud vendors and many of our customers are going a step further and are adopting a multi-cloud strategy," he said.

At the same time the firm revealed that it had achieved stage 2 compliance for the Health and Social Care Network.

The firm, which focuses on the Hull and East Yorkshire areas, has already established itself in that region as a provider of comms and IT services to hospitals and doctors' surgeries.