SoftwareONE marks a year since HeleCloud move

It has been just over a year since SoftwareONE acquired HeleCloud and the ambition to add more Amazon Web Services (AWS) expertise is being realised.

HeleCloud had a strong position as an AWS MSP and premium AWS consulting partner and was seen by SoftwareONE as a way of gaining more depth around that cloud technology across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), thanks to its operations here, in the Netherlands and Bulgaria. 

A year down the track and the relationship with AWS has grown tighter and the opportunities it was hoped the acquisition would deliver have started to arrive. The firm signed a strategic collaboration agreement with the vendor in January, which spans several years and will help the business reach more customers.

It has also been busy achieving competencies to stand out more in the AWS partner ranks.

Alex Galbraith, global director, AWS at SoftwareONE, said that although the business had already been growing in the AWS space and had a background with Microsoft before the acquisition, it had wanted to ensure it was in a position to deliver support whatever the cloud platform customers chose to place their workloads on.

“We were looking to develop two things – growing additional capability, helping us to accelerate what we were already doing, and then also growing the capacity to actually be able to deliver against that for our customers,” he said.

“We haven’t just scaled our capabilities locally. For example, we now have consultants in Benelux and the UK who are serving our European customers that were originally part of the Helecloud teams.”

The key aim was to build more AWS expertise and, just a year after the deal was announced, the firm has been able to show significant progress, gaining AWS premier partner status. The business has also developed more managed services skills that have been recognised by the public cloud giant, with competencies achieved in the non-profit and financial services arenas.

“I am really pleased with the way the integration has gone,” said Galbraith. “We’ve gone to time and not only that, we’re at the end of it and we’re now in a much stronger position in terms of being able to really show our customers value and being recognised for that by AWS.”

Galbraith will be heading off to the vendor’s re:invent conference in Las Vegas later this month looking for more ways for the business to work with the cloud player.

“Understanding what other people’s challenges are, and really seeing how they are tackling them, what their solutions are, can really give us great insight as to what’s going on from a customer’s perspective,” he said.

Fears of recession and doom and gloom generated by energy prices and inflation are swirling round the market, but Galbraith believes the channel has a role to play in helping customers through those challenges.

“Customers are telling us they are battling those twin pressures of having to innovate and transform, but also to work with even more significant budgetary pressures than they’ve had previously,” he said. “People are tightening their belts and so forth, but they still need to look to how can they reduce costs where they can but grow revenue, and balancing those two things off against each other, that’s where cloud comes in really strongly.”