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CloudSmiths CEO looking for UK growth
Firm has a growing presence in the country, and is looking for further expansion using a strategy of forming channel partnerships
The CloudSmiths CEO has talked of the UK as a significant market, and indicated the strategy of forming channel partnerships will continue as it looks to bolster its presence in the country.
The South African Salesforce and Google Cloud partner has already built relationships with a number of UK partners, including Cymetri, Grafana Labs, i-10, Leadex and Xactly Corporation.
The firm has a track record of providing a large number of services via partnerships, and has built an impressive customer base across private and public sectors, developing relationships in the financial and healthcare verticals.
Having been an active member of the Salesforce ecosystem, the plan is to learn from those lessons and work with other partners looking for cloud expertise.
CloudSmiths has senior personnel working out of a London office, and has close ties with the UK arms of its vendor partners.
“We’ve got our most senior technical resources in the UK and we’ve got significant executive-level sales capacity,” said Jason Timm, founder and CEO of CloudSmiths. “The UK team is up to 25 and growing fast.
“Those partnerships have been really good for us because they allow us to use our existing capability but open up new customers and new markets, like the UK and Europe,” he added. “We definitely plan to expand those partnerships ... and expand our growth into the UK from the clients and from a staff perspective.”
Macroeconomic conditions
Timm said the macroeconomic conditions were a factor for both UK and South African customers, but it felt it had a proposition that could appeal to even the most cost-conscious users.
“We think that we’ve got the skills inside of our business to be very competitive in the UK,” he said.
Timm added that the firm is currently focusing a lot of energy on generative AI, and translating the hype into scenarios and use cases users would relate to.
“We like complex projects,” he said. “At the moment, we’re doing a lot of gentle AI workshops with our customers to help them utilise [the technology]. There are about 15 of those, and then we thought we could create use cases.
“Generative AI is relatively new, and we always define what that is,” said Timm. “It’s using AI to generate things like words, pictures or any sort of voice sound. But we’ve been building AI models for customers for years and years before generative AI existed. We often try to just draw the distinction between the two and then make sure we help our customers define their use cases.”
