All-AWS Partner Mission Battles Tech Talent Shortage with Cloud Elevate

Low unemployment rates in the technology field, coupled with an ongoing skills shortage, put organizations in a tough spot. Executives can’t afford to slow internal innovation, yet they have to work around a growing dearth of IT professionals. That’s just the problem channel partner Mission Cloud Services aims to address with the launch of a new platform. On Tuesday, the Amazon Web Services Premier Consulting Partner released Mission Cloud Elevate, which takes direct aim at the technology expertise gap.

Mission’s Jonathan LaCour

“Finding talent is very, very difficult, especially in our space,” Jonathan LaCour, Mission CTO, told Channel Futures in an exclusive interview. “Retaining that talent is really difficult. But the bigger challenge is understanding how to put that talent to work … and that’s where Cloud Elevate really comes into play.”

The new platform gives end users “a combination of people, process and tools with Mission’s expertise,” LaCour said.

From a broad perspective, Cloud Elevate supplies the following:

More specifically, Cloud Elevate provides a strategic adviser in the form of the cloud solutions architect, as well as DevOps engineers and experts in security, financial operations and infrastructure as code. Mission calls this structure “pods.”

A Game Changer

Mission’s Alex Beal

It’s a “game changer,” said Alex Beal, director of product for Mission.

“This agile engineering distribution model is built to optimize workflows, get tasks done, and accelerate outcomes as quickly as possible. Where customers have ad hoc requests or projects outside the areas of expertise of their named resources, the pod allows customers to tap into a bench with the AWS expertise and skills the work calls for. With Mission Cloud Elevate, businesses are adding a comprehensive roster of AWS experts to their own internal teams, and doing it for significantly less than hiring similar skillsets internally.”

LaCour agreed.

“This aligns all [the client’s] business goals and technology landscape into a clear, multiphased approach,” he said. “We iterate forward.”

Plus, the more implementations Mission performs, the more reusable templates it collects to repurpose for new customers.

“You’re getting successful, measurable success out of that team,” La Tour said.

Cloud Elevate: Much More Than ‘Rent-A-Team’

Mission’s Simon Anderson

Cloud Elevate’s key proposition boils down to speed, said Mission CEO Simon Anderson. Companies come to Mission at various stages of growth – mid-market evolving into large enterprise, for example – and needing to modernize both customer-facing and back-office applications. Cloud Elevate enables that quick momentum, thanks to the melding of Mission’s people and AWS’ technologies.

That’s all good but, frankly, other channel partners offer somewhat comparable resources.

True, LaCour said, but Cloud Elevate is different.

“There are a lot of people in the market attempting to do something similar to this … and that’s sort of rent-a-team,” he said. “And while that is useful and does help address the talent gap, it doesn’t make sense of where you want to go.”

Cloud Elevate, on the other hand, takes organizations from clunky, slow hardware setups to AWS-powered tools that illuminate the past and future.

Take, for instance, a mini-case study from the Boston Celtics.

The basketball team has used Mission’s DevOps service, the precursor to Cloud Elevate, for some time to analyze data. Through combined AWS and Mission capabilities, the Celtics now have fresh information each morning about data points including movement during games and shot ratios.

Prior to moving the Celtics off on-premises hardware and into AWS, coaching staff had to try to strategize off “stale insights,” La Tour said.

“It took days to process one game. Now, coaches have all the data from the day before.”

In addition, LaCour said, Celtics leaders are using their Mission-AWS platform to draft talent.

“They’re not just looking at in-game data, they’re also assessing international and college players. … It’s been a multifaceted project for them.”

Mission works with customers in a range of worlds; the privately held company says it has more than 350 clients in verticals including life sciences and health care.

Going Beyond One-Time Consultations

Cloud Elevate’s core value lies in its ability to support business outcomes, Mission executive say.

That’s how other channel partners need to…

…approach the market, too, Anderson said. He wants his peers to think about the “continuous engagement model.”

“That works best,” he said. “As industries evolve and as new technologies emerge, as cloud has, you have to look hard at what you’re selling and understand how your customers want to consume it and adapt. … It’s very important for all of us to adapt and create this new category, this new way of engaging with customers. … It’s not like the old days.”

In other words, partners will invite more recurring revenue and loyal customers when they go beyond the lone consultation.

“The cloud journey is what we always talk about,” LaCour added.

More than ever, organizations need a “much broader view of the landscape,” LaCour said.

“We are past the time when you can do one-off, simple engagements with customers. They need a holistic view.”

For Mission, Cloud Elevate accomplishes that, well, mission.