ClearScale CEO: Why Customers Pick AWS Over Azure, Google

“If you’re going to invest millions of dollars and pick a public cloud partner that you may use for the next 10 years or more, you want to pick the one that’s the strongest in the market, has the best technology, the best customer service, continued innovation and is going to be there for a long time to come,” ClearScale CEO Pavel Pragin tells CRN.

ClearScale plans to nearly double its employee headcount within the next two years thanks to its growing success with enterprise customers who are choosing Amazon Web Services over Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, says CEO Pavel Pragin.

The San Francisco-based AWS Premier Partner says growth at ClearScale is being driven by customers wanting the most reliable and long-standing cloud provider for their application modernization and critical cloud transformation needs.

“All of that is Amazon,” Pragin said. “[Customers] want to make sure they’re putting their money on the right horse.”

ClearScale All-In On AWS

ClearScale is a fast-growing cloud system integrator, consultant and application development solution provider who partners with AWS.

The company has obtained more than 10 AWS competencies, including recently achieving the AWS Digital Customer Experience Competency, with plans to expand both its employee headcount and global reach thanks to its AWS success.

“Today we’re at 300 employees,” said Pragin. “I wouldn’t be surprised if within two years, we would get to over 500 people at ClearScale. … I feel like we have a lot of horsepower now when it comes to driving business, closing business and really fueling our growth.”

AWS ‘Customer Obsession’ Mentality

Founded in 2011, ClearScale historically has been focused on SMB and startup customers.

However, the company has invested heavily in winning enterprise customers in recent years who are placing their cloud service bets on AWS versus other cloud competitors.

“Technology-wise, all three [AWS, Azure, Google] are going to be chasing after each other. Some of them are better than others in certain areas, but one of the things that Amazon focuses on is their customer obsession mentality and really being customer focused - that’s where a lot of the value is,” said Pragin.

In an interview with CRN, ClearScale’s CEO talks about AWS versus Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, application modernization cloud services that are driving sales, and the growth plans for his company.

Why are your customers today selecting AWS for cloud transformation versus Azure and Google Cloud?

For customers, one of the key things is the customer service aspect of Amazon.

Technology-wise, all three are going to be chasing after each other. Some of them are better than others in certain areas, but one of the things that Amazon focuses on is their customer obsession mentality and really being customer focused - that’s where a lot of the value is.

We see Amazon being very customer-centric a lot of the time, which is very much liked by their customers. That’s where a lot of value comes from.

It has to be backed up by good technology, which Amazon has, but that’s what makes it the most unique between the other two is the customer service aspect of it.

Amazon’s level of innovation and growth and market position also breeds confidence for customers. Because if you’re going to invest millions of dollars and pick a public cloud partner that you may use for the next 10 years or more, you want to pick the one that’s the strongest in the market, has the best technology, the best customer service, continued innovation and is going to be there for a long time to come. All of that is Amazon.

The customer invests heavily too when they go on a cloud platform, especially if they’re an enterprise because they’re spending potentially tens-of-millions of dollars to actually get there. They want to make sure their putting their money on the right horse.

Why is ClearScale placing its bet on AWS versus Azure and Google Cloud?

AWS is the market leader. Their technology is really good. Their [AWS] Partner Network is well developed.

We invested heavily into building an organization that essentially uses Amazon as our main channel. We’ve trained everyone on that technology.

There’s a huge amount of opportunity within AWS for a company of our size. It’s almost unlimited. We can work with anyone, anywhere and anytime - it’s all up to us.

Technology-wise, all three have their pros and cons. Some of them may have, at any given time, a better service around a certain area. But they’re always innovating and making progress. They’re kind of all trying to catch up to each other.

I think Google is probably the least mature still from a technical offering perspective, even though they do have some very strong services.

Sometimes it seems that Google is not serious still about public cloud. I think some people would probably disagree with me, but that’s definitely what it seems like. It also seems that their partner program is still not quite there yet.

I think Microsoft is much further along and much more invested. Microsoft definitely is right behind Amazon. Definitely closer to them, but still quite different.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky

In terms of channel, do you see AWS making positive changes over the past year since Adam Selipsky became CEO and AWS hired Ruba Borno as its channel leader?

Definitely, we’ve seen more engagement from them and seeing some organizational changes that they’ve done and hiring different folks and making different changes that are definitely in the right direction.

Obviously, whenever they invest in partners, it’s good for us. So I definitely think Ruba Borno is a big improvement over the previous leadership.

We’re seeing good progress and good improvement.

Amazon has always been partner-focused. They’ve had the biggest channel partner network in the cloud and a lot of things along those lines.

What are some hot AWS services driving sales for ClearScale over the past 12 months?

Where we’re spending a lot of time with customers that’s driving a lot of our projects and business, is projects that probably contain 50 or 60 services each or more. So it’s not really one specific service.

One of the big things that we have seen over the last year or so is a huge demand for application modernization or just modernization in general.

When we started 10 years ago, it was all about migration. Customers would try to basically take their stuff from their data center and lift it into Amazon. That happened for a while. The first customers were startups and SMBs. They had much simpler workloads and the migrations weren’t extremely complex, but there was quite a bit of them going on.

What’s happening now is the enterprises, who also have been doing these lift-and-shift migrations for a few years now - they’re now realizing that that’s just the beginning.

For example, we have customers that use mainframes still. You’d be surprised how many large enterprises still use mainframes - it’s a lot. And you can’t just lift and shift a mainframe into AWS.

If you want to do it right, you have to modernize the application. It has to be refactored, re-architected, it takes design, discovery, it takes a lot of development work, and then it takes some migration as well. So a lot of the projects that we’re doing these days are projects like that - trying to help enterprises shift into Amazon and modernize applications in the process.

How is application modernization driving growth for ClearScale?

In many cases, you can’t move it as it is - it has to be modernized. So this requires skill sets and strategy, because the customer could have 50 of these.

You need to decide which one is the first, which ones to do, which ones not to do, and what technologies to choose from. Then after that, it requires strong development capability, it requires DevOps capability, and data capability as well because some of these workloads are data heavy.

For example, maybe they’re trying to move their IBM or Oracle databases to Amazon servers instead. So it requires data skills.

These become quite complex projects that require real strong capability, which a lot of the smaller partners or even bigger ones just don’t have, but we can.

So from a business perspective, these are the best customers, the longest projects, and they drive the most value for these customers because they’re trying to solve large problems in moving to the cloud and in a smart way.

What’s the future of ClearScale look like and how much growth do you expect?

One of our things that we’ve been focusing on for the last couple of years is really moving more into working with enterprise customers. Historically, we’ve been a focus on SMB and startup customers, which we still do a lot of business, but we’ve invested a lot to do more with enterprises. which has been working for us.

Today we’re at 300 employees. Within a year, we should get to 400-plus. And then continue to grow from there.

I wouldn’t be surprised if within two years, we would get to over 500 people at ClearScale.

We’re very well established in the East and West [in the U.S.] and we’re investing in central. Longer term we’re also interested in growing outside the US and Europe.

We already have a delivery presence in Poland so we’re planning to potentially expand into the European markets as well from a sales perspective.

We continue to be fully invested with AWS and we want to continue to grow a partnership.

We also have invested a lot in our sales organization and marketing and business development and really matured it. I feel like we have a lot of horsepower now when it comes to driving business, closing business and really fueling our growth.