GlobalOne, Cloud Sherpas Merger the "Next Step" for CSPs
GlobalOne and Cloud Sherpas "both had a similar concept in mind and were both looking for the next step," precipitating the just-announced merger of the two cloud service providers.
In 2011, Cloud Sherpas had completed four small acquisitions while GlobalOne completed three, enhancing its mobile strategy and "architectural capabilities," according to David Northington, the former CEO of GlobalOne who will now serve as CEO of the combined cloud service organization Cloud Sherpas.
"We [Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne] both had a very similar thought process about the market and what the market was looking for and needing...so the idea quickly formed, and it didn't take too terribly long to realize we were interested in doing this together," Northington says.
A premiere Google Apps Cloud Service Provider, Cloud Sherpas was named Google Enterprise 2011 Partner of the Year. GlobalOne has comparable clout as a platinum Salesforce.com consulting partner, a partnership that "enables us to provide customers around the globe with a more comprehensive range of enterprise cloud solutions," said Douglas Shepard, president of Cloud Sherpas, in a statement.
Cloud Sherpas has experienced rapid growth in the Asia-Pacific region, which is in line with GlobalOne's expansion overseas. The company recently acquired Australian company Weblinc, a cloud computing apps provider, and Northington expects the Asia-Pacific business to account for nearly a quarter of the organization's revenue in 2012.
"It's the combination of a good economic environment and great interest in the cloud by the companies there with a fairly immature partner community" that makes the region so fertile for cloud service providers, Northington says.
With an injection of $20 million from Columbia Capital, which invested $15 million in GlobalOne last year, Cloud Sherpas is poised to meet the forecasted demand of enterprise adoption of cloud computing practices over the next five years.