This was a watershed year for Expedient, and although significant on a number of levels, the best is yet to come.
I know this is a time of year when we collectively get nostalgic and sentimental. And in 2021, as was the case in 2020, we have many reasons to do that. If we truly take stock, we can agree – we are extremely fortunate!
But setting aside the eggnog, here at Expedient, we’re working harder than ever to get our clients from their current state﹣whether that’s contemplating the cloud or trying to accelerate the journey that’s already in progress﹣to their short-term goals﹣whether that’s showing some quick wins and proving the concept or completing high priority objectives﹣to a future cloud operating model, better serving the business by providing faster innovation, more nimble agility, and better responsiveness. In essence, our promise is to take our clients from here to there to anywhere. We rolled out some exciting, new cloud services and capabilities and added several new cloud nodes/data centers, further solidifying our position as a leading national Full-Stack Cloud Service Provider (CSP). To appreciate this transformation and what it delivers to organizations large and small, we need to go back to March, when we introduced our Cloud Different vision.
For years, if not decades now, we’ve been talking about digital transformation (DX). Hyperscale cloud providers make it all sound simple enough﹣with siren calls like “just move everything to cloud” and “go all in”! Unfortunately, the notion that “cloud equals hyperscale” doesn’t address mission-critical﹣applications that don’t lift and shift easily into cloud-native environments.
Moving existing applications to the cloud has proven tougher than expected, even for enterprises with relatively large IT management teams, resources, skills, and budgets.
For mid-size and smaller organizations, it’s nearly impossible. Instead, they often find themselves leaving things as-is, or moving at a glacial pace. Either way, the gap between the potential of cloud and the benefits they’re actually realizing is a colossal one. Plus, compounding this migration is the question of what happens to all the legacy IT assets accumulated over time? Existing investments in hardware, applications, databases, development tools, etc., can’t just be remediated with a “rip and replace” or simple “lift and shift” approach. The idea of migrating decades of IT system investment as well as net-new development to a single cloud appears to be wishful thinking at best.
This is where our Cloud Different approach provides a sensible way forward for organizations across the sizing spectrum. We believe that cloud isn’t a destination, but it is an approach, a mindset. A cloud operating model delivers desired business outcomes by matching and aligning IT resources for optimal results. Expedient takes the guesswork out of migrating to the cloud by bringing together a curated and fully integrated stack of software, services, and capabilities. It is about getting the right applications and workloads running on the right infrastructure from the best location.
In 2021, to help organizations make unprecedented progress on their cloud journey:
- We rolled out a new suite of universal multi-cloud services, including Cost CTRL, Security CTRL, and Operations CTRL. These services enable organizations to standardize management, monitor security, and simplify overall IT operations across on-prem, VMware-based enterprise clouds, and hyperscale environments. We are enabling organizations to keep costs under control by helping manage the complexity of multiple clouds. So if you want to use the latest and greatest serverless and AI/ML functionality, you can do that and still optimize where your VMware workloads run, integrate legacy hardware and software, and manage it all on a unified, consistent management plane. In other words, you can “have your cake and eat it too”. Yum!
- As a result of the pandemic and the Great Resignation, recruiting and keeping a talented workforce, which includes employees, contractors, and agencies, has become a top priority. We launched Expedient Enterprise Workspace, a fully managed Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) service, enabling hybrid workforces to remotely access applications and data from any device or location, without compromising performance or security, all while helping organizations figure out the best work-from-anywhere options.
- In the past 60-days, Expedient has opened-up three new data center locations (Denver, Phoenix, and Milwaukee). We now operate 14 data centers across the US, which all deliver a consistent portfolio of Universal Multi-Cloud Services. Each cloud/data center location acts as an onramp to the cloud while providing onsite fully redundant, power, and cooling infrastructure systems.
As you can see Expedient has evolved dramatically in 2021, building on our heritage providing colocation, data backup, and disaster recovery services to now emerge as a leading national Cloud Service Provider (CSP). Collectively, these capabilities are designed to help accelerate digital transformation and are all backed by our white glove service and support.
This is why we believe our Cloud Different approach can help any organization realize the full transformational power of cloud. We empower organizations to simplify and streamline IT operations while leveraging a cloud model that accelerates operational agility. Not a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all model. We can take your organization from where you are today to where you aspire to be in the here and now and in the not-too-distant future . From here to there to anywhere. This mindset and growth trajectory will continue in 2022 and beyond!
As always, if you have any questions or ideas you want to explore, I’d be happy to chat. Email me at tim.kounadis@expedient.com.
