SingleStone Strengthens AWS Partnership In Pursuit Of Bigger Cloud Opportunities

Digital consultancy SingleStone has attained an advanced Amazon Web Services partner certification in hopes of helping more businesses migrate to the public cloud.

The Richmond, Va. solution provider, which has worked with AWS for the past five years, said the recently-achieved Advanced Tier Consulting Partner status would help the company better target potential enterprise clients – primarily those in the financial services and insurance spaces – through the cloud provider's lead registration system. The distinction also qualifies SingleStone for access to MDF support and monthly calls with Amazon's partnership team.

"It allows us to be a bit more strategic as we go after these larger engagements," Ryan Shriver, director of technology at SingleStone, told CRN.

[Related: HPE Buys 200-Person AWS Consulting Workhorse Cloud Technology Partners]

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SingleStone's cloud business has averaged year-over-year growth of 120 percent over the last four years, and the overwhelming majority of that work has involved AWS or, to a lesser degree, Microsoft Azure.

Clients who were tentatively considering a move to the public cloud five years ago are flocking it, Shriver said, as business decision-makers have grown more comfortable with their overall levels of security and performance. The engineering workforce required to build a private cloud and the potentially cost-prohibitive nature of privately-run big data projects have turned many of them toward the alternative.

"The adoption of public cloud has gone a lot quicker than building out your own internal private cloud, and then managing and running it," Shriver said.

SingleStone also maintains a "working knowledge" of Google and OpenStack – Shriver said he expects client interest in both to eventually increase – but the team has experienced limited demand for those platforms to this point.

About 10 of the company's cloud and DevOps clients are Fortune 500 firms looking for strategic guidance as they prepare to move workloads from on-premises data centers to a public platform, some of which have multiple cloud projects running simultaneously. SingleStone also works with clients that sell to Fortune 500 firms to reposition legacy on-premises solutions for the public cloud.

Also, the company has developed practices around cloud-first custom app development and continuous delivery pipeline.

With a strong foothold in the Richmond, Detroit, and Chicago markets, as well as parts of the East Coast and California, SingleStone positions itself as a "value" consultancy that can compete with national firms due to the strength of its senior talent. The average member of Shriver's technology team has nine or 10 years of experience, he said.

The expertise of that team was pivotal as SingleStone set out to prove its AWS proficiency. The advanced-tier partnership required the solution provider to undergo an internal skills assessment, provide a specified number of meaningful client case studies and show it had generated the requisite AWS revenue.

Having met that threshold, SingleStone can now pursue a specific competency within the Amazon partner network. Shriver expects the company to achieve the financial services and DevOps competency certifications within the next 12 to 24 months.

"A big value of those partnerships – they elevate our competencies and our skill level (by creating) opportunities and incentive to develop our people and skill sets," CEO Chris Little said.

When the ongoing wave of cloud migration eventually crests, SingleStone anticipates a handful of other emerging cloud services will experience a popularity boom, with server-less computing for app development, containers and continuous delivery all among them.

Little and Shriver both said they expect to see a surge of cloud innovation aimed at cost-optimization and time-to-market.

"If you're out there in the cloud, and you point and click your way to set up, if you need to switch over to another region because of data disaster recovery, you don't have time to point and click everywhere. You need to really automate a lot of that," Shriver said.