Ensono - Hybrid IT: Formulating the Right Blend

Ensono works extensively with clients that are using AWS services already, helping them get to the stage of advanced adopters, but also sees great market potential in those that don’t, or scarcely, but have expertise in using the public cloud, more so, to deliver mission-critical workloads in a production-like manner. “We see value in delivering best-of-breed proof-of-concepts, in conjunction with AWS, for our clients,” says Moss. In one instance, a large specialist electronics retailer in the U.K., who was using SAP Hybris earlier, was trying to gauge how to use AWS to its business advantage. Ensono partnered with the client, defined their success criteria, and utilized the automation of their tooling to wrap the delivery and deployment of an entire environment for them in 48 hours. Needless to say, the client signed an agreement with them to move forward, shortly thereafter.

Client Success Ingrained in the Culture

Attributing the company’s success to its philosophy, Jeff says, “We believe it is important to have the business conversation first, determining what our clients are trying to achieve before unthinkingly proposing that we migrate all their servers to the public cloud. That is why we have accreditation in all platforms— mainframe, private, and the public cloud—so that we can deliver a solution rather than sell a product.” This approach forms a critical component of the culture at Ensono. In every associate meeting, an avatar-like persona of the clients sits in the discussions, making every decision made at Ensono as one that would be so if a client was present during the deliberation. The company also has a Client Advisory Board, comprising the clients with whom Ensono shares long-term partnerships. As part of an all-day work session with Ensono, the board meets for 90 minutes in a single sitting to discuss and formulate a SWOT analysis of the company, in the strict absence of Ensono’s associates or sales pitch initiatives. “While our clients think of this initiative as ‘brave,’ I think it would be rather foolish of us not to do it. The Advisory Board not only gives our clients the ability to shape our roadmap and know that their opinion is integral to our business, but also helps us stay highly relevant and valuable to them,” explains Klingbeil.

The team sees an increasing shift toward edge-computing driven by both their clients as well as AWS. Further, Ensono sees a rising need for the migration of major enterprise workloads to AWS for acceleration and optimization. These workloads, traditionally known to have been cumbersome and complex, can be auto-scaled and operated on with Ansible and Terraform to turn off unused environments, with the expertise that Ensono brings to the table. “Today, the public cloud still claims a very small share of the global IT spend, which amounts to trillions of dollars. With the rapid adoption of the public cloud, we are going to see this change in its favor,” notes VonDeylen. In the backdrop of such developments, with a majority of organizations still stuck in the friction of a complex hybrid approach, Ensono accelerates their cloud adoption strategies with a panoramic vision and a laser focus on improving business outcomes.