Media Mavens report on Monster Merger

This has been quite a week for GlobalOne.  Actually, it has been quite a year – but this week stands out with the major announcement of our company merging with Cloud Sherpas.  For those of you who haven’t yet heard, we announced on Tuesday, March 6^th the joining together of Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne to become one of the largest Cloud Service Providers focused on helping customers adopt and enhance cloud solutions.  It is obvious from the coverage we have received that there is tremendous interest in the marketplace for companies to move into the cloud.

Coverage ranged from the WSJ noting that as “an international cloud service provider, (the merged company will be) helping businesses in the US and Asia Pacific move their computing to the cloud,” to Talking Cloud saying “A blockbuster cloud services provider (CSP) merger involving Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne, potentially forming a next-generation cloud consulting company.”  Brandon Butler, Network World,(Cloud consultants Cloud Sherpas, Global One merge) quoted Jeffrey Kaplan’s perspective: “The SaaS-based cloud industry has proliferated and is beginning to consolidate — the consultancy world is a shadow of that,”  Kaplan says. “It’s all about moving from best of breed offerings to more stand-alone, all-encompassing, strategic suppliers of services.”

And a favorite is the one from Channel Nomics  where Larry Walsh called our “Monster Merger” the “Deal of the Year” so far in 2012, saying “Perhaps it (the merged company) will draw the new blueprint for what solutions providers should be in the cloud era.”

What do you think such a blueprint should be?  What are your expectations from a strategic cloud service provider like us?

If you are new to this blog, sign up for the RSS feed and keep watching us. We have new partnerships, new solutions and workshops all coming out this spring.

Becoming world’s leading Cloud Services Provider: GlobalOne and Cloud Sherpas Merger

For those of you who have been watching GlobalOne, the announcement being made today should not come as a surprise. Since GlobalOne’s founding, our vision was to enable companies to transform their businesses by leveraging the power of the cloud. Today we advance that vision forward by joining together our company and the top Google Enterprise Partner, Cloud Sherpas. This union joins together two market leaders, united in our mission to deliver cloud advisory and implementation services to assist you with your journey into the cloud.

We have seen first-hand, customers struggling with multi-location and global teams trying to run mid- to large enterprises with traditional on premise tools. That is yesterday’s approach. Today’s enterprises are integrating cloud based applications such as Google and Salesforce.com and others into their technical architectures. This brings new, quickly evolving capabilities for collaboration, sales, service and workforce management, marketing and many more tools into the hands of the user. And all this is being done at a fraction of the cost it would take to even try and do the same with traditional on premise solutions. The browser is the new desktop and the cloud is the enabler of that reality, a reality that exists not just in the office, but anywhere a tablet or smart phone can go. As a combined company, Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne, now operating as Cloud Sherpas can help you plot a course, plan specific projects, execute those projects and enable the new cloud reality in your company.

More details of the announcement can be found on PR Newswire as well as the Cloud Sherpas’ blog.

GlobalOne – One of the Hottest Companies in NY

What an honor to be named one of the hottest companies in New York. Lead411 just issued their list of the fastest growing technology companies in New York and included GlobalOne along with Buddy Media, Yodle, Logic Works and a list of other select companies to watch in 2012.

Usually a company has to submit an application to be considered for any one of the numerous awards that are given out by publications and industry leaders. But with the Lead411 award, winners are identified by their team of researchers who scour through press releases, business articles, venture capital financing news and other public reviews of the company. You can’t apply for this award – you have to be selected.

This recognition of GlobalOne comes on the heels of a very exciting time for us. In August we announced receiving $25 million in funding from Columbia Capital and named a new CEO, David Northington. In October we acquired Flow thru Logic and established our Communications Practice. We launched the G1 Solutions for Asset Management in November and went on to acquire the Vodafone mobility development team to create a new Mobility Practice at GlobalOne. In January we acquired Weblinc, one of Australia’s most innovative providers of cloud computing applications, and a salesforce.com Premiere Consulting Partner. With this acquisition we are now broadening our expertise in building and deploying enterprise cloud applications across the globe.

We are very proud of our recent achievements and are truly honored to be recognized in the marketplace as one of the hottest technology companies to watch in 2012. Sincere thanks to our employees, our partners and most of all our customers for helping us to achieve this recognition. But we aren’t stopping here – we have very ambitious objectives for the coming year. Keep watching us as we continue working to support our clients in their efforts to bring increased efficiency and value to their organizations.

Big Events & Facebook Can Help You Grow Your Company

This weekend during the Super Bowl I set out to prove a point that I made nearly 10 years ago and still believe today… Super Bowl Sunday is in the top 5 best recruiting days of the year.

The sheer number of people online (tweeting, browsing and updating Facebook, searching the web) at once makes Super Bowl Sunday a prime time to connect.  Combine that with the inspirational atmosphere of the whole event, and you can start to see why this can be one of the best days (or even best stretch of 4 hours) to pitch a dream job to a huge, highly engaged pool of candidates.  (Now I admit, finding a recruiter willing to work on Super Bowl Sunday is another issue – but maybe we’ll revisit that in another post)

At GlobalOne, we have an Employee Referral Program, Growing Global, for GlobalOne employees to refer a connection as a candidate for an open position.  With this program, we’re able to gather an amazing collection of resumes to help hire some of the most talented folks in the industry for a variety of open positions.

But, I recently noticed that there were 2 positions open that had no referrals.  And so, wanting to test out my theory, I posted an update on Facebook on Sunday, asking my friends if they could refer someone they knew for either of the positions.  1 post and 6 hours later and I have 12 resumes for the 2 positions that had no referrals and another 10 email addresses and phone numbers for other people who my network tells me I must call, ASAP. This was incredible. Something that typically takes weeks or months, I was able to gather in a matter of hours.

This is simply a better way of working – integrating social into every aspect of my function and our business. Now it’s off to the think tank with our Social Business brain trust at GlobalOne (Cyndi Zaino and Geoff Merrick) to put the finishing touches on a pretty spectacular Social recruiting plan.

Give them a shout if you want them to do the same for you!

Weblinc Joins Forces with GlobalOne

When we launched Weblinc in October 2008, our idea was to build a Cloud Consulting Practice focused on the salesforce platform. Our deep interest in architecture and mobility, and Salesforce’s approach to delivering value to customers, matched well with our idea to build a solution-focused consulting practice to solve complex business problems for our customers.

And it worked! Within 12 months Weblinc was named Partner of the Year for the Australasia Region. I credit this early success to our early intuition that Business Architecture was crucial to ensure the success of our customers. Making this the focus of our Practice got us off to a good start.

Weblinc was so successful, that we began to gain recognition as a key contributor to the evolution of the cloud technical architecture community. A proof point was being invited to hold a seat on salesforce.com’s International Technical Architecture Review Board.

Our team also began to build large custom apps on the Force.com platform which required complex integration with ERP core systems. In the process we developed a library of blueprint designs and evolved an agile delivery method and tool chain tailored to cloud app projects.

Things moved fast. In October 2011, on the 3 year anniversary of Weblinc, we asked ourselves, “How does Weblinc take its DNA and dominate the Australian salesforce partner ecosystem?” The answer came quickly. Literally that morning GlobalOne made an approach to investigate a partnership. As the discussion evolved, we saw an opportunity to join forces to become the dominant salesforce partner in the Asia Pacific region

Our thought process and check list was simple:

• Shared vision
• Complimentary client base
• Team culture, structure and fit
• Aligned strategies
• Architecture focus

It was clear early in the process the combination of both businesses would make a formidable team, not only in Australia but globally. With GlobalOne, we found a great match. We share the vision of creating a Global Architecture Practice to take thought leadership in the cloud architecture to market. With GlobalOne, we can scale our business faster and provide customers with a deeper and broader set of cloud services – all from a single provider. Now that the deal is done, our attention is quickly turning to how to best integrate the teams and get on with business.