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Franklin D. Roosevelt the 32nd US President said “To reach a port we must set sail. Sail not tie at anchor. Sail not Drift.” BeCloud’s journey is not hapless or adrift, but it is dynamically driven by customer need, technological innovation, and community activism. One of the Stories of Inspirational Entrepreneurs, James Phipps, is steering the ship of BeCloud. He is the President and CEO of the company.
James believes that most senior executives aim to foster a culture of learning and empower employees in a comfortable teamwork environment with challenging corporate stretch goals. But, technical leadership requires more. It requires aggressive skill mastery. A mastery of new technologies combined with continuous improvement and agility. The resulting skill sets yield a wealth of information to draw from during consulting engagements with customers. James has learned to only emphasize solutions that align with customer priorities. His “Customer First Strategy” reminds his team of software developers, engineers and technologist that if the customers goals and expectations are not met by a recommended solution, technical know-how is pointless.
In an interview with Insights Success, James shares how the “Customer Driven” nature of BeCloud’s services combined with employee diversity, internship opportunities, and community development differentiates the company, while also providing leading and transformational cloud-based solutions to customer business problems.
Below are the highlights of the interview:
How do you diversify your organization’s offerings to entice the target audience?
Our portfolio of services provides solutions for every stage of our client’s cloud journey. Our capabilities make us the premium choice for managing the security, networking, stability and cost of cloud resources. But, for many of our customers they operate in a hybrid environment. Supporting data centers as well as on premise resources means that we can support customer environments end to end. The ability for us to partner with customers running various technologies combined with our depth of technical expertise and customer engagement makes our Managed IT Services second to none.
What are the vital traits that every business leader should possess?
Empathy – try to understand where your customer and employee pain points are. Seek to resolve root causes of issues and challenges. Develop solutions based on that empathetic understanding and iterate on improvements.
Lead by Example – Employees should be able to confidently follow your example.
Empower your workforce – Open communication with clear and focused direction concerning corporate vision. Without that communication, your workforce does not understand how they play into corporate success.
I do not know of any other field besides IT where training and skill development are more important to workforce enablement. We improved our training programs in response to better workforce skill development.
Where are you focusing your energy now, and where do you hope to make an impact next?
BeCloud’s mission is to bring Modern Technologies to corporations with an eye towards digital transformation. Customers and potential clients utilizing SAN’s and other expensive on-premises hardware are looking to modernize business applications with the cost saving advantages, agility, performance and reliability of the cloud. That move to modern technologies, including: AI, Data Lakes, IOT, and Automation is what drives our vision for corporate technology solutions that can solve business problems.
What culture change you suggest for companies that want to embrace the full power of AI?
I always recommend starting small and then iterate on success. In my opinion, all technologies including AI should serve to enable business capabilities first. Your technology choices should support business need. For example, determine what areas would most benefit your business in the near term. Whether cognitive insight, automation to address cost restraints, or customer relationship improvement, AI technologies can help address each of those issues and more.
How do you keep yourself up to date with the latest technology trends?
Only through study, practice and collaboration. At BeCloud we allocate a certain amount of “on the clock” time dedicated to reading, study and practice. That is the only way a technology company can stay up to speed on the latest technological advancements.
What does it take to attract and retain tech talents?
We challenge our team members to contribute more today than yesterday. In return, management is careful not to put unnecessary requirements on team members. We give team members the family time, professional growth and flexibility they need to thrive.
What roadblocks or challenges were faced by you in a corporate business? And how did you overcome them?
IT leadership should maximize a company’s competitive advantage with an effective IT strategy. But many times, our customers and potential clients get bogged down in supporting current infrastructure and business processes instead of planning for the future. They resist taking the time to do process, security and/or network audits that can uncover potential opportunities for improvement. BeCloud seeks to make recommendations based on customer need and solution capability, rather than ad hoc decisions and knee jerk reactions. Therefore, we prefer to do a holistic review of the infrastructure, but it can be difficult to get key stake holders together long enough to develop strategic corporate IT strategy.
We provide executive questionnaires, and/or webinars for customers and potential customers to allow for a custom approach to business technical need. For some clients this is not a problem but for others getting a seat at the table to garner executive buy in proves elusive. For those customers sadly, it usually takes an outage or major issue to get the required executive commitment for needed technical upgrades.
What culture change you suggest for companies that want to embrace the full power of AI?
Resist fear! AI does not get rid of jobs but allows employees to focus on more high level and impactful functions.
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