Executive Vice President & Strategy Officer
Global IT Consulting Firm
One of the global technology consulting and digital solutions IT company with operations in over 30 countries, helping more than 300 customers, accelerate their digital transformation and cloud journey enabling their mobile, social, analytics, IoT wanted our assistance in bringing in an Executive Vice President for Global Cloud Offerings to service its customer in Cloud Modernization Business.
Since One-Size-Does-Not-Fit-All, this role would also be revolving around suggesting the best cloud practices to customers to adapt to the best technology specific to their unique business requirements. This position was supposed to understand & solve enterprise customer pain points, & deliver a world-class though leadership and solutions across cloud-native ecosystem working as a thought leader with Customers in helping them to adopt cloud PaaS/ IaaS/ SaaS services after exclusively engaging in technology conversations with the client at CEO / CIO / CTO / CDO level.
As a Cloud Business Head, this role would also work closely with the sales team as their technology partners in all the phases of the sales process – from evangelizing and demonstrating the technology to prospects, to defining and executing proof of concepts and answering any technical questions around service and how they can help their enterprise customers clients in their journey towards transformation on the cloud.
Importance of Cloud in the Era of Digital Transformation
The organization recognizes the importance of core modernization in digital transformation intending to secure profitability through increased operational efficiency by modernizing legacy applications and migrate them over to cloud.
Most organization seek the assistance of an external vendor to understand the current process and market trends and ask them to provide their expert-level advice to adapt to emerging digital technology, best cloud and DevOps methodology.
Legacy applications tend to consume a lot of time and resources, and modernizing those applications to the cloud is the only way forward. In the upcoming years, all the legacy applications would get migrated to the public cloud depending on the what cloud infrastructure works best for the customers and most importantly it will also require optimization to become more cost-effective. Hence Cloud service providers will continue to invest on their native optimization capabilities to help organizations select the most cost-effective architecture that can deliver the required performance.
With the technology booming, Cloud computing is firmly established as the new normal for enterprise as well as directly to the end consumers. Cloud would be one of the fastest-growing segments within IT and every major player in the IT is investing in Cloud and one of the wisest calls any ‘C’ executive can hover through is invest in the cloud ecosystem with a lot of thought pouring so that all the efforts of investment are profitable and they meet the standards.
Challenges
Vantedge Search was contacted by this organization to fill this high-level role in their hierarchy with a special mention of this reporting directly to the CEO of the organization. Immediately we had an inkling of that it is going to create an impact within the organization. This role would provide seeding thoughts for Scaling the Cloud Native / PaaS competency of the organization for setting up and incubating various PaaS cloud and setting up the practice in the enterprise as well Serve as a thought leader in cloud practice area by attending industry conferences, networking with industry leaders, actively seeking speaking engagements, developing new case studies and presentations.
We knew this role was going to take a lot of efforts to fill and we wanted to strategically go on our sourcing and presenting candidates. One of the major challenges we had been introduced with was to not connect with one particular competitor which has similar market offerings hence we decided to exclude those candidates.
This role was supposed to head the entire Cloud Practice of the client having a blend of Business Development leading a team of technical directors and senior directors within delivery and practice hence we understood the associated grandeur.
We had to take every step with precautions as we knew that we can’t even connect with someone if we have a flake of doubt as in that case the role gets exposed to everyone even when they are not a fit and customer at times doesn’t appreciate a practice like this.
Considering these situations at entirety, we decided to have our best resource on this search, someone who can introduce our client before these industry leaders with great emphasis being put into their offerings and presence impressively to attract the best of the talent.
Strategy
We did a lot of research on available talent and resource for our client who is into similar space with the same cloud and DevOps offerings. We started to tap the talent while doing initial search and presented the first set of candidates to check with the Talent acquisition team to see if we were heading towards the right direction. It helps a lot when our clients directly help us during these exercises and this set a roadmap for search. They were very much focused on candidates who are loyal and associated with their clients for the long term and they should have a lot of loyalty to help them create long term growth and vision.
We started alternate competitors and approached Big candidates handling $XXX MN of the portfolio, handling global role within cloud practice, someone who knows almost all the major cloud and someone who can speak technically when representing the client’s capability in the cloud offerings.
Since this role was directly reporting to CEO of the organization executive presence of one of the key factor that we had to take extreme care of during our search, so we thought someone who is attending industry conferences and speaking regularly would be the best fit with a core competency within Application Modernization, Digital Transformation, Cloud Engineering, CIO Advisory, Enterprise DevOps and Agile, GTM.
People at this level generally anchor large scale enterprise DevOps transformations worth cumulative impact of Multi-Million $XXX, at the same time they would also hold some patent within SDLC and they would be experienced in setting an entire BU within Agile, DevOps and Application Modernization for their subsequent employer and would be putting all the efforts growing the entire Cloud/ DevOps practice with multiple direct reports. They also hold Big P&L, reports to someone at C level, they head the GTM practice, conceptualize application modernization practice.
Keeping all this in account, we started our search and started to reach out to selected candidates and started having an exploratory conversation. The way we had represented Vantedge Search as an executive search partner for the client and started selling our client’s capacity made the candidates excited to explore the role. Most of the candidates also wanted to create an impact within the growing organization and this client has a real good presence within Digital and Cloud Space in entire NA/ Europe and APAC market.
These executives appeared to be thrilled about the way we shifted the debris and explained the role in a Barney Style; they were excited to talk to the leadership. They were focusing on all the industries with cross verticals offerings in terms of cloud modernization. We had also linked their current role and provided them with enough reasons to explore the role and had put in a cradle to give perspective.
We knew about the unique challenges on this role as this was going to shape our clients business and the talent pool was limited and many candidates we encountered were also travelling globally for their respective assignments so coordinating with the interview would take a toll on us.
Result
After concluding our search we ended up with a substantial pool of candidates and we coordinated several rounds of interviews with the leadership. Interestingly the candidates at this level are always on road and someone who was eventually selected had attended a round of the interview while being in the UK.
We ended up placing a solid executive with 20+ years of considerable experience in IT domain working with a single organization which was the key attribute of his personality, he was loyal to his company and it took a real decision for him to join.
This candidate had a core technical background, which went on to provide his consulting services to end customers in terms of rolling the sleeves and getting the job done; he was instrumental in setting up and establish offshore DevOps Practice for his existing employer with distributed agile engineering center. Handled a P&L size of $XXX MN which my client wanted he came from entire Application Modernization and Cloud modernization background.
He was very positive in his approach, having a go-getter attitude, leads from the front and setting examples. During the interview process he has outlined the future vision and how would he like to paint the canvas when he joins this opportunity and this is the best thing which CTO liked about him.
The way he had conceptualized and architected the various cloud methodology during the interview was mostly liked by the CTO, he had his clear vision to establish the new employer as a top vendor for Application Modernization and Delivery Practice. He had launched new services in Cloud/ Application Modernization as well and had tremendous relations with alliance partners like Gartner, Forrester, ISG and Everest.
To summarize our client wanted someone who can also nurture C-suite relationships as a Trusted Advisor for cloud application migration and modernization and all of these mentioned characteristics makes him an ideal candidate for the role and he would be impactful when it comes to continued growth and profitability; by hiring this candidate they had gotten all the required skills.