The First 150 Days: Bringing our vision of data as infrastructure into focus

I discussed my approach from the perspective of the CEO of Aptum in a recent podcast, where I outlined my priorities of establishing goals, building a knowledgeable, experienced team and then creating a strategy to achieve those goals.

For Aptum, these first months have been especially important because whilst establishing a new brand, we have also been introducing a new operating model. It’s been a very exciting time and I’m thrilled that we not only have a great team in place, but we’ve also made incredible progress communicating our new brand values and executing on our goal of enabling organizations around the world to unlock the potential of their data as infrastructure.

We’ve assembled a group of experienced industry leaders focused on delivering value to our customers, including the hiring of our first Chief Revenue Officer, who is focussed on growing our global data center and managed services business.

We’re also committed to investing in our talent. For example, we recently brought our global team – from data center to network operations to sales – into Toronto for Aptum Grow, a two-day company-wide kick-off event and training. Aptum Grow is about learning and honing our expertise but it’s also about coming together as a united, global team.

Teamwork is also key to meeting the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals we have established for our company. Over the holiday season, Aptum teams around the world helped out by giving their time to groups providing food and gifts to local communities as part of Pay it Forward, our community volunteer program. Pay it Forward supports our five core values – Adapt, Inspire, Grow, Connect and Community – by giving employees time off to volunteer their services to charities and community organizations.

On the environmental front, we are committed to having a global process in place for tracking and responsibly disposing of all e-waste from our 15 sites and 19 office locations around the world by the end of our fiscal 2020. We are also investigating programs and initiatives that will offset our carbon footprint.

Making sure our customers get the best possible experience is a priority. We’re expanding our pre-sales engineering team, so we can assess organizations’ business needs and construct tailored solutions – including global connectivity, public and private cloud, as well as managed services – that meet each customer’s particular requirements. We are also enhancing our data center capabilities, including our recent expansion of our facilities in the Atlanta market.

On the business development side, we have reorganized our team from a regional to a global structure to give our customers the best possible service. Some of the team is now dedicated to finding new business, while others are focused on ensuring our existing customers get the services they need to truly leverage their data. Our largest enterprise accounts are receiving dedicated resources, overseen directly by a member of our executive team. Our next step will be to make the channel a more significant part of our business model.

As a newly independent company, we’ve transformed our operations, adopting digital tools that allow us to serve our customers’ needs more effectively. We’ve enhanced our product offerings by adding Managed Amazon Web Services to our existing portfolio of Managed Microsoft Azure Services, private and hybrid cloud services; expanded our Cloud Connect direct, secure cloud connection product; and continue to invest in our global MPLS network and data center portfolio.

These steps have made us nimbler, helping us focus on our core goal of ensuring organizations maximize the value of their data as infrastructure.

I sometimes get asked exactly what that term means. For me it means not stretching an organization’s existing infrastructure to try and come up with a solution to its data problems. Data is one of its most important assets. Infrastructure should be determined by how a company is capturing, managing and using its data to make intelligent business decisions.

Too often it’s the other way around. Companies are trying to come up with quick fixes to manage their growing data requirements. You can’t solve your data problems by just adding another server to a rack. Instead businesses should be identifying their data workflows and determining the optimal place for those workflows – whether it’s in the public cloud, a private cloud, in a co-location site, or on-premise.

We know organizations want to maximize the value of their data and need advice on how to build a solution suited to their needs. At Aptum, we’ve built a team that has the experience and expertise to help our customers construct agile, managed, secure, low latency, hybrid infrastructures, based around their data requirements. As cloud adoption grows, organizations’ hybrid cloud needs are becoming more sophisticated. They need expert advice and we have the technical expertise and a proven methodology to build solutions that allow companies to meet their specific business objectives. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished in a few short months and we’re excited about the new services and capabilities we’ll be introducing to the market in the near future.