Undeniably, cloud technology has brought a revolution in adoption of technology in the recent times. Remember Floppy disk, magnetic tape, and CDs? All had gone trash when digital drives arrived for the storage in the form of Hard disks and pen drives. Within a few years, a similar trash of digital drives appeared with the introduction of cloud computing. Today, this technology makes it possible not only to share storage, but also to develop software online.
The cloud solution providers offer the infrastructure, which cater to software users as well as developers. In IT, cloud has its own place of importance, providing developers a Platform as a Service (PaaS). A Europe-based PaaS company, Clever Cloud offers IT automation for companies’ software factory.
Automating Cloud Services
Clever Cloud helps companies to be more competitive by being more agile in the development, deployment, monitoring, and scalability of the software they produce and run. The company helps them to keep their developers happy by automating everything that can be. Agility is mostly a manifest, and so the company has built the agile hosting toolbox.
The Roles of a Vibrant Leader
Quentin Adam is the CEO of Clever Cloud, who defines success in an interesting way. He says, “As the CEO of Clever Cloud, I see success when my team is happy and when our customers are happy using our product. My responsibility is to make that happen by offering the best conditions and the material to let them enjoy their work.”
At Clever Cloud, everybody work wherever and whenever possible. The important part is making sure the job is done through the best way possible for everyone. Adam thinks that his work is to be what the company needs him to be when it needs him. He creates the initial value, then he finds somebody better than him to replace him, who can take the full time job. Then, he goes to the next challenge.
The Journey So Far
At the beginning, Adam’s teams were doing a tech product for tech people and thought that would be it. Their mindset has changed a lot since then. They understood that without a clearer marketing, a simpler user interface, and services all around the product, they were just having fun and building something for them and no one else. They understood that they don’t do hosting. But now, they have scalable software products and services that meet the requirements of the customers.
Adam sees resilience as a must have characteristic in a team to elevate the company to success. “One of the core values of the Clever Cloud team is resilience. We’ve had ups and downs like any company; but in six years, we have embraced so many difficulties and faced them all. Resilience is also, not so curiously, a key characteristic of our product.” Adam explains.
Challenges and Opportunities
At the moment, the company is facing two main challenges. The first one is to make its value proposition and products understandable by anybody (technical and non-technical people). The second one is pretty much the same, but internally. The teams need to be able to recruit and keep non-technical people, so they can become a non-technical-friendly company.
The company has the main opportunity right now that is to make board members and executives understand the future competitiveness, which is a development-driven. The more software they will be able to build, integrate, deploy, and use, more the difference they will make in the competition. They are living a revolution, the challenge is to make people aware of the path to follow for success.
The X Factors
Adam puts the light upon the factors that really make Clever Cloud better option than others. These factors are their architecture, their understanding of the developers’ difficulties, they use their product themselves and make their product run on it (yes, it’s a bit like Inception), their awesome 5 stars support and the simple pricing.
When asked about the most important thing on which his company is working, Adam says, “Today, we are working on really important partnerships with large corporations and the banking and insurance industry for the ‘On Premises’ version of Clever Cloud. This will open us a highway of credibility on an international scale.”
The Culture Emerged Itself
Quentin Adam and his team believe that they do not observe a culture in the company because the culture emerges itself. They just do their best to be happy in their jobs and make their customers very satisfied with what they do for them. They do not declare a culture rather create one with usefulness and happiness. Six years ago, when Adam created the company, he wanted to build the world best organization one can work for.
For the moment, their size allows them to have one department. Many people do different tasks. Several people in the team do engineering, development, and customer support. They are recruiting more and more people and will soon have two departments – a product team and a sales and marketing team. “A company is not an addition of departments or views, but a combination of several individuals that can create value altogether,” Adam shares his views.