Partner Spotlight: Cumulus Global

Company: Cumulus Global
Location: Headquartered in Westborough, MA
Market Served: North American SMB
Website: www.cumulusglobal.com

This week we heard from Allen Falcon, the Founder and CEO of Cumulus Global, a leading North American reseller, to find out more about his organization.

BetterCloud: When was your organization founded?

Cumulus Global: In 2006 we created Horizon Info Services, a spin off of our existing consultancy, to sell cloud services. 18 months later we rebranded as Cumulus Global.

BetterCloud: What led to the founding of your company?

Cumulus Global: As a consultant we identified Postini as the best spam and archiving service for our clients, but at that time Postini wasn’t being sold to SMBs. After going back and forth with Postini, they told us we could serve the SMB market. Within 12 months we achieved platinum status as a Postini reseller, which proved to us there was a growing need for reselling cloud services to SMBs.

In 2007 Postini was acquired by Google and in 2008 we became one of the first 20 pilot resellers for Google Apps in North America.

BetterCloud: How has the market changed since you started as a Google Apps reseller?

Cumulus Global: When we first started selling Google Apps, the service was perceived as another hosted email service. So for companies already using another hosted email provider or for those not looking to buy more hardware, Google Apps wasn’t a difficult sell.

But selling beyond that was a challenge–the Google Apps suite wasn’t mature and the concept of online collaboration wasn’t a mainstream idea. Now, Google Apps has great name recognition and more and more people know about it everyday. There’s a lot less confusion with “Apps” – people no longer think it’s something you download to your phone.

BetterCloud: Does your company have a certain specialty – Industry? Location? Size?

Cumulus Global: We serve a couple of major market segments:

• Businesses and nonprofits in the United States and Canada from 1 to 1,000 employees
• Local and municipal government agencies
• K-12 and higher education institutions, we’re actually a pilot reseller for Chromebooks for Education
• Small financial and medical firms where we specialize in creating compliant ecosystems
• Public and private libraries – we’re an E-Rate vendor.

BetterCloud: Can you tell us one thing about your company we wouldn’t find out from your website?

Cumulus Global: One of our employees is an avid beekeeper. He actually manages beehives for a nonprofit community garden that provides fresh fruit and vegetables to the Wooster, MA county food bank.

BetterCloud: What do you hope to see from BetterCloud going forward?

Cumulus Global: I am truly impressed with how BetterCloud engages its customers and partners to direct the feature roadmap. Every time you add something new I say, “I know someone who needs that.” Everything you build seems to be meeting the needs of our customers.

With that said, I love BetterCloud’s Drive management tools and can’t wait to see more in that area.

BetterCloud: What do you hope to see from Google Apps going forward?

Cumulus Global: Open file locking options that can be set for Google Drive – so you don’t have multiple people editing the document at once. Sometimes people don’t realize someone else is editing the document and this can lead to some confusion.

BetterCloud: What are your company’s plans for this year?

Cumulus Global: We plan to continue to position ourselves as a cloud solutions provider. We’ve had huge growth in the past and look forward to continuing that trend.

BetterCloud: Favorite cloud service your company uses, other than Google Apps?

Cumulus Global: Pardot–it’s awesome. I love it because it automates personalized communication and we achieved the ROI for our first year basically within the first two weeks of using the product.

BetterCloud: What’s the best thing about working at your company?

Cumulus Global: Well, my kids are really impressed, but overall, there’s just palpable excitement because of our growth.

BetterCloud: Why should someone looking to “Go Google” work with you?

Cumulus Global: We know what we’re good at and if it’s not our strength we introduce the right resource to our customer to get the job done. In other words, “our evangelical zeal for cloud computing and Google Apps is tempered by pragmatism.”

For more information on all of our partners, visit bettercloud.com/partners.