7y
We’re coming up on a year since you worked here. I would welcome you reaching out to me directly to have a conversation as I’d appreciate understanding more about some of your specific commentary. I’m positive we’d both learn something.
On one hand, some of your comments are absolutely spot on. We have replaced the sales team twice in the past - actually - three years (two years from your perspective given your tenure at Atmosera and when you left). On top of that, we’ve also vastly improved our Customer Success Team.
Atmosera has evolved from only selling collocation and private cloud to adding Azure and more complex Azure services to our portfolio. Additionally, our client base has expanded geographically and in complexity (for example, we just signed a Fortune 100 customer for which we’ll be managing Azure in a planned 13 countries).
This evolution of Atmosera was absolutely required and many other companies just like Atmosera are going through this. This evolution has required new approaches and ultimately different skill sets and different people. It’s not easy but the reward is we don’t go the way of the Dodo and we get to continue to serve customers in new/valuable/interesting ways.
We’ve always been upfront about our evolution and the changes/improvements, in fact, Microsoft and Mark Rice (Corporate GM of Service Providers) did a video with me specifically addressing and highlighting Atmosera’s model transformation from small, regional colo/cloud provider to a global Azure provider and the challenges and effects that has on sales, operations, and service / product mix. This video was shown at Microsoft’s global conference, Inspire, this year in a session led by Mark himself.
The great news is, during 2018 we’ve built what we / I believe to be a great team with a solid sales leader and their camaraderie, their activity is yielding results on many important levels. Same goes for the Customer Success Team which is, in my view, fantastic.
So yes, we’ve made significant adjustments in sales staff and sales approaches to build a better, more technology relevant, higher performing business… and we’ll continue to do our best, work our hardest to make sure we’re doing the right things for our customers and for our employees that sell to or serve them. This is positive for Atmosera. I will note that we’ve hit or exceeded every financial target this year and will be exceeding our most important financial metrics at year end. It’s paying off and your comment about us not growing/closing minimal small deals is misleading… in fact, our Azure business is up 300% since July 1 (the start of MSFT FY).
Close to my last point, I gotta say that many of your comments are incorrect or you are generalizing a very specific activity or two or some specific conversations to make your review more impactful.
For example, we are and always have been a direct sales force model and it’s widely known in the industry that MSFT CSPs (like ourselves) do not often interact with MSFT field sales or get much (if any) deal flow from the MSFT field as do System Integrators. That’s the nature of the MSFT paradigm and that’s been in place for a long time. Yet you frame that Atmosera doesn’t interact (“There is no relationship or support from the Microsoft Azure sales teams”) with Azure sales as a negative thing for Atmosera. It’s not negative and shouldn’t be insinuated that it is. As a CSP, our relationship with the MSFT Azure field sales teams is how the paradigm is/has been for not just us, but all MSP / CSPs in the MSFT ecosystem. Calling that out in an attempt to shade what we’re doing points to a lack of understanding on how MSFT works and a disregard to the fact that we’re a nationally managed MSFT partner with a tremendous amount of support, connection, MDF/BIF/CIF funding, and relevancy within MSFT in other channels, and other organizations within MSFT.
Bottom line, we own and do our best to learn from constructive comments on Glassdoor like “projects are chaotic, because services and offerings are poorly defined” or “absolutely no repercussions for sub-par work“ or other constructive comments provided by reviews here. Some are hard to swallow, some cause us to examine how to improve, but all constructive comments have some value and we take them seriously. I’m certainly not perfect / I'm always seeking to improve, but we/I cannot own things that are simply not true or that are a standard deviation from being constructive or that are purposefully misleading generalizations satisfying an underlying intent. That would be disservice to the people who are working so hard to build a great Atmosera.
I do wish you the best, and of course, I thank you for your three years here - those years and your effort were accretive to our positive growth during the stage you were here. Again, I’m happy to take a personal call or meeting to discuss more.
