The shifts to the cloud and outsourced IT functions have massively increased over the past several years. Executives now expect even higher productivity at a lower cost from their IT investments. They are determined to find ways that will enable the organization to get out of the Data Center business and instead, focus on their core competencies and strategic goals. To achieve this target, a managed service provider (MSP) offers a complete service solution including all infrastructure, software, management, and support. With the rapid growth of the industry, the demand for MSPs has increased. There is a strong competition amongst businesses providing IT solutions to attract potential clients and stay ahead in the race.
Based in Beaverton, OR, Atmosera, Inc. is amongst the top cloud solution providers with more than 20 years of experience in managing complex IT environments. By leveraging the engineering expertise, reference architectures, and the team’s consultative skills, the company identifies where the client may be on the cloud curve, and what solution best suits their needs in order to accelerate the value of the business.
Establishment of Atmosera
Atmosera has been in the business since 1995 and contributed significantly to the evolution of technology. The company initially started as an internet service provider in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s, there was an addition of colocation. In 2014, the firm pivoted to manage private, hybrid, and public cloud with Microsoft Azure services. The growth and evolution of the company is the outcome of being curious, having the ambition to serve its customers as well as being adaptive—the evolution has been constant and customer needs have been pivoted or changed. Through this decades-long journey, Atmosera has maintained an incredible focus on engineering expertise and 24x7x365 customer support/management.
Supporting Clients with Scalable Services
Being a hybrid managed services provider, the company designs, deploys, and manages optimal cloud environments based on the application use case and business goals. Atmosera is a Gold-level, nationally managed Microsoft Partner and Microsoft Azure Expert MSP (one amongst 50 in the world) so it can architect and manage public, private and hybrid clouds based on the Microsoft Azure Platform of technologies. The firm’s client history includes 225 clients in 40 states and 10 countries. It has come across a variety of different, complex use cases and manages a variety of cloud environment to meet an equal number of desired outcomes. The scalable cloud solution provider also offers information security, compliance (HIPAA/HITECH, PCI-DSS, IRS-1075, SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II), data protection, colocation, and DevOps services.
The scalability of these services comes from three key factors—leveraging software, automation, and defined runbook processes.
Training Employees to Deliver the Best Performance
In an ever-changing technology landscape, training and education are significant and they are an important element of Atmosera’s corporate culture. The company has persistently received excellent customer feedback. To deliver their best performance, the employees go through a specialized training program called Atmosera University. This training comprises of programs and employee incentives around certifications, job-specific training, and general education. For example, around 60% of its technical staff is Microsoft-certified Azure Administrators. To accomplish this, the employees need to pass the prelimary exams. Along with the customized training program, the company also relies on its industry partners who also provide their specific brand of technical training.
A Passionate CEO’s Journey Towards Success
Jon Thomsen, the CEO of Atmosera has had experience in almost every business. Through his journey, he has held senior executive positions at successful startups and Fortune 500 companies. He has led businesses in the telecom, food, energy, and now cloud computing spaces. According to Jon, passion is the key source of his journey; once the passion is gone or the opportunity to create greatness wanes, he bids his farewell to the business. Currently, he has been working at Atmosera for about 6 years now and his passion is still strong. Jon’s expertise is to take client companies to the next level of growth through a high degree of focus on them and deliver operational excellence. Coming from an impressive academic background, Jon is backed with a Master’s in Business Administration from the J.L. Kellog Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Willamette University.
As the CEO of a leading cloud computing company, Jon has to perform several key responsibilities daily. In order to make sure everything is running smoothly, his daily tasks are aligned systematically. Jon has also built a few everyday responsibilities that cannot be neglected. Therefore, the very first thing he does after waking up is to check the email alerts, to ensure that the work is moving swiftly and if there is a necessity of course-correcting in the plan laid out before. Another responsibility is to serve the customers across time zones as the clients expect 24×7 services. After checking the customary dashboard elements, Jon jets off to work to be a part of and support the team.
Aiming Towards a World that is “Auto-Everything”
Jon believes that beyond the accelerated growth of public cloud adoption, cloud computing will continue to evolve from a software-driven perspective. The software will initiate Feature, Functionality, Transparency, and ease of use. Environments, services, or optimizations that would have taken days or weeks in the past are now done in mere hours or minutes. With this pace of acceleration in the software paradigm, the use and benefits of cloud computing will dramatically increase. While looking at the growth of the company, it has progressively elevated in scope, scale, and complexity—without adding any significant amount of people. The growth has been achieved due to constant efforts to embrace the software-defined paradigm of how securely it delivers mission-critical infrastructure. Jon envisions that the forthcoming years will comprise an “auto-everything” service.
