The increasing adoption of the cloud has resulted in the emergence of a new class of highly effective cloud leaders. These leaders not only understand the current market requirements but also introduce various innovative business solutions boldly. Additionally, there is a simultaneous increase of unnecessary market trends in the backdrop—posing a challenge for leaders. Therefore, cloud leaders must learn to distinguish while emphasizing the vital market trends and customer requirements.
An instance of such effectual leadership is demonstrated by Kris Poria (CEO and Co-Founder of EarlyBirds). Kris is recognized as a successful and high-achieving international businessman. He possesses a thirst for learning with a determination to improve business functionality throughout his career. In 2019, Kris established EarlyBirds with his business partner Jeff Penrose (COO and Co-Founder). His encompassing subject-matter knowledge, passion, vision, and boundless energy have accelerated EarlyBirds to great heights of success. Moreover, Kris has also helped the company attain global success by acquiring customers at a rapid rate of knots—making EarlyBirds the obvious choice for custom-made solutions for all parties involved.
Comprehending Global Market Requirements
Kris developed the concept of EarlyBirds while working for a large systems integrator on a significant project which required a solution to manage a multi-cloud environment. On the other hand, Jeff worked with a startup that had a multi-cloud management solution that was suitable for the purpose. Although Kris and Jeff established a series of positive meetings with Kris’ tech team, architects, and other stakeholders, they could not seek approval from their head office.
Meanwhile, the system integrator, whom Kris was working for, decided to build a solution in-house and not use the startup’s disruptive off-the-shelf solution. It resulted in no winners and the customer received a bespoke solution with preferably more risk and cost. The System Integrator missed the opportunity to provide a prompt, value for money solution to the customer. While the local startup missed a great opportunity to gain a customer reference, build skills and create employment.
Kris and Jeff decided to resolve the situation. Initially, they considered providing business development and sales as a service to a few local startups and scaleups. After extensive research on tech innovators and early adopters, they realized that they were dealing with a global problem. It inspired them to build a platform for linking innovators, startups, and scaleups, with early adopter customers in public and private sector organizations. Hence, EarlyBirds was born.
Innovative Cloud-Based Platform
The EarlyBirds platform is a cloud-based global platform. It assists organizations seeking to scale their innovation capabilities and speed. The platform is a dedicated ecosystem for ongoing collaboration and exchange of actionable innovation.
Currently, there are a million innovators, 400 companies, and over 100 consultants on the EarlyBirds platform. The key going forward for EarlyBirds is to continue to add value to all providers on the platform and learning fast. EarlyBirds Marketplace turned into an Open Innovation Ecosystem – with three key pillars. These are namely—Innovators; Early Adopters; and SME Consultants.
Kris and Jeff created two programs as a part of the EarlyBirds platform, namely—Explorer and Challenger.
- Explorer Program–Designed to expose the latest disruptive solutions to a business function or an entire organization regularly by proving ongoing innovation as a service.
- Challenger Program–Designed to solve business challenges quickly by working with Independent Subject Matter Expert (SME) consultants and Innovators.
Orchestrating Responsibilities
Being at the company’s forefront, Kris acts as an orchestrator with the customers, product team, subject matter experts (SMEs), and advisory board. He also acts as a Chief Innovation Officer responsible for the platform’s vision.
Kris generally agrees on the outcomes with scope. He allows the team to work independently while checking if they need any support on regular basis.
Analyzing Current Industrial Fiasco
Kris asserts that the complexity of delivering IT capabilities has been changing the cloud industry. Customers have started consuming outcome-based capability instead of managing everything in-house. He emphasizes that cloud transition began with the basic IT capabilities such as processing, storage, infrastructure but then to platform as a service (PaaS) to now Software as a Service (SaaS).
Currently, numerous customers are expecting a Service model. Kris states, “But this has created further challenges and opportunities in integration, data and application security areas.”
Vehement Response to Challenges
EarlyBirds had recently debuted to the market when the COVID-19 pandemic hit society. Since the company was new, it faced several challenges while engaging with potential customers in person due to frequent lockdowns. However, such a situation also helped the company focus on few customers and towards the need for its platform—given customers struggled to engage with innovators via events and in-person.
In response to the pandemic, EarlyBirds has launched two new products. Firstly, the Cybersecurity Innovation Map. The company’s second initiative is to create a capability framework ‘to live or work with COVID-19’.
‘Innovation Maps’
EarlyBirds is planning to release more Innovation Maps to offer dynamic views of an industry or innovation theme which can be broken down into easy-to-follow core themes and subthemes. The definitions of the themes and subthemes are based on generally agreed and well-known industry terms and definitions.
The purpose of an EarlyBirds Innovation Map is to provide a continuously updated view of the discoverable global Innovators within each technology group and their logical themes with supporting data. Data supporting each Innovator that is identified in the map is collected and aggregated from multiple data sources and updated daily. The information available in an EarlyBirds Innovation Map includes the total number of Innovators in a cohort within the technology group, details to identify the company and their offering, commercial maturity, their location, and much more.
Kris’ Candid Views on Leadership
As a cloud leader, what challenges do you face in the industry?
One of the key challenges in leadership and leading any initiative is to understand the unnecessary market noise and keep focusing on what is needed at any given point in time. As a cloud leader, we are responsible to deliver “as a Service” outcomes to the customer while managing all the complexities behind the scenes.
What would you like to convey to the young entrepreneurs aspiring to make a mark in the cloud industry?
I would suggest focusing on the customer challenge to identify a real opportunity aligning with your passion, experience, and capabilities. Before building any cloud product, research enough to understand if someone else has done it before. You can also use the EarlyBirds platform to identify innovators.
Read Full Magazine: The 10 Dominant Cloud Leaders of 2021.
