Eric M. Sanders worked for a large systems integrator and started the cloud practice after a promotion. He was told by several of his colleagues the cloud model wouldn’t be sustainable. After a year in a half in that position and countless meetings to convince his leadership through on the ground events, Sanders decided it was time to start his own company based on cloud providers’ YoY growth.
“I launched the company bootstrapping the entire company out of the gate,” said Sanders. “The goal all along was to develop and grow a recurring revenue organization and start by delivering projects and consulting services and then converting our clients to ongoing managed services and recurring revenue products and solutions.”
Nine years later, Sanders has absorbed another company and shored up his engineering and delivery. He now serves as the managing partner for eCloud Managed Solutions.
eCloud Managed Solutions is a hybrid cloud consulting organization with a goal to help clients define which applications, workloads and IT functions are suitable for the public cloud, while also helping them understand the differences between the major hyperscalers and niche providers available in the market.
“Eric brings a unique skillset and background that is both technology, business and marketing oriented while preserving a servant leadership style,” said his colleagues. “Even though he is the founder and executive of eCloud, he has the ability to bridge the gap and work with business leaders to translate their requirements into technical requirements, timelines, risk and being able to technically solve the design as well.”
As a result, the company became an AWS Advanced tier partner in 12 months and continuously drives the organization to be customer obsessed, listening to the clients’ needs, challenges, gaps and developing products and solutions to help drive business outcomes that solve business challenges through technology.
Sanders also takes this approach when leading. According to Sanders, his leadership style is never to ask anyone to do something that he is not willing to do himself. “Coaching, mentoring and growing our people from within is core to our DNA, culture and what our leadership team loves to do,” said Sanders. “Trust, honesty and integrity are foundational to our character and the only thing that I feel I have and can’t destroy, whether I work for eCloud, start another organization or go work for someone else.”