AWS Director, Sales Leader Jumps To Innovative Solutions

‘He has a track record at AWS, Rackspace and at Dell of helping achieve massive, scalable sales growth,’ Innovative Solutions CEO Justin Copie tells CRN.

Innovative Solutions CEO Justin Copie

Amazon Web Services’ fast-growing partner Innovative Solutions has hired AWS’ professional services leader and managing director Arrian Mehis as its new CRO as the company plans to grow its AWS business by 400 percent over the next three years.

“Arrian led all of the sales teams for professional services at AWS for the United States. He has a track record at AWS, Rackspace and at Dell of helping achieve massive, scalable sales growth,” Justin Copie, CEO of Innovative Solutions, told CRN. “He has a track record of doing it for three other companies and that’s exactly what we are aiming for with our 400 percent [AWS] growth plan over the next three years.”

Mehis left AWS this month as managing director for U.S. services sales and delivery, responsible for driving a transformational sales strategy to help customers adopt the AWS cloud. He led hundreds of AWS sales and delivery employees while managing $665 million in bookings at the cloud giant during his seven-year stint at AWS, according to his LinkedIn profile.

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Prior to AWS, Mehis was general manager of Rackspace’s global private cloud business in charge of hundreds of millions in sales along with Rackspace’s VMware practice. Mehis also spent 12 years at Dell Technologies from 1999 until 2011 in top executive services roles.

“He knows how AWS operates. He’s just got sales in his DNA,” said Copie. “Through our growth over the last three years, we knew for us to continue down the growth path and to keep building our business, we needed to bring somebody on that could lead sales, marketing and customer success.”

As CRO, Mehis will oversee the revenue organization, including solutions architecture, business development, direct sales and marketing. “He has the ability to help us evaluate what customers want, help us anticipate where customers are going to buy and how they’re going to buy in the future, and to align our service delivery to meet those customer needs—that’s his forte,” Copie said.

AWS’ Strategic Collaboration Agreement

Rochester, N.Y.-based Innovative Solutions is rapidly expanding its services across North America in partnership with AWS.

This year, the AWS Premier Tier Services Partner signed a multiyear strategic collaboration agreement with AWS to align its sales, marketing and delivery teams to accelerate the adoption of cloud services in the SMB and startup markets. With help from AWS, Innovative Solutions is also building out new practices and expanding its managed and professional services offerings.

In fact, over the past 10 months Innovative Solutions has on-boarded more than 60 new IT professionals while expanding its presence in major cities throughout the U.S.

Generative AI Push

One new market Copie hopes his new CRO can tackle is generative AI.

Technologies like generative AI and the need for modern application development are being explored by nearly every business today, Copie said. Mehis will enable Innovative Solutions to help customers deploy and leverage new generative AI solutions more broadly.

“We are going to be making a major announcement around generative AI and some products that we’re specifically launching for startups and SMB customers with AWS. He’s going to help us with that launch,” Copie said. “Because as you know, generative AI is the conversation every customer wants to have with us. He has the abilities to help us position ourselves the right way for customers and help us with this next wave of customers. I’m so thrilled for him to join now because he’s the right guy for it.”

Mehis said in a statement he’s excited to join Innovative Solutions to help customers achieve business outcomes using AWS.

“The benefit of cloud has become immutable in a market that is not only massive but still growing where customers increasingly value the depth and breadth of expertise and managed services that Innovative delivers,” said Mehis.