Why Presidio’s Cloud Business Is Soaring To $600M

‘Cloud services are the fastest-growing service segment we have: both professional and managed,’ says Presidio CEO Bob Cagnazzi, as cloud services sales are on fire.

Presidio’s cloud business is booming, generating upwards of $600 million each year with a continuous annual growth rate of around 30 percent to 40 percent.

The CEO of the New York-based solution provider superstar, Bob Cagnazzi, said the firm’s skyrocketing cloud sales growth can be attributed to a mix of high customer demand for cloud services, recent strategic cloud acquisitions, innovation from Amazon Web Services and investment in employees to achieve more IT cloud certifications than ever before.

“Cloud services are the fastest-growing service segment we have: both professional and managed,” said Cagnazzi, an industry stalwart with more than three decades of top executive channel experience.

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“The amount of certifications that this team, both from a sales and technical standpoint, has achieved in the last 18 months, has probably been 10-times of what we’ve seen in the 18 months before that,” said Cagnazzi. “We’ve really invested in skilling up around cloud, security, automation, DevOps, and just a host of other certifications that have helped transform this business. It has really changed the way that we go to market.”

In addition to investing heavily in creating more Presidio cloud experts, the company is doubling down on its partnership with public cloud market leader AWS. In fact, Presidio last month achieved its official Amazon Web Services Networking Competency status for AWS Consulting Partners.

“With AWS, their rapid pace of innovation means there’s always something to be excited about,” said Cagnazzi. “They’ve been fantastic to partner with. We’ve made a number of joint investments across the business to grow and accelerate it and our clients are finding a lot of value in how we are approaching—not just helping them migrate, manage and operate the AWS environment— but also how we’re helping them understand how to secure it and how to create the most economical model in terms of how they’re consuming the product as well.”

Presidio, previously known throughout the country as a top national systems integrator for vendors like Cisco, has transformed itself over the years into an end-to-end, digital services and solution superpower. Presidio, which currently ranks No. 22 on CRN’s 2021 Solution Provider 500 list, generated $3.1 billion in total revenue in its recent fiscal year.

In a move to push its cloud business and drive more cloud services sales, Presidio has been acquiring companies to quickly scale and expand its cloud market reach.

Last year, Presidio acquired cloud consulting specialist Coda Global, who partners with the likes of AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google Cloud.

“Because of the Coda Global acquisition that we that we made about 18 months ago, that brought us much deeper skillsets in cloud native application development, re-platforming of applications, the strategy around a public cloud and a hybrid cloud environment—so that’s really accelerated that piece of the business,” said Cagnazzi.

In terms of expanding Presidio’s market reach to add net new cloud and digital transformation customers, the company acquired Ireland-based Arkphire earlier this year. Arkphire has operations in Dublin, London, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Tel Aviv and Tokyo, with clients spanning from Asia to Africa and from Europe to the Middle East.

“Arkphire gives us presence in in Dublin, which gives us access to the EU presence in the UK, in London and Asia/PAC, and Latin America through Brazil,” said Cagnazzi. “So we’re able to extend our lifecycle service offerings and our digital transformation solution offerings across the globe now for our clients.”

Presidio plans to invest heavily in 2022 and beyond on driving cloud services revenue, with high sales growth expectations in the market ahead.

“The team has done some remarkable work [around] some really innovative projects we’ve done for clients because its truly transformational for how they do business and how they engage with their clients,” said Cagnazzi. “We wanted to help our clients with this extremely complex transition from legacy IT in silos, to one that is much more converged and integrated to provide the agility, scalability and security that people are looking for today in those hybrid and multi-cloud platforms.”

Presidio has approximately 2,800 employees around the globe serving nearly 8,000 customers.