Ensono Expands Customer Allyship, Grows Opportunities 25% with the AWS Partner Transformation Program

Ensono, an AWS Partner, participated in the AWS Partner Transformation Program (AWS PTP) with the goal of understanding growth areas and how to maximize them for its Ensono Digital business, born from recent acquisitions. The Chicago-based company is a technology solutions and managed service provider operating globally. Ensono was launching its new digital business concurrently with its AWS PTP participation and applied PTP best practices throughout the process.

Ensono, a consulting partner and managed service provider, is a committed ally to its clients, helping them accelerate digital transformation by moving critical applications and workloads to the cloud. An Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, it assists customers in the public sector, financial services, manufacturing, and other industries migrate to AWS.

Ensono has been expanding rapidly, increasing revenue from $200 million to $800 million in four years, acquiring several cloud-native businesses, and establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence. To support this growth and continue to meet its customers’ evolving needs, the company needed to ensure it continued building its AWS skills.

“As your business gets bigger, it can become difficult to integrate the various acquired teams, especially with new leadership teams coming in that might lack a cloud background,” says Gordon McKenna, chief technical officer of public cloud for Ensono. “For example, we knew we needed guidance on how to best package our AWS skills to ensure we deliver the best outcomes to our customers every time.”

Ensono decided to strengthen its business focus by participating in the AWS Partner Transformation Program (AWS PTP). This is an AWS-led assessment, training, and enablement program that helps AWS partners identify strengths and accelerate revenue and growth through AWS. Working with AWS, Ensono embarked on a 100-day plan providing guidelines and timelines to help its internal teams identify strengths and opportunity areas.

AWS PTP participants are provided with a customized transformation plan of activities designed to help build, transform, and optimize their cloud business and increase their AWS business potential.

Throughout the program, Ensono worked to refocus its business and reevaluate processes to play to the company’s strengths as an AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP). “The AWS PTP provided an opportunity to examine our end-to-end process. We particularly focused on differences between our UK and US operations and identified any disconnects in various teams including marketing, sales, operations, and client delivery,” says Rita Barry, director of public cloud alliances for Ensono. “During the interview process, responses from many within our teams provided a more holistic view of the business that uncovered both gaps to be closed and strengths to be built upon. Much of the feedback revealed that we could do more in terms of marketing our AWS capabilities, and this helped us develop a framework and formulate a plan.”

Insights generated via the AWS PTP enabled Ensono to achieve a better understanding of its business. “The AWS Partner Transformation Program proved essential in ensuring our business evolves correctly,” says McKenna. “It helped us focus on the things we need to be the best AWS partner we can be.”

Feedback received from different business units during the PTP illustrated that Ensono needed to restructure its cloud-focused businesses, some of which were siloed. This helped shape the organizational structure and roadmap that was being developed with the launch of Ensono Digital, a new division focused entirely on cloud-driven digital transformation. “With Ensono Digital, we’re pulling together all the pieces of our cloud work into one centralized organization. This will allow us to focus more on the AWS aspect of our customers’ digital transformation,” McKenna reveals.

Because of the organizational changes made since participating in the AWS PTP, Ensono is experiencing a 25 percent growth in total AWS opportunities. “We’re expanding the AWS business because we better understand what types of offerings we need to take to market,” says McKenna. “For instance, we’d talked about database transformation, but didn’t have a lot of depth in that area. The AWS PTP helped us focus on this and drive further growth.”

The AWS PTP also helped Ensono focus more on training and certifying employees on AWS technologies. “The AWS PTP accelerated communication and process changes, which led to larger discussions around AWS training and certification resources,” says Barry. “This created conversations with our sales teams about becoming certified, which then resulted in a 15 percent increase in AWS certifications.”

Ensono ultimately discovered that its partnership with AWS became stronger through the PTP process. “The AWS Partner Transformation Program clearly demonstrates the continuing support AWS invests in its partners,” says Barbara Owens, senior marketing manager of global partner programs for Ensono. “AWS put a lot of resources into the program, which reinforces its commitment to partner development.”