2016: Visioning. Planning. Bringing It.

2016 is going to be big in our industry. How big? Very big.

I can feel it coming. I’m a HUGE Steelers fan. And just like I knew victory was theirs in Super Bowl XLIII when Ben Roethlisberger led the Steelers on an eight-play, 78-yard scoring drive and then threw a six-yard touchdown pass to Santonio Holmes – I know this year is an industry game changer. With over 16 years of personal experience in this industry and having served over 100 enterprise clients, I am completely confident.

Let us take a moment to reminisce.

Wander with me back to 2006. Amazon was an online retailer. A pretty ordinary online retailer, really, until it decided to tackle something different. It offered a series of online services where businesses could build and operate software without setting up their own hardware. Things like websites. Mobile apps. It was a new idea: Open a web browser – tap into a seemingly endless computing power.

Dropbox was one business that opted-in. They built one of the world’s biggest online empires on Amazon’s cloud services. In those years, not everyone was onboard. There were people who thought this technology was not secure enough to work for everyone. Not banks. Not Insurance companies. Certainly not the government.

What did we get in 2015?
2015 was the realization of the cloud revolution.

In 2015, even the big Wall Street banks started to move into the cloud. Of course, many businesses will continue to run in their own data centers. That market is not going away. But 2015 was the year everyone realized that cloud computing is the future. By 2015, Microsoft, Google, and Century Link were also in the game.

Avista’s big opportunity in 2016 is clarifying the potential uses of cloud resources for our clients.

Their greatest challenge will be managing multiple providers and multiple operations for IT. They will need a partner who listens and is responsive, who will give up the short-term sale to achieve the best long-term solution for their client, who has a diverse portfolio that meets the client’s needs, whose work ethic is proven, who will deliver a strategic design, who will advocate for their client in negotiations, who will earn the client’s respect and trust and will genuinely value and maintain that relationship for the long haul.

I am ecstatic.

What our clients need is exactly what Avista does and does better than anyone else in our industry. That is why the only team better than the Steelers is ours here at Avista. We bring it every year. Here’s to an outstanding 2016!