The Cloud Accelerator will help connect Scottish startups to global partners and new markets, and build an IP base that helps cultivate and fast-track new ventures.
The sector opportunity is simply massive. The global cloud computing market size is forecast to grow to $1,240.9 billion by 2027.
Scotland is well positioned to carve out a significant niche within this vast market. A number of Scottish companies have developed world-class intellectual property and innovative solutions that have global scale revenues potential.
Cloud Cover IT
Cloud Cover IT, an Microsoft solutions partner based in Glasgow, offers an exemplar blueprint for how Scottish tech businesses can develop global scale products.
Their core business is consulting and services work, and they have leveraged those capabilities to also build SaaS (Software as a Service) products, notably ‘Check IT‘ and ‘Gauge IT‘.
SaaS businesses are massively more scalable than services-based models, easily saleable online to customers worldwide versus labour-intensive client facing work, and that are extremely profitable and cash flow generating. But they can prove very expensive and time-consuming to build and launch, and so conceiving them as a consequence of your regular services capability is a super smart boot-strapping strategy.
Built as a Microsoft Teams app, Check.it works seamlessly on desktop and mobile, allowing users to keep up to date with tasks and update team members on their progress from any location. Similarly Gauge.it is a Teams-based app which makes it easy to track employee morale, allowing leaders to identify and address potential issues.
CirrusHQ
Similarly CirrusHQ, based in Livingstone, specializes in AWS and provides consulting services, and has also repeated this approach to also launch their Acuity Platform.
Aggregating data across AWS accounts, the Acuity platform streamlines and democratises access to the AWS platform and provides a customised graphical dashboard enabling customers to simply manage their AWS accounts and workloads from one single place.
With cost optimisation being a key advantage of the cloud’s capabilities, Acuity provides CirrusHQ customers with oversight of their entire AWS estate, highlighting insights which might otherwise be missed, such as illustrating savings which can be made by moving workloads or reducing bills by eliminating unused or idle resources.
Cloudsoft
Edinburgh-based Cloudsoft is an Advanced AWS Consulting partner, delivering AWS services to customers across Scotland and beyond.
Recent innovations includes their news they were named as an AWS Launch Partner for AWS’s Service Management Connector for ServiceNow , which enables ServiceNow end users to provision, manage, and operate AWS resources natively from ServiceNow.
AWS Service Management Connector benefits from high adoption levels, supporting millions of resources per year for global telecoms, aviation, and oil and gas organisations.
Ionburst
Other notable startups include Ionburst, an Edinburgh-based software solution that provides data defence-in-depth for any digital assets anywhere.
Customers of all sizes and industries can use Ionburst Cloud to securely store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as cloud and secrets storage, web and mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, and enterprise applications.
Ionburst also specializes in AWS Cloud services, recently participating in the StormCloud Community, supporting the Royal Navy and British Defence to bring cutting-edge, cloud based technology to the frontline.
Conclusion
In the USA equivalent companies enjoy $ hundreds of millions in funding and grow to $ billions in revenues.
While Scotland may not have that scale of venture capital we match the same level of engineering expertise and resulting product innovation, and thus have the foundations to build upon to reach for the same levels of success.
