Yorkshire cloud outfits team up

Two Yorkshire based cloud outfits have teamed up to provide clients with a “supercharged” cloud product.

Managed IT specialist CloudCoCo, in Leeds, will strengthen the cybersecurity offering provided by Huddersfield’s Vapour. While Vapour will enhance CloudCoCo’s network infrastructure with the addition of security-first SD-WAN connectivity.

The alliance is the latest in a series of strategic partnerships for Vapour – an organisation that has never shied away from joining forces with the industry’s brightest talent, when approaching customers’ digital transformation projects.

Vapour’s CEO Tim Mercer said that organisations – certainly in the larger SME market and above – don’t expect or want a vendor to be a ‘jack of all trades’ anymore.”

“They seek to place their trust in a small number of proven experts who will listen carefully to the brief and deliver exactly what the business needs. Partnerships, in this environment, are therefore key. But they have to be carefully formed, between specialists whose technologies, standards, and cultures, are on a par, with no exceptions.”

With both companies closely aligned with enterprise cybersecurity giant Fortinet, the credibility of the two brands was clear when discussions to partner first began.

Mercer said: “Both companies, and their teams are respected for their honesty, so we’re a good fit when it comes to devising solutions, together.”

Mark Halpin’s cloud-first vision was also dismissed when he too left the corporate world to set up CloudCoCo.

“I was told I was cloud cuckoo for believing the managed IT sector had become slow, unresponsive, boring and broken, so in April 2018 I left my long-term job and built a company of agile, fiercely passionate, and supremely talented cloud, cybersecurity, connectivity, hardware and hosted voice professionals”, Halpin said.

“Tim and I share a similar back story and many values too – not least a passion for delighting customers with the help of progressive people and powerful technology that doesn’t have to be complicated. This partnership could mean great things for both our respective teams. CloudCoco has an unlimited ambition in terms of growth, so the future starts now.”