Partner and capacity management with Peter Bakker

1. Where are you from and how did you end up at Nordcloud?

I'm Dutch, living in Rotterdam. I started the Azure relationship between Microsoft and Mirabeau when I was working at Mirabeau. I grew their Azure business, we became an MSP and I was asked to join the Partner Advisory team by Microsoft. There I met Nordcloud's founder Fernando. Mirabeau was acquired by Cognizant and integrated as of January 1st of this year. In terms of my career, I was in the middle of a journey with different changes and Fernando suggested for me to join Nordcloud in the spring of this year. His words were: "We always have room for good people". I had a chat with Nordcloud's CEO Jan and after some discussion, we agreed on interesting goals, I switched clouds from Microsoft to AWS and became the AWS partner manager at Nordcloud.

2. What is your role and core competence?

I was hired as Partner Manager for AWS. My responsibility was first to move from escalation management to opportunity management. Working with different AWS managers we started fixing things and recently signed a joint partner plan for 2020. We now have a joint ambition for what we are aiming to achieve together and this is actually one of my best memories since working at Nordcloud! My role has also evolved since I started and I also have the hat of Head of Capacity now. I'm commercially responsible for reselling AWS, Azure, and GCP, managing our margins, making our Sales colleagues life is a bit easier and understanding cloud costs, cost optimisation and the real value of capacity management. I fly around a lot and get to work with different teams as we're active in 10 countries. My daughter recently asked me if I was working at KLM.

3. What do you like most about working at Nordcloud?

1) Depth and broadness of skill levels: we have so many talented, amazing colleagues. 2) The great names that we work for and all the great things we do for example for BMW, SKF, Volvo or Redbull. 3) Freedom and opportunity to learn and grow.

5. What sets you on fire/ what's your favourite thing with public cloud?

Digital transformation! All the new business opportunities that our customers get by adopting cloud. For example last week at the AWS Partner summit Konecranes presented a great case of Nordcloud helping them in a very short timeframe to build a serverless solution using IoT that helps them to weigh containers. This solution is now fitted in new equipment and retrofitted into existing equipment. The payback time for Konecranes was only 3 months. Sales of their equipment were boosted. It's great seeing how starting small and laying foundations sets us and our clients up for success and even bigger projects.

6. What do you do outside work?

I'm a passionate golf player as well as a youth at our golf club in Rotterdam. 8. How would you describe our culture? Open and flat organisation! There is no hierarchy at Nordcloud. We are all colleagues and together we help our customers to get cloud native. 9. What are your greetings/advice for someone who might be considering a job in Nordcloud? Somebody in a recruitment process recently asked me how I like it here at Nordcloud. I answered, " I should have done this a year ago"! As there is a lot of freedom and opportunity to learn and grow, you must remember to take care of yourself too. There is always something interesting to do, so it's very much about finding the right balance. As things get excited, I sometimes have to remind myself; there is also always tomorrow!

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