Mission Cloud Services expands the credentials of the cloud MSP and AWS premier tier services software application development partner with the acquisition of software specialist Dozen Software.
The acquisition gives Los Angeles-based Mission Cloud Services, which already does application development work for its Amazon Web Services customers, the opportunity to expand its reach, said Mark Medina, Mission’s vice president of marketing.
“We are not only seeing more demand from existing customers, but also from AWS itself, for application development,” Medina told CRN. “We meet regularly with AWS. We assigned account managers to AWS account managers. And they tell us they see more demand for application development from their customers.”
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Mission Cloud Services offers a suite of cloud services to help businesses migrate to AWS and help them operate, modernize and manage their AWS environments.
“With Dozen Software, we can amplify our existing application process to help customers customize their applications or create new ones,” he said.
Chris Downs, CEO of Nashville, Tennessee-based Dozen Software and now the application development practice leader at Mission, said his company builds software applications for customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.
“We haven’t been industry specific,” Downs told CRN. “But with Mission, we will focus more on cloud native development, cloud scalability and global availability.”
Dozen Software did not have an AWS-centric business model prior to the acquisition, Downs said.
“We were driven by customer demand,” he said. “We will continue to honor all our existing relationships. But in the future, our focus will be on AWS software application development. We are not talking about application aimed at mobile phones. We do enterprise and desktop applications.”
For Mission Cloud Services, the exclusive focus on Amazon Web Services gives customers confidence in the kind of expertise the solution provider brings, Medina said.
‘We are a consultancy’, he says. “We want to understand why a customer wants to move to the cloud and what AWS can do for them.”
Prior to the acquisition, Mission Cloud Services had a team of 286 people in 40 states, all of whom work remotely across the US, Medina said. “It means we’re not limited where we look for talent,” he said.
In contrast, Dozen Software has 12 employees in the Nashville area, Downs said. Those employees all work remotely, but like to meet every other week to make sure everyone is okay, he said.
As for the company name “Dozen Software”, Downs said the company was founded with the current 12 employees. “Literally we had 12 engineers,” he said. “We didn’t get creative with the name.”
While Dozen Software was profitable, it saw an opportunity in an acquisition by Mission Cloud Services to work within a larger company whose culture aligned with its own, Downs said.
“It’s like Mission is running a bigger version of Dozen,” he said. “They have built a company that is employee- and customer-centric, like we did. And we saw a lot of excitement in what the mission is doing to make application development part of something bigger than what we were doing.”
Medina and Downs declined to discuss the value of the acquisition.
The two met through a mutual friend who worked at Mission and knew Dozen Software’s work, Downs said.
“When Mission decided they wanted to add an application development competency, that friend got up and said he knew someone who could help and made the introduction,” he said. “We met, and then we skipped the partner preparatory phase and went straight to the acquisition.”
Mission Cloud Services was founded about five years ago when a private equity firm acquired three small consulting partners who then merged their businesses, Medina said.
Dozen Software is Mission’s first acquisition since then, but probably not the last, he said.
“We’re always exploring what other acquisitions we could make,” he said.
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