Theo Bierman, Sales Director, TrueMark SA. (Image: AI-enhanced)
South Africa has a mature cloud market with widespread adoption, but as many gripes about pricing and lagging efficiency. Many organisations have fallen short with underwhelming cloud migrations, shaking their faith in cloud's promises.
It's a tough environment, and the perfect space for TrueMark. Founded in the US in 2014, this cloud migration specialist, advanced tier AWS partner and IT consulting firm focuses on a different proposition than most other cloud-focused migration experts.
Still, when it opened local offices in 2022, convincing the local market was a challenge. Companies were sceptical. Even AWS, which has an extensive partner network in the country, needed persuasion. TrueMark had to excel on all fronts.
"It wasn't the technology. It was that everyone in the organisation was getting the brand across. We know our why and how, and everyone talks with the same language," says Theo Bierman, TrueMark SA's Sales Director.
The cloud era started in earnest around 2010, promoting an alternative to server rooms. Rather than own all the infrastructure, companies could use only what they need on hyperscale providers. It was a shift from capex to opex: more cost-effective and reduced risks such as lock-in and costly licences.
But the honeymoon phase eventually ended. Cloud implementations brought new challenges. Notably, costs could be opaque, even higher. Refactoring software seemed expensive and risky. Repatriation, moving assets away from cloud providers, became a parallel strategy. Businesses weren't abandoning the cloud, but its original value proposition didn't always hold up.
TrueMark's founding purpose is to meet the maturing cloud market with mature migration. It looks beyond cloud as merely an alternative to data centres, instead emphasising the best software end state for a customer.
"Everyone at TrueMark understands the technical depth of applications and workloads," says Bierman. "This is something most cloud migration strategies overlook. The goal is to work out an application's best end state and align that to what AWS provides to produce the most effective and cost-efficient outcome."
The TrueMark philosophy stands on respecting a crucial difference between traditional hardware and hyperscale cloud technologies. These environments can deliver the same outcomes, which is to run applications and workloads, but they differ in substantial ways.
"When you lift-and-shift, you're mostly exchanging hardware for hardware. But an application or workload is software tied to a business objective. This is the big difference with the cloud. It's not like for like. It's a different pathway to get to the same outcome. That means that if customers want the best value from the cloud, they need the best end state for their software."
That end state might mean a virtual machine. But the best results often stem from changing the software to behave differently and use technologies such as serverless instances. TrueMark's pitch is that it helps customers define and reach that end state, then sustain and improve it.
TrueMark had demonstrated this proposition in the US market. But local organisations still needed convincing. Even AWS South Africa, TrueMark's exclusive cloud partner, was sceptical.
"There are many great AWS partners in SA, so what made us different? We had to prove that by finding customers. It required a lot of knocking on doors and pitching our vision," says Bierman, referring to that culture where everyone at TrueMark understands and promotes its core values.
Eventually, TrueMark signed on its first South African customer, and it continued to grow. There is a reason for that ongoing success: TrueMark is intentional about choosing the right kind of work and very guarded about its reputation.
"We decline business that could hurt us in the long run. Our customers are part of an ecosystem where they can get to know each other. Once we help someone establish their software's end state, we keep working with them to help optimise, improve and expand what they can do. That works very well when those companies can also interact with each other."
TrueMark's strategy stands on three pillars: understand what a customer needs from their technology, define and implement a suitable end state on the cloud, then continue to support those gains. This third part leverages TrueMark's Enterprise Operations Centre (EOC), a managed hybrid security and network operations hub that ingests alerts on customer systems, tracks event-driven behaviours, and continually cost-optimises the environment and its processes.
The strategy has been effective, establishing TrueMark as one of South Africa's leading AWS partners. But Bierman also credits the local market.
"Our success is a sign of more mature customers. People are sharper than before, they have a good grasp on the cloud, what it is, and could be. Our job is to help them figure out how to get there. Give us your idea, what you want to prove, and we'll build it out for you. It can be as simple as a POC, which AWS often pays for. That's how we restore faith in the cloud's value and potential."