Cloud Sherpas

“After I migrated my personal domain’s e-mail to Google Apps, the opportunity to do the same for businesses struggling with expensive, often outdated, legacy on-premise infrastructure was obvious,” said Cohn.

Initially, Cohn envisioned a business that could be a reseller and integrator for an entirely new crop of information technology vendors in the cloud, but those lofty initial concepts eventually became more tightly focused on the cloud’s software as a service (SaaS) layer, which Cohn said strongly resonated with IT managers.

From there, it was a matter of betting Cloud Sherpas’ future on the world of Google Apps, and becoming a Google channel partner.

“There was a tremendous amount of trepidation; my wife was eight months pregnant and I had just quit my job,” said Cohn. “But opportunities don’t come around very often. We approached Google and said we believed in what they were doing. They asked us to participate in a pilot reseller program and, in January of 2009, we became a founding member of the program.”

Ironically, Cohn believes the economic downturn actually worked in Cloud Sherpas’ favor. “In 2009, companies were looking for ways to save money,” said Cohn.  “Google Apps represented a new, far less expensive way to manage corporate e-mail, and in most cases provided a massive upgrade from aging technology.”

Three years later, the Google Apps suite is a serious threat to Microsoft’s incumbent position in corporate IT environments, boasting more than 30 million users from some three million businesses that have “Gone Google.”

When asked “what’s next” for Cloud Sherpas, Cohn responded, “In Google’s cloud, the sky’s the limit.”

And Cloud Sherpas, with offices across the U.S. and in Australia, has emerged from Cohn’s basement to become one of Google’s go-to partners, after bringing more than one million people around the world to Google Apps.