Doherty leads sales, sales operations, marketing, solutions engineering, and channel and commercial management for Flexential and is responsible for the company’s focus and revenue growth investments. A 20-year-plus veteran of the technology industry, he has a long record of success across a variety of fields, including sales, marketing, strategy, and product development.
Before joining Flexential in 2017, Doherty was US President for OnX Enterprise Solutions, where he helped transition the legacy VAR to a services-led model. Doherty was also Vice President of Sales for North America at Unisys, where he led sales teams in crafting IT solutions for large enterprises and public sector clients. He also held several positions at Sungard Availability Services, including Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and sales leadership roles at AT&T.
When it comes to services, what are some of the key differentiators for you?
One of the key elements that sets us apart from the industry is the quality of our people, which is why we think of Flexential as being synonymous with ‘hybrid made human’. We are very proud of the strength of our technology offerings, but a critical differentiator for us lies in the skillsets that our Flexential professional services team bring to the table. Whether customers are looking at deploying hybrid or cloud-based solutions, our highly-trained professional services team is critical in helping develop best-practice deployment models, and in some cases providing ongoing management of customers’ applications and workloads.
What does the product roadmap look like for Flexential’s Hybrid IT solutions?
In defining our future roadmap, we are absolutely guided by maintaining close contact with our customers and staying ahead of their requirements. We recently held our customer advisory council, which provided an ideal forum to discuss our FlexAnywhere™ solutions and get specific customer feedback – to understand if they address the pain points that they are feeling as senior IT leaders and major enterprises. After consulting with multiple CIOs in our customer-base and the industry analyst community, we then used our know-how to build out those solutions. Getting that direct customer feedback into our roadmap, and particular our hybrid IT strategy, was critical for us to continue to make our national FlexAnywhere™ platform the ideal location for supporting our customers’ digital transformation initiatives.
We offer three cloud options to our customers – managed public, private and hybrid or multi-tenant clouds. The starting point lies in understanding which applications are best suited to each cloud flavor. There’s great value in having a strong engineering and architecture team, backed by the professional services organization, sit shoulder-to-shoulder with our customers. Together they complete a thorough assessment, work on the design – and migration plan if needed – to ensure that these applications land in the optimal places.
How do you see Flexential addressing its various types of customers with different needs?
Since companies have evolved to supporting highly distributed employee bases, a process that was only accelerated by the pandemic, the need for access to localized markets has grown in importance. We’ve created specific capabilities around network hubs to enable service-to-service and cloud-based solutions – both public and private – that become more dynamic in the overall platform, regardless of the ecosystem or a user’s focus. Across the entirety of our new FlexAnywhere™ platform, we provide our customers with access to a broad range of data center and cloud-based solutions, which really expands their aperture. We built these solutions based on direct market input and extensive testing and validation – so we ended up with a built-out set of custom blueprints to use as best practice examples and starter packages for many different types of enterprises spanning many vertical industries.
For us, the sweet spot lies with our hybrid IT customers, who are US-based enterprises with typical revenues between $100 million – $2 billion USD. There are roughly 10,000 of these organizations that are addressable in the US market, and these customers generally leverage the entirety of our FlexAnywhere™ platform. When we look at the hyperscalers or social media companies, typically what we find is they are large consumers of wholesale colocation, which requires a different selling motion based on their unique set of requirements. For the hyperscalers, our value lies in our highly available, secure, redundant platform across 19 markets nationally. When they plug in with us, we find they stay with us for the long-term and grow across our hybrid IT solutions portfolio.
