Ahead: NTC Featured Member for the Month of May : Greater Nashville Tech Council

As part of NTC’s Featured Member of the Month, we get to know more about a local tech business. May 2017’s Featured Member is Ahead!

Over the month of May, the team from Ahead will set up camp in Tech Hill Commons, host the May 9th NashCocktail, and have a chance to meet with folks at the tech hub. We’re excited to have the chance to talk with Ahead’s Adam Burris, to tell us more.

Upcoming Events:

Looking Ahead / Think Ahead 2017: June 22, 2017 at Harris Theater in Chicago

NashCocktail: May 9, 2017, 5:30pm – 6:30:pm at Tech Hill Commons

What is Ahead’s Mission?

Innovate and Transform with Quality First

Be a Business Partner, not a Technology Vendor

Passionate about Customer Outcomes

What do tailored cloud solutions mean to Ahead and its clients?

AHEAD helps customers stitch together best of breed technologies to enable cloud services in the data center or public cloud. The solutions help our customers improve services, drive efficiency and improve business outcomes. Whether this is a complete green field or utilizing shelfware that a customer already has purchased, we have the IP to make it work. Our framework drives actionable results from the strategy and roadmap phase to deployment while building consensus and enabling organizational change.

What other services / products does does Ahead offer?

AHEAD has a full offering of solutions. From Enterprise Service Management, Automation, and Orchestration software offerings to infrastructure, we represent the best in the industry. Cisco, Pure, Dell/EMC, Puppet, Chef, Salt, Nutanix, ServiceNow, AWS, Azure and many other offerings.

What’s your role at Ahead in the Nashville area?

I am the Client Director for the Nashville Area supported by a team of technology experts that hold 1,000+ certs and recognized as industry experts. Roger Nienaber is the Managing Director for Nashville as well as a five state area including Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

What can we expect from this year’s Looking Ahead Annual Summit?

Looking AHEAD is a free, day-long event and will be attended by over 600 technology leaders from across the country. The summit is designed for IT leaders to take time to focus on new ideas and hear how peers are innovating The content-packed agenda contains presentations around cloud, security, innovative technologies, service management, and data analytics, with ample opportunity to connect with experts from dozens of technology leaders. The keynote presentation will be delivered by Nicolas Carr, thought leader and bestselling author in the technology field.

Nashville has a growing DevOps community. How is Ahead getting engaged?

AHEAD is focused helping customers adopt an enterprise dev/ops strategy. AHEAD helps operations automate, orchestrate and deliver services faster to developers. This process drives time to market improvements, reduces cost, and enables financial transparency. One of the biggest challenges is providing the organizational framework and change that supports and drives innovation across both teams and eliminates silos.

What’s with those red shoes?

AHEAD’s customer base spans both enterprises and startups. The red shoes represent the idea that startups do not have some of the same constraints that typically slow down enterprise customers. The red shoes represent the innovation that needs to work within the wing tip environment. Our goal is to enable our enterprise customer to innovate like a startup while maintaining the same GRC and security policies at speed.

What are the opportunities you’ve seen elsewhere that you’d like to see more of in Nashville?

We continue to see customers aggressively moving towards automation, orchestration and cloud enabled offerings. This trend has driven great interest not only in AWS, Azure and Google but in cloud enabled technologies. AHEAD has sponsored and hosted events in other markets solely focused on Cloud enablement and trends. These sessions have been well attended and are solely focused on educating on the art of what is possible.

What are you most excited about in Middle Tennessee?

The growth and excitement in the Middle Tennessee technology market is infectious! We are excited to be a part of and invest in the local community, to partner with organizations driving innovation and be part of the business culture.

UPCOMING EVENTS: