Innovative expands North American footprint with a fourth office in Austin, TX

With over 32 years of technology solutions experience, Innovative continues to invest in major tech hubs across the United States.

Innovative Solutions, the fastest-growing AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, announced today the opening of their newest North American office in Austin, Texas. Continuing the momentum of 2021 into the new year, Innovative has made significant staffing investments in the greater Austin area and is committed to growth in this region, in alignment with the latest AWS investments in the territory.

“Our focus and commitment are not only aligned with helping customers leverage the power of the cloud but in creating the most amazing company with employees across North America. Our Austin office will be 15 team members strong by the end of this year, and we’re investing $5 million into the community over the next three years. The great state of Texas is home to some of the best and brightest tech talent in the nation, and we want to continue making them a part of the Innovative culture. I couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come,” said Innovative’s CEO, Justin Copie.

This excitement has been met with open arms by the Austin community. Mayor Steve Adler said, “It’s affirming when cutting-edge technology firms recognize Austin as a mecca for tech talent. Innovative shares our values, forward-looking culture, and the recognition that it’s our people that makes us special. Innovative, welcome home.”

This new office follows Innovative’s expansion into the Canadian market in the fall of 2021 and emphasizes their rapid growth and expansion in North America. Austin is critical to Innovative’s growth strategy as a southern hub to the already thriving Central Territory, based in Chicago. With the opening of the Austin office, Innovative can now place a greater emphasis on serving their South-Central customers with employees in-territory and further supporting AWS’s expansion. The culture of this southern city also speaks to the Innovative mantra – “People + Technology, in that order.”

“We are thrilled with the continued growth of our Texas team, where the strong Innovative culture meets incredible talent and high energy. The opening of our Austin office will unleash even more opportunities for our people to stay connected and build meaningful relationships,” said Chief People Officer, Jaime Eisenhauer. “At our core, Innovative is a place where people come to be challenged and grow to beyond what they thought was ever possible. The potential here is limitless.”

AWS Premier Tier Services Partner

Learn more about Innovative

Innovative believes that every company will become a technology company, and we’re here to help. With an army of cloud experts and the Innovative Cloud Runbook utilizing leading cloud technologies, Innovative gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud with Well Architected reviews, cloud migrations, managed cloud services, application modernization, cloud-native software development, cloud cost optimization, cloud security monitoring, and virtual CIO and CISO consulting.

Innovative Solutions adds Executive Vice President to accelerate growth

Gary Copie brings over 40 years of sales leadership and business management experience to the fastest-growing AWS Premier Consulting Partner.

ROCHESTER, NY, January 12, 2022 – Innovative Solutions, the fastest-growing AWS Premier Consulting Partner, announced today the addition of Gary Copie as Executive Vice President. In this role, Gary will help fuel the company mission to enable small and mid-size businesses to harness the power of the cloud. He will oversee Innovative’s consulting division which specializes in helping customers turn complex problems into accessible opportunities. His primary focus will be developing and launching advanced products and services to help new and existing Information Security, IT Consulting, and ERP customers benefit from the cloud. This leadership investment reinforces Innovative’s strategy to provide highly skilled consulting services to its customers.

“I am tremendously excited to be joining Innovative. The explosive growth happening at Innovative right now makes it an incredible time to come on board,” said Gary Copie. “I look forward to leveraging my past experience to further this momentum and drive transformative outcomes for our customers.”

With over 200% annual growth, Innovative quickly became the fastest-growing AWS Premier Consulting Partner and provider of managed cloud services in 2021. With the vision to not only keep this momentum up but build upon it, Innovative is making significant investments in their US and Canadian regions.

Justin Copie, Innovative’s CEO, said, “Innovative has grown to become the go-to partner for every SMB leveraging AWS across North America. Our geographic expansion and the ongoing growth and hiring of cloud engineers, solutions architects, and our network operations center have increased our conviction to remain customer-obsessed. Personally, the addition of Gary to our team is one of the most rewarding to date. I’m extremely excited about what the future will hold. The best is yet to come.”

 

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At Innovative, we believe every company will become a technology company, and we’re here to help. As a recognized AWS Premier Consulting Partner, we have a team of cloud experts utilizing leading cloud technologies via our Innovative Cloud Runbook. Businesses of every size work with Innovative to confidently grow in the cloud with well-architected reviews, cloud migrations, managed cloud services, application modernization, cloud cost optimization, cloud security monitoring, and IT consulting.

Connect with Gary

Gary Copie
Gary Copie
Executive Vice President
gcopie@innovativesol.com
Connect on LinkedIn

Innovative Solutions achieves the new AWS Networking Competency

Growing businesses throughout the United States and Canada look to Innovative Solutions as a trusted AWS Partner, and now Innovative Solutions is one of the first AWS Partners to achieve the new AWS Networking Competency.

ROCHESTER, NY — October 18, 2021 — Innovative Solutions, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner, announced today that they have earned their AWS Networking Competency. This designation showcases that Innovative Solutions has the technical knowledge and real-world experience to optimally implement and manage AWS networking technologies.

AWS networking services help customers securely connect to AWS from public or private clouds, group and distribute their applications across Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and additional AWS services and improve their digital experience by providing tools for network performance and monitoring.

The AWS Networking Competency was created to help customers easily and confidently engage highly specialized AWS Consulting Partners that can develop and implement solutions in the areas of network connectivity, network visibility, and hybrid networks. The AWS Networking Competency takes on the heavy lifting of identifying and validating industry leaders with proven customer success and technical proficiency.

Achieving the AWS Networking Competency differentiates Innovative Solutions as an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with deep domain expertise in solutions that:

  • Offers new ways of routing traffic through private backbones and cloud cores
  • Provides secure ingress to mitigate latency
  • Improves availability and enhances application experiences
  • Provides visibility and control in cloud networking


“In our 32 years of business we’ve architected, designed, and implemented literally thousands of networks supporting millions of devices,”
said Justin Copie, Owner and CEO at Innovative Solutions. “That 32 years of experience coupled with our team’s ability to help small to mid-size business customers leverage the power of the cloud, is exactly why we’re in such a unique position to deliver innovative networked solutions on AWS.”

Innovative Solutions AWS Networking Competency

Learn more about Innovative Solutions

Innovative believes that every company will become a technology company, and we’re here to help. With an army of cloud experts and the Innovative Cloud Runbook utilizing leading cloud technologies, Innovative gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud with Well Architected reviews, cloud migrations, managed cloud services, application modernization, cloud-native software development, cloud cost optimization, cloud security monitoring, and virtual CIO and CISO consulting.

Demand for AWS cloud services fuels rapid growth for Innovative Solutions

Rochester Business Journal – Written by: Kevin Oklobzija

The tidal wave of businesses migrating to the cloud during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a boon to Innovative Solutions.

The company’s own day-of-reckoning moment, however, began three years earlier, which is one reason the recent workload has increased so dramatically, owner and CEO Justin Copie said.

Innovative Solutions is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner and provides cloud migration, cloud consulting and cloud-native development to small- and mid-size businesses.

With those services in high demand due to a spike in remote work, remote learning, telemedicine and online services, the Henrietta-based firm has enjoyed 100 percent year-to-date growth. The surge in business earned Innovative a spot on the Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce Top 100 list of fastest growing privately owned companies.

As a result, Innovative has increased its employment base by 33 percent in the past 10 months and expects to nearly double the current number (80) by the end of 2022.

“One of the things that COVID ended up doing, it has accelerated every business’s adoption of technology,” Copie, said. “It was a race to the cloud.”

Essentially it was sink-or-swim time, he said.

“If you were a small business and you dipped your toe in the water with tech prior to COVID, then post COVID things just completely accelerated for you — if you were not only going to survive but if you were going to figure out how to differentiate and ultimately serve your customers better.  That’s what’s fueling my company’s growth. Demand is just so high, and we can’t hire fast enough.”

Indeed, Innovative had 18 open positions when the month began. The primary need is for cloud architects and cloud engineers, the people that know how to design, build and support AWS cloud environments.

For Copie and Innovative Solutions, their pivot began in 2018 after he attended Microsoft Inspire, the tech giant’s annual partner conference.

“I’m out at Las Vegas at the world’s largest Microsoft conference,” Copie recalled. “I just got done hearing the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, talk about where Microsoft was going with the cloud.”

Copie didn’t like what he heard.

“I got out of the keynote, I picked up the phone and I called two of my guys who were in New York City at an Amazon Web Services conference and I said, ‘Guys, we’re in trouble. Microsoft is not leading, they’re not innovating and they’re not going to be the horse that we want to bet on in the future if we’re going to go all in on the cloud.’ They had this following mentality.

“They (his colleagues in New York) go, ‘Justin we literally couldn’t have more of an opposite reaction to what AWS is doing. They are innovating, they are absolutely the future, and this is the horse we need to bet on.’”

Over the next two years, the firm’s leadership team, along with 22 other employees, devised a plan to align fully with AWS.

“We’ve always been a Microsoft partner,” Copie said. “We started (in 1989) by supporting small- to mid-sized businesses that were using IBM technology. Innovative had expertise specifically around the systems that small- to mid-sized business would need from IBM that needed to be supported.

“That obviously grew to the Microsoft world and to a customer who wanted to connect its business to the internet in the late 1990s or the company that wanted to build a web presence or e-commerce presence. Or the small- to mid-sized businesses that wanted to support their local end users who are now using laptop computers or desktop computers on a corporate-based system.”

By 2021, the company began focusing on migrating customers to the cloud, foreign as it was to most.

“The cloud is nothing but data centers upon data centers and miles upon miles of cabling that another big tech company owns that you decide to host your information on,” Copie said.

The majority of that space is owned by three firms, he said: Amazon, Microsoft and Google, with close to 40 percent of the overall market owned by Amazon, he said.

“They are the biggest, they are, by technical standards, recognized as the most technologically advanced, and they are most scalable,” Copie said. “That means Amazon has the ability to scale their cloud, to grow their cloud, with capabilities faster and more efficiently than any other cloud service provider in the world.

“And it should be no surprise that the reason that they have all this infrastructure is they’re running one of the world’s largest retailers on that same infrastructure.”

The need to adopt cloud-based practices and the attractiveness of AWS has meant business is good for Innovative Solutions. The firm even hired Ryan Boyer as vice president of product away from AWS, where he worked in partner solutions architecture.

“All we do every single day is we move customers to the Amazon cloud (AWS) and we support them once they’re there,” Copie said. “Once you’re there, there’s new piping so to speak that needs to be managed, because things change, because security needs to not only be monitored but managed.”

There are more than 10,000 AWS partners worldwide, but only around 120 have the AWS Premier Partner designation. And of those, fewer than 40 provide services for commercial businesses, Copie said.

From restaurants needing the cloud to provide online ordering and home delivery, to a Syracuse research laboratory pivoting to COVID-19 testing services, Innovative Solutions helped a wide variety of businesses make the transition.

Ensuring his own employees have the ability to grow is also critical, Copie said. He believes the key to success comes from engaged, happy, productive employees that also find fulfillment away from the office.

“This company is built to give employees the opportunity to architect their very best selves,” Copie said. “I want people to not only explore what it is what they want to do, but I want them to go home at night feeling extremely fulfilled by the work that they do.

“It’s a philosophy that I’ve found creates an environment where employees, if they really find fulfillment in what they do and they find that the relationship they have with the business is one that they genuinely feel invests in who they are, not only are they willing to put their blood, sweat and tears into helping customers achieve what needs to be done, but everything is ROI positive. You have happy customers, you have a customer base that wants to do more with you, you have employees who are doing the things they want to do for those customers. You’ve got this perfect cocktail for good things to happen.”

Innovative supports about 500 customers across 250 cities, with around 200 with the company for at least five years. Besides Rochester, the company has employees in 14 other cities.

It is the headquarters in the Riverwood Tech Campus in Henrietta, however, that is inspiring Copie. During his own keynote address to his employees in 2019 regarding the migration from Microsoft to AWS, he pointed out the irony of being in a former Eastman Kodak Co. building.

“I said, ‘Look at these bricks on the wall,’” Copie recalled. “They should all be a reminder on why you want to cannibalize your own business and never let somebody else do it for you. Kodak didn’t follow their own advice. They didn’t cannibalize their own business — film. They allowed their competitors to do so with digital, and they became irrelevant within a decade.

“We will not let that happen with our business. We will go all in with Amazon and we will support our customers when they’re looking for the best cloud provider in the future.”

He only foresees more demand.

“The estimate is less than 15 percent of all future cloud workloads are actually in the cloud, meaning we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” Copie said. “Businesses are rapidly moving. The amount of data in the world doubles every year. Meaning a huge portion of the data that exists today is freshly created, so the data requirements are continuing to increase.”

Innovative expands North American footprint with investment into Canada

With 30+ years of experience providing tech solutions to customers all over the US, Innovative answers growth in Canada with office and full-time staff in Toronto.

ROCHESTER, NY, and TORONTO, ON — Innovative Solutions, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, announced today the opening of their first Canadian office in Toronto, ON. 2021 had been a monumental year for Innovative as the business has grown over 100% annually, expanded across the US and into Canada, and now added a Toronto office with full-time Canadian staff.

Justin Copie, Innovative’s CEO, said, “As part of our commitment to AWS, we’re thrilled to open an office in Canada to support our growing Canadian customer base. We’ve also added dedicated Canadian staff, allocated more resources to our Canadian customers across our entire footprint, and built critical infrastructure to support our Canadian business moving forward.”

Opening an office and adding Canadian staff is just the beginning for Innovative’s expansion plans. Innovative is also building and offering products and services to meet the specific needs of Canadian businesses looking to leverage the power of the cloud for business advantage.

“The Canadian market is underserved yet Canadian businesses recognize the same benefits of moving to cloud infrastructure, which is exactly why we’re putting so many resources against supporting AWS in Canada. As one of the only AWS Premier Consulting Partners investing in the region, we’re seeing support from AWS in return. We couldn’t be more excited for what the future holds for AWS, Innovative, and our customers in Canada,” says Jeff Valentine, President and COO of Innovative.

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AWS Premier Consulting Partner

Learn more about Innovative

Innovative believes that every company will become a technology company, and we’re here to help. With an army of cloud experts and the Innovative Cloud Runbook utilizing leading cloud technologies, Innovative gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud with Well Architected reviews, cloud migrations, managed cloud services, application modernization, cloud-native software development, cloud cost optimization, cloud security monitoring, and virtual CIO and CISO consulting.

Innovative Adds VP of Product to continue 100%+ YoY Growth

Ryan Boyer brings 16 years of technology experience to the fastest growing managed cloud service provider and Amazon Web Services Premier Consulting Partner.

ROCHESTER, NY, August 19, 2021 – Innovative Solutions, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, announced today the recent appointment of AWS Alumni Ryan Boyer as VP of Product. Innovative is rapidly expanding across North America, in partnership with customers of AWS as it enables their digital transformations with a focus on cost optimization, cloud security, and operational excellence. Ryan will oversee the development and monetization of every product and service Innovative brings to market, including Cloud Migration Services, Well-Architected Reviews, Managed Cloud Services, and IT Consulting.

With the addition of Ryan and recent completion of Innovative’s fourth AWS competency in cloud migrations, Innovative is doubling down on helping businesses leverage the power of the cloud. Justin Copie, Innovative’s CEO, said, “Customers are now realizing that fighting gravity is no longer worth the energy. Every Small to Mid-size business we talk to today, is seeking to understand the power of the cloud. We’ve made it our mission to over deliver on our promise to help every customer become a technology company.”

Innovative has been serving the technology needs of businesses for more than 30 years and has experienced exponential growth in the past year, including 38 new hires in the past 11 months. This expansion includes adding talent in Austin, Atlanta, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Tallahassee, Knoxville, and Toronto, ON.

“I’m so excited about how passionate the entire Innovative team is about our customers, and I can’t wait to build world-class products that directly address our customers’ needs,” said Boyer.

Boyer has held various positions in tech since 2005. His most recent leadership post at AWS was in the Partner Solutions Architecture organization where he was responsible for driving transformational strategy with Consulting Partners & Managed Service Providers to help them successfully grow their AWS focused lines of business.

 

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Innovative believes that every company will become a technology company, and we’re here to help. Recognized as an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. With an army of cloud experts and the Innovative Cloud Runbook utilizing leading cloud technologies, Innovative gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud with Well Architected reviews, cloud migrations, AWS cloud hosting and resale, managed cloud services, application modernization, cloud-native software development, cloud cost optimization, cloud security monitoring, and virtual CIO and CISO consulting. For more information, visit www.innovativesol.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

Connect with Ryan

Ryan Boyer
VP of Product
rboyer@innovativesol.com
Connect on LinkedIn

“I’m so excited about how passionate the entire Innovative team is about our customers, and I can’t wait to build world-class products that directly address our customers’ needs.”

Innovative Solutions Launches Cutting Edge Managed Service Offerings for Amazon Web Services Customers

Best in class managed services align to the needs of growing cloud businesses.

ROCHESTER, NY, April 5, 2021 – Innovative Solutions, a leading Amazon Web Services Premier Consulting Partner, announced today the launch of three new AWS Managed Cloud Services offerings. Unlike alternatives, these offerings are focused on providing customers with choices that fit their business needs as they leverage cloud-based services. Backed by a team of 100% AWS certified cloud experts, small and medium-sized businesses can select the cloud support offering that aligns to their business needs.

Starting today, the three new offerings from Innovative Solutions are:

Innovative MCS Tier Offerings

The three managed service offerings include access to curated technology and tools that are fully integrated into AWS, including:

  • The Innovative iNOC for 24 x 7 x 365 support
  • New Relic, for application performance monitoring
  • CloudCheckr, for cost analytics, cost savings and optimization, security, and compliance
  • Cloud Storage Security, for cloud storage antivirus scanning
  • SecureCloudDB, for cloud database security monitoring
  • Skeddly, for cloud automation
  • PagerDuty, for alerting and escalations
  • Emergency cloud engineering support

 

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Innovative Solutions believes that every company is a technology company. As the fastest growing AWS Premier Partner, Innovative Solutions helps customers in more than 240 cities throughout North America. With an army of cloud experts leveraging the Innovative Cloud RunbookTM, Innovative Solutions gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud.

Justin Copie

Justin Copie, CEO

“Managing a cloud environment is complicated. Our entire business is designed to lessen the burden on the business owner’s shoulders and help them recognize the power of the cloud. Managed Cloud Services are the number one enabler to achieving this goal. More businesses have selected AWS than any other cloud provider, and hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses are selecting Innovative Solutions as their partner of choice to help them buy, optimize, and secure their AWS environments in the cloud.”

Innovative Solutions taps ‘cloud’ veteran as president

Rochester Business Journal   |   February 17, 2021
By: Velvet Spicer

Jeff Valentine has joined the firm as president and chief operating officer. As a leading managed cloud service provider, Innovative is growing in partnership with customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as it enables their digital transformations with a focus on cost optimization, cloud security and operational excellence, officials said this week. Valentine will drive the scalability of operations to drive unmatched customer experiences for businesses everywhere.

“Jeff’s background leading several successful technology companies, including three years as a C-level executive at one of our technology partners, provides our team and our customers with the opportunity to rise up like never before,” said Innovative CEO Justin Copie.

Innovative has served the technology needs of businesses for more than 30 years and has experienced exponential growth since 2019 as it expanded its managed cloud services offering into over 240 cities and three countries.

“Businesses everywhere are realizing that moving more of their applications and operations to the cloud helps them meet their goals,” Valentine said. “I’m excited because Innovative helps businesses accelerate their digital transformations with our army of cloud experts, our technology, and our best practices.”

Valentine brings more than two decades of experience in starting, growing and investing in technology companies. Most recently, Valentine spent three years as chief technology officer at CloudCheckr.

Innovative Hires Top Cloud Exec to Accelerate Growth with AWS

Jeff Valentine brings 20 years of technology experience to fastest growing cloud managed service provider and AWS Premier Partner

ROCHESTER, NY, FEBRUARY 16, 2021 – Innovative Solutions, an Amazon Web Services Premier Consulting Partner, announced today the recent appointment of Jeff Valentine as President and COO. As a leading managed cloud service provider, Innovative is rapidly growing in partnership with customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as it enables their digital transformations with a focus on cost optimization, cloud security, and operational excellence. Valentine will drive the scalability of operations to drive unmatched customer experiences for businesses everywhere.

Innovative has been serving the technology needs of businesses for more than 30 years and has experienced exponential growth since 2019 as it has expanded its managed cloud services offering into over 240 cities and 3 countries. Valentine’s passion for growth paired with Innovative’s team of AWS-certified cloud engineers will continue to enable businesses to modernize their operations using the cloud.

Valentine is a seasoned growth leader with over 20 years of experience in starting, growing, and investing in technology companies. Most recently, Valentine spent three years as CTO of one of the leading providers of cloud insights software that accelerates digital transformations. Valentine served as CTO, CPO, CMO, and CEO at various technology companies since the late 1990s.

 

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Innovative believes that every company will become a technology company, and we’re here to help. Recognized as an AWS premier consulting partner, Innovative uses its cloud expertise and technology to help customers move to and manage cloud workloads.  With an army of cloud experts and the Innovative Cloud Runbook utilizing the leading cloud technologies, Innovative gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud with Well Architected reviews, cloud migrations, AWS cloud hosting and resale, managed cloud services, application modernization, cloud-native software development, cloud cost optimization, cloud security monitoring, and virtual CIO and CISO consulting.

Justin Copie

Justin Copie, CEO

“Jeff’s background leading several successful technology companies, including three years as a C-level executive at one of our technology partners, provides our team and our customers with the opportunity to rise up like never before.”

Jeff Valentine

Jeff Valentine

“Businesses are realizing that moving more of their operations to the cloud helps them meet their goals, I’m excited because Innovative helps businesses accelerate their digital transformations with our army of cloud experts, technology, and best practices.”

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