Doug Schneider
Doug Schneider

2nd Watch, which helps companies move applications onto Amazon Web Services, has raised $10 million in fresh funding from Top Tier Capital, Madrona Venture Group and Columbia Capital. It also named Doug Schneider as CEO, with founder Kris Bliesner moving to the role of CTO.

The new cash follows a $23 million funding round that the company completed in November 2013. It also follows a record revenue quarter for 2nd Watch, which reported sales growth of 600 percent during the third quarter.

“We’ve got a lot going on,” said Schneider, who started with 2nd Watch on Monday. “We are in growth mode.”

2nd Watch claims AWS Premier Partner status, and says it plans to manage 10 percent of all AWS infrastructure within the next few years. Its customers include Amplify, Crate & Barrel and Diane von Furstenberg — helping those customers and others move IT infrastructure into AWS. It boasts more than 100 customers, including implementations in financial services, consumer packaged goods and insurance.

At this time, 2nd Watch is exclusively focused on helping large organizations move onto Amazon Web Services. There are no plans at this point to offer its services for other cloud computing environments, such as Microsoft Azure.

“We have a great partnership with AWS, and we work quite well with them and we are really happy around how we collectively come together to provide a great experience for the end customer,” said Schneider. “As we found ourselves in front of bigger enterprise customers, we found that we were able to meet their needs with the Amazon public cloud. Amazon is continuously innovating on their cloud at a ferocious pace, and we are finding that we’re able to meet the needs of our clients.”

Kris Bliesner
Kris Bliesner

Schneider is the former president of Verio, which he led to an IPO before selling to NTT Communications for more than $5 billion in 2000. He most recently served as executive vice president and general manager at Melbourne IT, a publicly held Australian Web hosting company. He’s also the former CEO of AllCall.

In fact, Schneider said he sees parallels between his experience at Verio, an ISP which helped usher in the Internet era, and 2nd Watch, which is helping to bring forth the cloud computing era.

“I said: ‘Gosh, it sure feels like there is a similar dynamic going on here where the cloud — and the technology around it — is disrupting the traditional Internet and disrupting traditional data center providers and the way large-scale enterprise services and applications are delivered and managed,” he said.

Schneider said that the public cloud is growing in acceptance, with large enterprises, including those in financial services, pushing more IT operations onto AWS. That’s creating an opportunity for 2nd Watch, which provides a higher level of customer support and service as big companies move into the cloud.

“We are focused on moving enterprise-level workloads to the cloud, and that consists of planning, moving and managing those workloads,” he said.

2nd Watch employs 85 people, with about 10 open positions. The company will continue to grow across its locations in Liberty Lake, Wash., Seattle, San Francisco and New York. The new money will also be used to expand into new geographic markets.

Schneider said that the company was not actively looking for capital, adding that there were a lot of interested parties “knocking on the door.”

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