“We started Veddio with the mission that we would be disruptive in the cloud computing sector.”

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Stonly Baptiste is a self described software and team developer currently building the cloud startup, Veddio, in Fort Lauderdale. As Veddio’s Chief Technology Officer, Stonly Baptiste coordinates reliable and efficient hosting services for businesses. As lead developer for Veddio’s back-end software and service integrations, he helped build it’s secure cloud infrastructure and developed an award winning service management platform.

Veddio is a cloud computing and hosting provider that empower Managed Service Providers (MSPs), System Integrators/ITSP/VARs (SI’s), and Software Companies throughout the United States and Canada with cloud infrastructure and cloud solutions that significantly enhance current product and service offerings. Veddio’s relationships with Dell, Microsoft, and other vendors positions them to offer online backup, Hosted Exchange, Virtual Private Servers, and Voice over IP service amongst other products.

MO: What inspired you to launch Veddio and how did your previous experience and background contribute to the development of the company?

Stonly: Veddio is the result of a merger between a VoIP company I built over the last 4 years and a hosting company that my co-founder, Todd Myers, built over the last 8 years. We met via a mutual customer as competitors at first and decided to joined forces to form Veddio a year ago. My VoIP offering AstonUCS, was a great experience for me in developing my own service company as well as developing a communication platform. Before that my history is checkered with IT consulting and softwar development businesses. It feels like everything I’ve contributed to, whether successful or not, has prepared me for and lead me to the next adventure.

MO: Can you explain what services you offer and who your target market is?

Stonly: Veddio was designed to be a one stop shop for CLECs, Managed Services Providers, and IT Service Providers who want to provide cloud and hosted solutions to their customers. We have a unique blend of solutions which include Exchange, Sharepoint, Online Backup, Virtual Servers and Workstations, as well as Voice over IP. Our value is in our ability to provide all these services in a secure and reliable environment as well as our Dashboard which allows our customers to order, provision, and manage everything in one place.

MO: The Veddio Cloud Dashboard won Best New Technology At MSPWorld last year. What elements make your Cloud Management Dashboard so innovative and what influenced the design?

Stonly: Our focus has always been product/market fit and user experience. Early on, we invested much or our efforts in bringing minimum viable products and interface designs to groups that represented our target market. Those efforts paid off when we saw how responsive our customers and the industry was to our initial public release of the Dashboard. The inovation is that the Dashboard is an enterprise level tool that makes cloud adoption automagical and it has a user friendly interface.

MO: Startups typically need to pivot and evolve their business model over time, especially as customers start to use the product. Can you provide some advice or lessons learned to entrepreneurs on pivoting while keeping your business moving forward at the same time?

Stonly: We started Veddio with the mission that we would be disruptive in the cloud computing sector. To start on that mission, our first task was to identify where we needed to pivot our existing business model in order to differentiate ourselves. That lead to our focus on Channel Partners and developing a Dashboard. Just like us, most tech companies will have to differentiate and pivot from whats already being done. From there, you are charting new territory and your future pivots are the shaping of that landscape. The good news is that there are millions of potential users and customers out there willing to help you identify where and when you need to pivot, even if its by telling you that they don’t like what your doing. The trick is to keep giving the market what is working while focusing on identifying and removing what isn’t working.

MO: Where does your entrepreneurial spirit come from?

Stonly: My parents were my first example of creating something out of nothing. We came to the US as Haitian immigrants and they were able to bring us to a middle class standard of living. My father specifically taught me to be resourcefull by collecting broken and used computer equipment for me and my brothers from a young age. That is how I learned to repair and build computers, write software, and eventually find vulnerabilities in networks. The latter landed me in trouble as a teenager but taught me to think for myself and ask “why not?”. I dropped out of college to persue business. College wasn’t my type of environment and neither was corporate, so I feel like I have no other choice then to be an entrepreneur. I’m happy about that.

MO: How do you think that cloud technology will evolve over the next 2 years?

Stonly: Cloud technology will continue to be enabled by advancements in web and mobile interface technologies. So you will see a growing migration of people and organizations at all levels to the cloud. The caveat is that these technologies will also introduce new and greater security threats. The push for and solidification of cloud, mobile, and html5 security may need to happen befor we see full adoption or realize the true potential of cloud computing.