We’re extremely happy to announce that Steve Midgley has joined UpCloud as our new Board Chair. Steve brings a wealth of knowledge regarding the cloud infrastructure industry. After the €18 million investment that UpCloud secured at the beginning of 2020, his appointment is another part of our transformation towards becoming a partner of scaling and growing online businesses.
“Our goal was to bring a strong industry leader who has built and scaled companies in our industry. With his experience, especially from AWS, Steve is a great addition to our team as we develop UpCloud more towards working with serious online businesses, companies who need a reliable and high-performance partner for their cloud infrastructure workloads,” says UpCloud’s CEO Antti Vilpponen.
“Small and medium-sized companies are often left behind by big cloud providers. UpCloud can compete with the big players on price and agility and yet remains fundamentally true to its users, helps them succeed globally and most importantly, will never compete with them,” explains Steve Midgley on his motivation to join UpCloud.
Understanding customers and helping them thrive
Steve Midgley has a long career in building and scaling technology companies all over the world. Among many others, he spent four years as the General Manager of Amazon Web Services in EMEA pioneering Cloud in EMEA and fourteen years Globally with Cisco. He worked with EQT on creating a key company in their portfolio, as well as on various advisory positions with companies such as CVC Capital Partners and Bain Capital.
Having specialised in bringing various cloud and SaaS companies to market over the last decade, Steve would like to focus on deeper understanding UpCloud’s customer base. In the Board Chair position, he wants to prioritise the customers’ needs and apply them to UpCloud’s roadmap as the company evolves.
“UpCloud already has a strong position among the SMB customer base, especially in Europe. So we need to build on this success and future proof ourselves in the digital world. More specifically, I would like to see UpCloud broadening their offer of additional higher-value services, such as Databases/Data Lake as a Service or analytics,” says Midgley.
