Partner Spotlight: Ep#10 More Than a Migration Partner: The TrueMark Approach

Speaker A: Welcome to another session of AWS Partner Spotlight with Ingram Micro where we highlight partners doing big things with aws. Today I'm joined by Derek Ross from Trumark. My name is Chris Parker, Senior Program Manager at Ingram Micro. We're here to talk about the impact that you're making with your customers. So Derek, thanks for joining today. Appreciate it. Thanks. Uh, your company philosophy is more than a migration partner. Tell me a little bit about what that means for your organization.

Speaker B: We think it's important to be advisors and real partners in the business, outcomes that our customers are facing and that they're trying to accomplish. So it's not just about the technology, it's about how to utilize it to actually meet customer objectives. So we are an AWS only implementation partner. We've done that so that we can become experts on the tool sets that are available to you. Uh, and we use those to take you uh, and scale with your customer. Whether that is a global retail company, whether that's compliant research, uh, whether you have local, uh, state and local government workloads that you need to uh, accomplish, we're there for you.

Speaker A: Uh, that's a great strategy and I love that you guys are specially focused on aws. With that point being made, many organizations are looking to migrate off of VMware, incorporate VMware into their AWS, uh, infrastructure, uh, or broader cloud transformations. So how does the Trumark approach to modernization differ than traditional lift and shift?

Speaker B: Absolutely. So, uh, I used to be SA at aws and that experience taught me that there's a lot of partners out there that do a little bit of everything. They do gcp, they do Azure, AWS on prem, uh, and what I found is that a lot of their teams didn't have depth, they didn't know how to really take it to that next level. So when we do a, uh, VMware migration assessment, we come and we look at each individual workload that you have. We're all technologists, we've all either hosted large workloads on AWS or a former aws. And so we take those, we break them down and we help you understand how to actually leverage cloud native services. Whether that's serverless, whether that's step functions, lambdas, uh, if we need to break up your databases, if we want to do really interesting things with S3 to actually keep your cost down, keep you super performative and make you uh, ability to scale up and scale down as necessary, but makes it so that you're not eating a bunch of cost because you cannot Use the cloud the way that you use on prem infrastructure and expect the same outcomes?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I think we're seeing that more and more in the space today. So as organizations grow, how do landing zones infrastructure as a code, governance and compliance help uh, them scale successfully.

Speaker B: So we do a lot of work in higher education, state and local government and in those particular sectors, uh, it's different than commercial where I can hire a multimillion dollar cloud team, I can go get the best talent that I possibly can. Uh, you're working with two to three person teams who are managing 100 to 150 different type of workloads. So we need to make it as easy for them to manage this large environment as possible. So this is where we come in and we use AWS landing zones, using control tower and organizations along with infrastructure as code to help meet compliance guidelines, to help meet automation guidelines. So, so anytime you need to vend a new account and there's a network associated with that, or if you have a compliance requirement like CGIS or CMMC or hipaa, we can help meet those. And if there's any drift off those workloads, we're going to alert you and we're going to give you patterns that you can repeatedly set up those types of workloads across your landing zone without necessarily having to use a partner. So we want to walk away and make sure that your two to three person team is both educated and equipped to deal with those workloads.

Speaker A: With all of this, uh, migrations moving over to the cloud, obviously there's a lot of cost that gets associated with that. Um, customers are under constant pressure to reduce their cloud spend while also improving performance. The old catch 22, uh, how does Trumark help organizations optimize?

Speaker B: Both, uh, we partner with aws, uh, and both AWS and Trumark will help fund your assessment and uh, either all or a large part of your actual implementation as you move to the cloud. So during that we're going to break down each workload, we're going to give you a migration path, whether that's re hosting, replatforming, maybe it's not AWS, maybe you should be going to SaaS for that particular workload and lightening the amount of overhead that you have. So we'll go through, we'll make a plan, uh, and then we'll have a mobilize phase, we'll actually help migrate that to the cloud. And so we're going to help one with the actual cost of implementation and two, we're going to break up that workload in a proper way to utilize AWS in a way that's going to be cost effective for you in the long run.

Speaker A: So for our last question today, we're going to talk about AI, of course. Right. Enterprise AI is nearly top of mind for every organization that's out there today. Uh, how's Trumark helping customers move from experimentation to production?

Speaker B: So again, our partnership with AWS really helps us benefit our customers in this space. Uh, so everybody knows about Anthropic and Claude or OpenAI and ChatGPT, but what I hear from all the legal teams and my CIOs is that they're terrified of what's being, being done with their data. Uh, especially in the government space where they uh, have to answer to their citizenry. They are worried about how their town or their city or county's data is being utilized. And uh, they don't have that control. So our answer to that is use Bedrock. Uh, so you have access to aws bedrock or SageMaker when you move to AWS and you have access to those same models. But it's much like the other services you use in AWS where they're in isolation and you own those. AWS doesn't have access to the data. Uh, we as Trumark don't have access to the data. So you can utilize Claude, you can utilize Meta's, uh, models, uh, Llama models, you can use Deepseek if you wanted to. Um, and uh, AWS has some of their own models and so we help architect systems where you can utilize those best in class models. And at the same time, since your data's in aws, we can get uh, your enterprise data set up with those models so that you're getting customized answers to the questions that you're asking. It's not a generalized response and so it helps, helps uh, provide productivity. It can help with your citizenry who are asking questions about how to gain access to community services. So there's lots of really interesting use cases and we can actually work with AWS to fund a proof of concept, uh, to test that theory out and see how effective we can be within your community.

Speaker A: That's great. I love how it's not necessarily like a one size fit all type solution.

Speaker B: Definitely not.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. That's awesome. Well Derek, I really appreciate you coming by today. You've been a great partner for Ingram Micro, uh, and with aws. Uh, I'd like to thank Derek from Trumark for joining us today. For AWS Partner Spotlight, and make sure to look out for more Partner Spotlight sessions.