Chief Cloud Strategist
Ottawa, Ontario, Ca
As Chief Cloud Strategist, Rick is focused on ensuring that Pythian, and its clients, fully understand, select and deploy the right approach to leverage enterprise cloud solutions when integrating, modernizing, or moving to the cloud. Rick is uniquely positioned to help organizations align their current set of strategic priorities and identify where cloud based consulting, services and managed support models can be deployed to accelerate their time to value. Rick’s expertise is in helping leaders navigate the complex cloud provider ecosystem and align the features of private & public clouds that solve the challenges of each unique business. Rick studied computer science, biochemistry and political science at the University of Minnesota. He’s an avid mountain biker and cyclist who competes at the elite level. Rick is actively involved in coaching basketball, and coaching youth at different age levels for the last 20 years. He also acts as an executive advisor and investor to Minnesota startups, mentoring and advising entrepreneurs throughout their journey. Rick and his wife have four children.In 2001 Rick co-founded Agosto. As the public cloud market matured, he led Agosto’s strategic pivot from a managed private cloud provider to a professional services organization focused on supporting the enterprise journey to the cloud. In 2016 Rick co-founded Skykit, is a board member and advisor to the company. In 2020, Agosto, was acquired by Pythian, a Mill Point Company and Rick transitioned to a leadership position at Pythian. Rick has 25+ years of technology advisory and leadership experience in enterprise product development, cloud architecture, open source and infrastructure modernization and transformation. His expertise has been instrumental to Agosto becoming a leading cloud integrator, aggregator, and top Google Cloud provider, as well as a valued resource to transformational executives, industry analysts and the media.