Cloud computing keeps Wilson on cutting edge

You could say Reed Wilson spends a lot of time in the clouds.

His business is cloud computing and he runs Palmetto Technology Group, or PTG, a Greenville-based Microsoft cloud-services contract company.

At age 37, Wilson has built an enterprise that was Microsoft Cloud's Partner of the Year in 2013.

Admittedly part maverick, part conventionalist, he's not resting on that laurel.

PTG got started when Microsoft rolled out its first version of Office 365. Since then, Wilson's company has been selling and delivering services based on Microsoft's cloud efforts.

An English major at The Citadel, where he graduated in 1999, Wilson started his technology career with Datastream Systems, a Greenville-based provider of enterprise software solutions.

After the company was acquired by Infor in 2006, he and two Datastream employees, Eric Pohl and Chris Vanzant, teamed up to start PTG.

"Technology's always what I've known. It's always what I've done," Wilson said.

Technically, cloud computing refers to an efficient method of managing lots of computer servers, data storage and networking, according to The New York Times.

More than a decade ago, engineers figured out ways that data and software could be distributed efficiently across several machines and their power pooled for collective use, the newspaper reported in a special section on cloud computing earlier this year.

The Times reported that it no longer mattered which servers were running a job; it was just inside this "cloud" of machines. There were immediate performance gains, since stand-alone servers typically used only a fraction of their capacity in case there was a surge in demand, the newspaper reported.

By linking the machines together into a larger "virtual" system, the surge problem eased and a lot of computation was freed, The Times reported.

The advent of cloud computing has driven unparalleled innovation in the private sector, with organizations able to purchase scalable IT as-a-service for a variety of needs, according to Government Executive, a trade publication.

Various levels of government have been more cautious in their approaches to the cloud in what equates to a balancing act between the cloud's biggest opportunities – cost savings and operational efficiencies – with its largest challenges, ensuring the security of information in the cloud, the publication said.

With tighter budgets and often smaller IT shops than their federal counterparts, state and local governments face additional challenges jumping to the cloud despite the significant promise it holds, according to the trade publication.

Officials at The U.S. Government Accountability Office, citing the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said in a September report that cloud computing is a means "for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."

To encourage federal agencies to pursue the potential efficiencies associated with cloud computing, the Office of Management and Budget issued a "Cloud First" policy in 2011 that required agency chief information officers to implement a cloud-based service whenever there was "a secure, reliable, and cost-effective option."

It amounts to back-to-the-future technology, Wilson said.

"Back in the old days, we had these green-screen...terminals where all the compute was done on some big terminal in the office and nothing was done locally on the desktop," Wilson said. "Then the PC came and now everybody is doing work locally on their PC. Now, the cloud is here."

With cloud computing, essentially "instead of that server being, sitting in your data center, it's sitting generally is someone else's data center," Wilson said.

However, he cautions, "You've got public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds. It can get pretty confusing."

Wilson grew up in Honea Path. His father was an independent pharmacist; his mother, a school teacher.

In his freshman year at The Citadel, Shannon Faulkner became the first female cadet to enter the school before voluntarily resigning shortly afterward.

In his senior year, Wilson was in charge of the The Citadel's entire corps of cadets as regimental commander.

"Basically, I was responsible, as the commandant put it, for the action or inaction of 1,800 college-age students, which was a lot of fun," he said. "I could tell you some good stories there."

A former teacher at the college remembers that Wilson put a sticker on his maroon pickup that read "Save the Males."

In 1995, Faulkner became the first woman to enter The Citadel - a military college noted for its strict discipline, rich traditions and strong alumni network. The transition from single gender to coeducation was not a smooth one - especially in the early years.

The Citadel Board of Visitors brought in a new commandant, Brig. Gen. Emory Mace (U.S. Army retired), and a new president, Maj. Gen. John S. Grinalds (U.S. Marine Corps retired), to lead the college out of its tumultuous beginnings with coeducation. Their charge from the board was to make The Citadel the best coeducational military college in the country.

The teacher, Col. James Rembert, said Wilson removed the sticker after he was called to Mace's office in the middle of his senior year and Mace acknowledged Wilson had made his point. Wilson confirmed the account.

Today, women are members of every company in the corps of cadets and can be found in classrooms throughout campus.

For his part, Wilson was a civil engineering major with the aim of going to law school.

After four semesters of struggling through statics, dynamics and other civil-engineering courses, "I said 'this is not where my heart is,'" Wilson recalled.

Stumped by one statics exam, he answered the first question by writing in bold letters to his professor, "Colonel Stout, if you promise not to fail me in this class, I will go to the registrar's office right now and change my major to English."

"The test had been handed out, maybe 10 minutes," Wilson remembered. "Everybody's furiously working on their exam and I go and drop it on the desk."

The colonel, he recalled, looked at him and said, "Mr. Wilson, you have a D."

"I saluted him and turned around and walked out and literally walked right across the campus and changed my major to English," Wilson said.

He took 90 hours in four semesters to graduate and then headed to law school.

But just before graduation at The Citadel, he was recruited to join Datastream.

He was 22, and company officials offered him the chance to live and work in Melbourne, Australia.

The career path didn't surprise those who knew him, including Rembert, who calls Wilson one of his favorite former students in 41 years of teaching at The Citadel. The two remain in contact.

"His best trait is a mixture of firm and delightful leadership and modesty and competence at whatever he does," Rembert said. "His worst trait was too much modesty, not coming to me for a letter of recommendation to law school."

That turned out in his favor, the former teacher said, because within 10 years Wilson's company was doing more than $3 million in annual sales, a figure Wilson confirmed.

"He has a way of immediately connecting with someone when he talks to them because of his goodwill and clamped-down competence and intelligence - all clamped down to just sort of the look on a person's face that he likes you, he's engaged with you and he doesn't need to say much to you," Rembert said. "You get it when he says something."

Wilson is married to a dentist and has two children, a son and a daughter.

In recent meetings in Greenville, Wilson gathered staff members and his sales team to review the new Microsoft Office 365 plans the company just announced.

Over ham and turkey sandwiches, the group discussed how to meet the needs of small, midsize, or enterprise organizations.

Wilson, in a rapid-fire thought process, prodded, cajoled and encouraged his staff. Alternately sitting up or slouching in his chair, he listened to their reports, including how to salvage some deals.

At one point, referring to a customer mixing and matching SKUs, he said, "I just don't believe how that's possible. Can you circle up with that?"

Or, while munching potato chips, he asked about a client contact and said, "Was the meeting hostile at all?"

Often he didn't hesitate, telling sales staffers, "You're not inspiring a lot of confidence here" and "Do I need to lower the (sales) forecast?"

He talked in terms of "key takeaways" and how to "close the gap" in assessing a customer's needs and potential upgrades.

Wilson refuses to take on debt to grow his privately held company, which has 20 employees. Revenue is up 42 percent over the last year and increasing across all lines of business, he said.

In running the company, Wilson said he has high expectations and struggles to delegate.

He will tell an employee he needs something done "and I'll be back in his office 30 minutes later, saying, 'This is how I want you to do it.'"

The employee, maturing as a leader, has grown confident in telling him, "Get out of here. You told me to do it. Let me do it," Wilson said.

"I really try very hard to let people make their own way," he said. "But it's a struggle for me. I'll tell you - it's a big struggle for me."

He has learned over the years that the struggle becomes much easier "if you just hire the right people," Wilson said.

"Everybody says that," he said. "Hiring the right people is expensive. It's not just expensive on the front end. It's expensive forever. But I've learned that it is way more expensive to hire the wrong people."

Wilson also clearly outlines to his staff the company's quarterly income goals.

"A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake - I made the mistake early on - of not sharing that," he said. "People care more about being a part of something than they really even do about pay."