Editor’s note: The original version of this story misstated Oak Rocket’s projected sales goal. The company aims for $250 million by 2025.
Dao Jensen, CEO of Oak Rocket, said that even with global economic uncertainty and a shockwave for her startup clients with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the Amazon Web Services partner is still on track for a sales goal of $250 million by 2025.
To get closer to that goal this year, the Austin, Texas-based partner is investing in more professional services, adding more machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, more security services and locking down more multi-year contracts with AWS clients, Jensen told CRN in an interview.
“We grew 87 percent year over year last year,” Jensen said. “We’re looking to be one of the biggest woman-owned AWS cloud partners in the country, if not the world. Shooting for a quarter of a billion dollars by 2025. And maybe being the next SHI” – No. 13 on CRN’s 2022 Solution Provider 500 and co-founded and led by President and CEO Thai Lee.
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AWS Partner Oak Rocket Taking Off
Oak Rocket – No. 400 on the same list – has about 20 full-time employees and offers services around cloud cost optimization, cloud migration, digital transformation and an AWS well-architected review.
With March being Women’s History Month, Jensen also spoke with CRN about her career path to leading a partner business. In the 1970s, she and her family left for the United States from a Vietnam still scarred by warfare.
“My mom already had five kids and felt that this was not the place for her kids to have a great opportunity after all the ruins and political situation that was going on,” Jensen said. “So that’s why we left.”
Jensen posted tributes on LinkedIn to her parents – her mother passed away in 2020 and her father this past February.
Originally aspiring to go into politics, Jensen found her way to the channel after tenures with Veritas, Symantec and CommVault.
“The biggest suggestion I have for people is always asking why,” Jensen said. “That question for anything is always the most important. And so when I went into technology, why is it important to have a fast E10k (The Sun Enterprise 10000 server) and a large E10k … And why does a customer care? I would always go look and find four really good specialists who understand how to say it in business terms.”
Here’s what else Jensen had to say to CRN.
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Wade Tyler Millward is an associate editor covering cloud computing and the channel partner programs of Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, Salesforce, Citrix and other cloud vendors. He can be reached at [email protected].
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