For a company that has more than doubled in size and now operates out of five different countries with more than 2,300 employees, you might expect those types of stats from a biz that’s been around for a decade or two.
But for Ensono, this growth has occurred in less than four years.
It turns out that hybrid IT is where it’s at, and Ensono is right in the middle of it, with over half of their business involved in migrating from mainframe networks to the cloud.
In high demand, Ensono has more growth plans in order, especially on the engineering side. We chatted with three leaders from the team to learn more.
FOUNDED: 2015
EMPLOYEES: 2,300 globally; 440 locally
WHAT THEY DO: Ensono provides a full scope of managed IT services spanning legacy mainframe systems to cloud transformations.
WHERE THEY DO IT: Downers Grove, downtown Chicago, and other global locations.
THINKING CAPS: Though they do serious work, they try not to take themselves too seriously — in meetings, some team members wears various masks and hats to foster creativity.
MULTIPLE PATHWAYS: This team values generalists that can be successful in a number of circumstances, as opposed to an expert restricted to one facet.
GET WELL(NESS): With a lengthy list of health and wellness initiatives, Ensono offers employees everything from an onsite gym with a trainer, yoga classes, and a full week dedicated to fitness.
Tim Beerman, Chief Technology Officer
For Tim, it’s not so much about solving interesting problems — you can find those anywhere, he assures. Instead, what he appreciates most is the people he gets to solve these problems with. The result? An environment that inspires and challenges each person to bring their best.
BZZZZ: In addition to building wooden furniture for family and friends, Tim is also a beekeeper. While enjoying the tasty treat of natural honey, he really enjoys studying the science behind the nature of the insects, which often parallels that of technology.
As CTO, how do you determine what new technologies to adopt?
It is a collaborative approach. There are so many new technologies that come to market, and we really encourage our associates to be curious, learn about these and bring back ideas. From there, it is a matter of understanding applicability to problems we are trying to solve, commercial viability as part of our overall service and supportability to ensure good lifecycle management.
How would you describe Ensono’s engineering culture? How has it changed since the company has grown?
It is a fun and fast-paced environment that encourages curiosity and requires a customer-centric approach and collaboration with peer groups to solve problems. While it has fundamentally stayed the same, we continue to adapt to ensure we maintain a strong culture as we grow globally.
As we continue to evolve as a company, I look forward to seeing the vision we have created, both technically and culturally, take shape and become a reality as we grow.”
What are you most looking forward to for the future of Ensono?
The managed services space is continuing to evolve rapidly, and Ensono has enjoyed great success. As we continue to evolve as a company, I look forward to seeing the vision we have created, both technically and culturally, take shape and become a reality as we grow.
Jeremy Bower, VP, Software
The simple answer to what Jeremy does is that he makes it easier to do business with Ensono. The more complex answer is that he leads his teams to provide actionable insights from their clients’ hybrid IT estates and digital interfaces to automate request transactions. He leads and coaches teams located in the U.S., U.K., Poland and India.
VINTAGE CLASSICS: As a break from his day job, Jeremy enjoys working on his classic muscle cars from the 60s and 70s.
As a leader, how do you ensure success is happening across the department with teams located globally?
I don’t. What I do is coach my teams to build up their levels of competence in engineering and Agile practices and create an environment in which each team has the skills and runway to be in control of their own destiny.
Our bar is pretty high, which makes it a challenge to find great fits.”
What’s your approach to hiring? What matters most to you, and how has this impacted the development of your team?
We try to determine the candidate’s level of stick-to-itiveness, ability and comfort with constantly learning new things, and understanding of and fit for an Agile culture. Our bar is pretty high, which makes it a challenge to find great fits.
What role will data lake principles play in Ensono’s future?
As an enterprise, we have a growing understanding of our data needs, and today we are making use of foundational data lake principles and tooling by ingesting into S3 storage in AWS and transforming jobs in Glue and Lambda functions. We are continuing to evolve our view so that we can build an ecosystem where data domain owners can be accountable for the cleanliness and accessibility of their data in partnership with engineering.
Dave Pearson, Director, Product Management/Agile
As director of product management and Agile, Dave is responsible for coaching and mentoring Ensono’s product owner group as well as crafting the vision for their client portal experience. He’s inspired by the challenge of simplifying complex systems, processes and tools, helping his teammates develop their passion for creating great products, and ensuring everyone has fun along the way.
MENTAL MASTERY: With a love for martial arts, Dave is particularly passionate about Shuhari, a Japanese term used to describe the concept of mastering skills through steps. Martial arts has had major impacts on his life, especially as a leader.
What’s the biggest challenge your team is faced with right now? How are you working to overcome it?
One of the biggest challenges is that data is everywhere, and it’s growing at an exponential rate. Our task is to pick out a handful of data points from an ocean of data and craft a narrative that helps us and our clients make better decisions. To combat this challenge, we are first focusing on getting relevant data points all in the same place. With a central repository of that valuable data, we can then start to identify patterns within the data that helps us provide a better level of service.
What opportunities does working for Ensono’s engineering team present that not a lot of other companies can offer?
We operate with a mindset of agility that allows us to do what we need to do to be successful. That empowerment is important to our success. We’ve designed and staffed this team to be self-sufficient and capable of making key decisions on the spot. That level of trust is rare and one that we are grateful for at Ensono.
We operate with a mindset of agility that allows us to do what we need to do to be successful.”
We heard about literally wearing a wide range of hats (and masks) — what started this tradition and when are they worn?
I’m a big believer that people will intentionally, or unintentionally, adjust their behaviors according to a wide range of external factors. My experience is that if people are asked to participate in processes that are more mechanical than personal, the opportunity to do great work is reduced.
So, we reimagined a very important series of conversations and meetings where you were required to wear at least one mask during the meeting. You can imagine the change in dynamics when you are discussing the finer points of ITSM integration with a person wearing an Angry Birds face mask along with a pirate’s bandana. It’s hard to keep a straight face. But laughing and camaraderie stimulate the brain in ways that fuel creativity and ideation. It’s not something I would recommend all teams try, but it served us well.
