Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting - Company of the Year - Computer

Company: Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting, Oceanside, CA
Entry Submitted By: Mayfield Consulting
Company Description: The award-winning cloud solutions experts at Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting (DCAC) assist companies in achieving their cloud architecture and infrastructure, business intelligence (BI), data visualization, migrations, performance tuning, and data security goals. More than 80% of DCAC consultants are Microsoft MVP's the highest ratio of Microsoft MVP’s at a single company in the U.S.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Company of the Year - Computer Services - Small

Nomination Title: Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting

Award-winning cloud solutions experts at Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting (DCAC) assist companies in achieving their cloud architecture and infrastructure, business intelligence (BI), data visualization, migrations, performance tuning, and data security goals.

Founded in 2012 by Denny Cherry, a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional), VMware expert, and author of multiple books on data security, DCAC offers the value proposition that their team of experts can solve any cloud solution challenges more quickly and reliably than the competition. DCAC marries that proposition with a willingness to train their client’s staff, rather than pursue expensive long-term contracts.

Cherry has recruited the most renowned IT experts in the world, under the promise they will enjoy a virtual office and flattened hierarchy. Each consultant enjoys the respect, collegiality, freedom, and salary their exceptional personal achievements merit. Today, more than 80% of DCAC consultants are Microsoft MVPs: the highest ratio of Microsoft MVP’s at a single company in the U.S., with each consultant’s specialty exponentially growing the capabilities of the entire company.

DCAC has been named for the past two years to the Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies, with 89% revenue growth over the past three years.

DCAC created the first ever Data-as-a-Service customer portal for the real estate industry, which enables customers to query, view, and potentially predict market behavior. The database simultaneously enables the publisher to anonymize and record the queries, and subsequently market them to other customers, akin to “Amazon Customer Preferences.” Built-in Azure Data Factory harvesting the Azure Telemetry Solution to detect user behavior in SQL Server Query Store, the solution is scalable and allows the publisher to authenticate users into the environment with single sign-on.

After a company suffered a Ransomware attack, production was running at 10% of capacity, suffering constant CPU spikes, and had no purchasing capability. In 96 hours, DCC performed a bare metal rebuild, despite no roadmap to the architecture, and had the system running at a level the company had never previously achieved: customer resource consumption was decreased by 600%, and daily processes went from 20 minutes to one minute.

DCAC also improved performance at a Fortune 50 company by 500%, created a zero-downtime migration solution for an enterprise business, restored production for a nationally known non-profit within 24 hours, performance tuned an educational provider’s 128 stored procedures in 36 hours (thereby saving their reputation), secured the data of a national medical state boards organization, and helped a major retailer build and deploy a high availability solution that led to record sales. DCAC subsequently completed an additional 21 architecture and infrastructure builds, 14 performance tunings, 9 data visualization and analytics projects, 5 migrations, and 3 security audits.

The most astounding aspect of the list above is that work was entirely performed by six consultants: a lone consultant designed the telemetry for the Data-as-a-Service customer portal. The 96-hour Ransomware rescue was completed with zero downtime and conducted by two consultants. Another consultant migrated a terabyte of data to the cloud in a single day.

In terms of significance, DCAC’s cloud portal work tests the outer limits of what is possible in the cloud. Thanks to the Real Estate data publisher’s unparalleled data acquisition and DCAC’s ability to normalize and harvest that data, their customers will ultimately be able to predict market behavior. The solution is both scalable and can be translated to other industries.

Additionally, DCAC saved multiple companies from financial ruin when production failed. The Ransomware event is a prime example: recovery normally requires 2 weeks of downtime. DCAC completed it in 4 days.

The ROI on hiring DCAC is financial as well: 90% of all jobs DCAC performed in 2019/2020 were billed at an average of 70% of the SOW of work estimate. 100% of their engagements were completed on-time. As added bonuses, DCAC routinely makes recommendations for how the company can save money in the cloud, completely gratis.

In short, DCAC can radically augment or improve any client company’s IT production, and the only limits are the quality of the data the company possesses, a CTO’s imagination, and the outermost boundaries of what is possible in the cloud.

We include both a case study with the CTO, Michael Kogon at Pull-A-Part about the Ransomware recovery that DCAC performed, as well as an article Disaster Recovery asked Denny Cherry to write so other IT professionals could learn from his expertise. Also included is a feature about the company in Insights Success, describing how Cherry recruited the top experts in their field and their areas of specialty. Finally there are articles about DCAC being listed twice on the Inc. 5000 List of America's Fastest Growing Private Companies, and a similar list in London's Financial Times, speaking to the financial success of the busniess. We also include a feature that Cherry wrote for Inc. Magazine at the beginning of the pandemic making recommendations for how businesses can successfully convert to a virtual office model, since DCAC has been a virtual office since its inception.