Championing Ambition: Women In Cloud Launches 2023 Cloud Scholarship Drive

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As of 2020, only 14.2 percent of people in the cloud computing industry were women – a number that is not improving. We believe that economic growth should be inclusive, reaching every person, organization, community, and country. And it all starts with increasing access to digital skills.

Women in Cloud recognized the importance of cloud certification in building an inclusive workforce and had the reach, approach, partnerships, and engine to make a meaningful impact. We embarked on a journey to test three hypotheses:

  1. What does it take for women to be job-ready in cloud technologies?
  2. What partnerships do we need to deliver micro-credentials and hands-on learning experiences?
  3. What wrap-around services do women need to succeed, including partnerships with Coursera, universities, and tech companies?

Through our experimentation, we learned that it takes $6,000 to $10,000 to provide the necessary services for women/anyone to be job-ready. However, this approach was expensive and not easily scalable. Determined to find a solution, we reverse-engineered a pathway to access $100K Cloud Tech Jobs.

A Breakthrough: Cloud Certification for $250

Collaborating with the Microsoft and Women in Cloud’s Board of Advisors, we identified what it takes to achieve cloud tech certification and devised a plan to make it possible.

After distributing 3,000 scholarships in just 15 months across 65 countries, we are thrilled to announce a breakthrough – women and allies can now become technically certified on Microsoft Cloud products for just $250.

Launching #WICxCloudScholarship Fund

Led by our esteemed Board of Advisors, the Women In Cloud Scholarship Fund is a collective effort driven by our vibrant community. Our mission is clear: to establish and sustain a fund that will empower women by awarding 1,000 life-changing cloud and AI scholarships. Over the next 24 to 48 months, we aim to raise $250,000 to pave the way for women to excel in the cloud industry, fostering diversity and innovation along the way.

We believe that giving is a calling, and giving smart is a choice. But that’s not all. We made it affordable, tax-deductible, and sustainable. This will allow every individual to contribute to the Cloud and AI Workforce Development and make Tech Industry Inclusive.

This holiday season we are launching an innovative campaign “Hope Rises With Every Donation”

In the boundless digital universe, the cloud is a cornerstone of our technological future. However, not everyone has the opportunity to harness its power. This community-driven campaign aims to empower women by providing cloud certification scholarships.  Our mission is to raise funds to create 1,000 Cloud Certification Scholarships.

We believe Hope Rises with Every Donation.

Be a part of this transformative giving campaign and help us make a difference! Your contribution can be the turning point in someone’s life. For more information, visit : https://www.gofundme.com/f/wicxcloudscholarshipfund

No Donation Is Too Small

That’s why we offer a variety of tax-smart giving options for your 2023 donations to maximize their effect:

Save on taxes and make an impact: Make a $250+ gift and receive a charitable deductions and sponsor a woman to become cloud certified. Plus get invited to become a mentor/advisor.

We invite you to champion a woman’s ambition and pave the way for her to achieve cloud certification. Together, we can create a more inclusive and diverse future in the tech industry.

Donate and Make an Impact Today

Together, let’s champion her ambition and make the tech industry more inclusive and diverse. Join the #WICxCloudScholarship Fund today!

Connect with Chaitra if you want to join the fundraising team.

Your support matters. Let’s create an Inclusive Future. Champion Her Ambition with Cloud Scholarships and Your Mentorships.

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2022 CEO Outlook by KPMG & ESGT Opportunities

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We got chance to read the research KPMG 2022 CEO Outlook, which asked more than 1,300 CEOs at the world’s largest businesses about their strategies and outlook, reveals that 58 percent of leaders expect a recession to be mild and short. Fourteen percent of senior executives identify a recession among the most pressing concerns today — up slightly from early 2022 (9 percent), while pandemic fatigue tops the list (15 percent).

This is a fantastic news!!

Global CEOs see a ‘mild and short’ recession, yet optimistic about global economy over 3-year horizon

Few Insights

  • Hiring freezes and headcount reductions under heavy consideration for CEOs
  • Uncertainty fueling long-term digital transformation : While current uncertainty is driving CEOs to continue to prioritize digital transformation, 40 percent of businesses have paused their digital transformation strategies and another 37 percent plan to take such steps in the next 6 months.
  • Evolving focus toward reputational and technological risks : Emerging and disruptive technology has landed as the top risk to business growth over the next 3 years. In addition, CEOs have identified several other areas as top risks to growth: reputation, regulatory and operational issues, and climate change.
  • Cyber security no longer corporations’ biggest threat, with more companies prepared for attacks. Cyber security has dropped from the top 5 risks to growth over the past year, with only 6 percent of CEOs naming it as their top risk (17 percent in February 2022).
  • Stakeholder pressure increasing accountability in ESG : More than one-third (38 percent) of CEOs say their organizations struggle to articulate a compelling ESG story. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (72 percent) also believe that stakeholder scrutiny of ESG issues — gender equality, climate impacts etc. — will continue to accelerate.
  • Economic pressure slowing ESG ambitions : Global CEOs recognize the importance of ESG initiatives to their businesses, especially when it comes to improving financial performance and driving growth. In fact, 69 percent of senior executives noted greater demand from stakeholders for increased reporting and transparency on ESG — 58 percent in 2021.

Download the report

If you are looking for answers I would like to invite you to join us on October 13th for our #WICxUNGA 2022 Signature Summit event presented by KPMG!

The 2nd annual #WICxUNGA 2022 Summit is bringing together business, tech and community leaders for enriching and inspiring discussions about the future of ESG+T and UN 2030 Goals.

The agenda includes keynotes, in-depth fireside chats, interactive panels plus power talks with some of the top names in tech and leading experts including Kim Folsom – CEO & Founder of Founders First Capital Partners, Erika Murdock Balbuena – Head of ESG at Robinhood, Colleen O’Brien – CMO at Armoire, Andrea Perkins – Vice President at Insight Enterprise, Tegan Keele – IMPACT Climate Data & Technology Leader at KPMG, Gena Goh – Channel Inclusion & Impact Senior Strategy Lead at Microsoft and many more.

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What can you expect at #WICxUNGA virtual event?

  • Keynote on ESG plus T Mega Trends
  • CLevel ESG Fireside Chat: Exploring Your Career: An Executive’s Journey Leading ESG Narratives
  • CXO Panel: ESG plus T: Tech as ESG Issue, Risk and Value Influencer
  • Power Talk: Differentiate and Grow your Business Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Hackathon 2022
  • Own Your Narrative Bootcamp: ESG=T Focused Personal Brand Building
  • ESG+T Advisory Roundtable Discussions

 Signup: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wicxunga-building-a-sustainable-tech-industry-tickets-403527289987

KPMG and Meylah has total of 30 virtual scholarship tickets and available at no cost with the code “WICxESG”.  Please feel free to share this special invite and promo code with your colleagues, or community network.

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WICxInspire 2022 Recap: Adoption of Cloud Marketplaces As A New Route to Enterprise Market

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On Thursday, July 14, the Women in Cloud community engaged in #WICxINSPIRE, presented by Kyndryl. Where we reimagined the use of hyperscaler cloud marketplaces to drive digital transformation and a new route to market.

Emcee Sonia Dara, Chief of Staff at Microsoft, created a warm welcome at the stage. Chaitra Vedullapalli, Co-Founder & President, Women in Cloud and CMO, Meylah and Sheetal Rishi, Senior Partner, Cloud Engineering & Development at Kyndryl brought important information and contagious excitement of strategic partnership with Women In Cloud within the Opening Remarks.

Then our Keynote, Jacqueline Woods, EVP & CMO at Teradata, brought us Leading Strategic Partnerships with Hyperscalers with audience Q&A led by Michelle Pruitt, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft & Women In Cloud Board of Advisor. 

The CXO Panel: Mastering Co-Sell GTM with Hyperscalers with Gail Mercer-Mckay, Vince Menzione, Amy Bray, and Annemarie Dev, moderated by Sharan Hildebrand. This panel showed you how to make sure that you have all the right factors in place before launching any new products or opening any new channels.

Then we went to Bootcamp! #CloudFounders Bootcamp began with Christine Puccio, VP, Global Cloud Alliances & GTM Programs, JFrog and Chaitra Vedullapalli led us through a Fireside Chat on “Leading Co-Sell Product Launch Strategies with Hyperscalers.” Then Chaitra Vedullapalli, led the workshop “How to Secure Funding For Eligible GTM Strategies from Hyperscalers” with proven tactics for your GTM strategy.

Next we celebrated the finalists and winners for the #empowHERaccess 2022 awards, Emceed by Amy Protexter, Senior Vice President, North America Marketing at Insight. We had wonderful award presenters from our sponsors: Camille Geiger from Boeing for the Cloud Advisor of the Year Award Presenter; Regina Manfredi from Teradata for the Supplier of Year Award Presenter; Andrea Perkins from Insight for the Digital Transformation Project of the Year; Dikasse Zalla from Avanade for the Investor of the Year Award; Katie Franzen from Accenture Women in Technology Outstanding Leadership Award.

Congratulations to the winners: Gena Goh, Beth White, Neal Dempsey, Ashley Miller, Elif Tutuk!

 

Then we joined our masterclass of advisors for intimate roundtable discussions on: Tech Leadership Roles, Executive Leadership and Presence, Tech Platforms, Business Partnerships, and Business Conversations. Thank you to our advisors: Nehal Mehta, Sreelakshmy G, Colleen O’Brien, Dhaval Shah, Sandhya Parameswara, Shirelle Francis, Anamarie Franc, Sahiti Bayana, Keri Smith, Geetha Gandhi, Ebony Burroughs, Amina Sartaj, Laura Sewell, Natasha Eichman, and Emily Colby.

Keep an eye for WIC’s next exciting initiatives:

Announcing the first WIC 100 Influencer NFTS! 

  • Get your WIC Influencer Limited 2022 Edition NFT: Pre-Order Now! 

The Exclusive Gold Edition NFT Includes Access to:

  • Annual Access Pass
  • WICxIcons Celebration Dinner
  • #WICxSummit2023 Speaker Opportunity

 

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Announcement: Women in Cloud Announces the Million Dollar Cloud Partnership 3-Day Challenge.

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WIC Million Dollar Partnership Challenge

Standing out in the $7 trillion cloud industry is no easy feat—in fact, 98% of women are unable to get access to corporate contracts and capital investments. 

That is why Women In Cloud is ecstatic to announce the Million Dollar Cloud Partnership 3-Day Challenge from June 22nd to June 25th, 2022. 

This challenge is designed to take women technology founders’ businesses to the next level and help them achieve the impact they have always dreamed of. 

Through a series of live webinars and editable workbooks, participants will become experts in strategic co-selling with cloud hyperscalers, develop a collaborative mindset that facilitates strong partnerships, gain access to new B2B SaaS investors, acquire skills in marketing and brand promotion, request warm introductions, and more! 

This challenge will cover a range of topics that promote professional and personal development:

  1. Collaborative Mindset
  2. Investor Access
  3. Co-Sell Solution Identification
  4. Brand Visibility

In addition, participants will meet and learn from industry leaders such as Chaitra Vedullapalli, Gillian Muessig, Rajeev Kapoor, Christine Puccio, Karen Fassio, and more!

Don’t miss out! Secure your ticket today! 

See the exciting schedule below:*

  1. Tuesday June 21st 11:00 am – 12:00 pm PT: Kickoff : Collaborative Mindset Through The Power of Trust (BONUS SESSION)
  2. Wednesday June 22nd 11:00 am – 12:00 pm PT: Access to Investor and Investments
  3. Thursday June 23rd 11:00 am – 12:00 pm PT: Cosell Solution Development with Hyperscalers
  4. Friday June 24th 11:00 am – 12:00 pm PT: Brand Visibility & GTM Plan

*Note: You are NOT required to attend every session. Ticket grants access to ALL sessions.

For more information on Women In Cloud’s 3-Day Million Dollar Cloud Partnership Challenge, click here. 

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Women in Cloud Launches Cohort 7.0 of Cloud Cosell Accelerator

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WIC is excited to announce the launch of our 7th Cloud Accelerator Cohort, beginning virtually on May 26th, 2022. Our unique accelerator program enables female tech founders to leverage the power of partnering with hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and IBM to become enterprise and Cosell ready. 

Women in Cloud has successfully graduated 70+ women-led companies over 6 previous cohorts with a global expansion including 9 countries around the world: United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, India, Kenya, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

The WIC entrepreneur community asked and We ANSWERED! We’ve adjusted the program to be even better than before.

Now A 3-month immersive program with even MORE benefits, including a 3 year relationship with the Women in Cloud community. During this immersive 3-month program the Cloud Accelerator provides: access to industry leaders, structured training, office hours, industry events, self-learning content, and more, all via digital platforms making the Accelerator accessible to women-led businesses worldwide. Women in Cloud is excited to announce the following 9 companies that have been accepted in the WIC Cloud Accelerator 7.0 Cohort of their award-winning Cloud CoSell Accelerator:

This kickoff focused on helping founders develop their future vision and this experience was led by Patti Dobrowolski, 3 Times TEDx speaker and inspired the founders to design their co-sell plan.

Here is the output of what a vision of equitable equity and access looks like for women founders.

Going digital has let us expand our horizon and open this program to people from around the world rather than just a region. 

This year’s WiC Cloud Cosell Accelerator is more than just an effort to make economic contributions to the system by empowering entrepreneurs. It is about embracing the new normal and moving forward with a sense of community. It is about adopting self-empowerment and finding comfort in knowing where to turn for support with a community at your side. Most importantly, it is about collective growth and learning.

The Cloud Cosell Accelerator combines training, access to industry leaders, structured training and office hours, industry events, self-learning content, and more, all via digital platforms making the Accelerator accessible to women-led business worldwide. Women in Cloud is excited to announce the following companies as accepted in the 7.0 cohort of their award-winning Cloud Cosell Accelerator:

  • AffableBPM- SaaS based Fully Customizable Business Workflow Management to provide Automated Compliance checks, Paperless – end to end, Cut down manpower up to 65% and Cost savings up to 50% . It is quick and easy to install and adopt!

  • Liiingo– Liiingo’s platform enables businesses to effectively connect, engage, and their shared customers’ journey, so they can nurture and benefit from repeat business and referrals. Liiingo’s mobile engagement platform removes those barriers for customers with our patented language delivery solution, as well as providing an intuitive an engaging experience.

  • LockDocs: LockDocs is a Digital-identity-as-a-service platform for the financial services sector. We are transforming how financial institutions collect and manage and customer data by offering a frictionless customer experience and generating significant time and cost savings in the process.

  • MyExcelia: MyExcelia is an AI-powered voice-enabled pocket coach that records voice, translates to text, anonymizes input, and provides in-the moment communication improvement feedback to managers, coaches, leaders, and employees at all levels without further input or effort from the employee.

  • OfficeTroops: Offers a global technology supported service to help small and medium organizations source, manage and nurture their future talent. The fight for talent requires a concerted effort at career brand development, candidate engagement and technology in hiring. Large organizations have substantial budgets to do this. We bring that same caliber to small and mid size businesses (SMB) who might otherwise lose out in this fight. Our solution centers around a white labelled hiring platform combined with concierge level placement services. We augment SMB hiring teams from day one and give them hiring scale at an attractive price point.

  • Accelera : The Maestro Ecosystem is a complete, all-in-one digital transformation tool. We partner with various technologies in payments, finance, and customer service through the API management layer. We use a digital identifier in a multi-tenanted environment to segregate a client’s data, which is orchestrated, headlessly, and displayed on a webpage.

  • Sapta Inc: Sapta is a cloud-based enterprise value management software built to help organizations achieve sustainable accelerated growth eliminating management chaos. The integrated management platform helps enterprises build OKRs, fuel innovation, make faster business decisions, and create a seamless CX journey.

  • Viverie AI: Viverie AI is the vision and brain for various types of smart robots, cameras, and sensors. Through collaborative training, our AI can be your solution for your specific needs. 

  • iLEAP Group: A Cloud MSP Provider transforming HBCU ecosystem with Cloud Services with IP based solutions.

Do you want to participate in the WIC Cloud CoSell Accelerator but missed the deadline? Don’t worry you can apply to be a part of our next Cohort HERE that is expected to roll out in late September.  

If you think you’d like to apply for the Accelerator Program but not sure if your business is ready yet?

 

Join us for the #MillionDollarPartnershipChallenge June 21-24, designed to prepare women-led tech businesses for the next steps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We invite you to apply. Click HERE to learn more: https://womenincloud.com/initiative-cloud-accelerator/

Women are the key drivers of the economy; by accessing the resources needed to launch and sustain businesses, Women in Cloud will address the economic inclusion to co-develop and co-market solutions by providing women the tools, knowledge, and networks they need to build a successful enterprise-ready cloud business.

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