The Silicon Review ^Asia

“Take Your Technology Learning Experience to The Next Level!”

In recent times the term ‘transformation’ gets thrown around a lot, and in the world of market turbulence and unprecedented disruption, transformation has a thriving need to create new value for new opportunities. Every transformation must somehow contribute and create value to enterprise because incremental improvement is not sufficient enough to win in today’s business environment. Having a strategic approach to employee development is a significant approach for business transformation. It is important to align business processes with overall enterprise goal, to achieve this it is ideal to deploy a modern technology skills-driven Learning Platform into Higher-Education institutes as well as Enterprise companies, because it provides an end-to-end and uniquely positioned foundational-to-advanced training solution for the digital workforce and extensive blended learning modalities for students of this generation and next.

CloudSwyft’s IT Learning Solution Model addresses the needs of modern organization and it has the potential to reach the diverse workforce. To achieve a transformation the enterprises must look with a strategic focus for better practices and processes, CloudSwyft is one such service provider who offers powerful learning solution for technology industry. CloudSwyft offers a platform that enables companies create and manage IT training, assessment, and development environments without the need to purchase and manually setup hardware and software tools. The cloud-based platform has been designed to provide on-demand virtual environments to deliver hands-on workspace for recruitment assessments, on-going training, quality testing, and development tasks. CloudSwyft is a leading Learning-as-a-Service provider based in Philippines and the key countries in which they function are Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia.

In conversation with Dann Angelo De Guzman Founder and CEO of CloudSwyft Global Systems, Inc.

How do you position yourself in the domain? How do you amalgamate latest technology with business objectives?

We position ourselves in the domain as thought-leaders of Future-Ready technology skills development in the industry by initiating first-to-market innovative solutions in providing the best technology learning experience and pioneering a product that will address those pain points in Education and Professional Learning sectors. We effectively combine, leverage, and apply latest technologies that corroborate the trends when we build to deliver and maintain the quality of our learning platform products; this helps us achieve the ultimate business objective of CloudSwyft which is serving our customers and partners.

Can you brief us about the history of your company?
I became an entrepreneur at the age of 22. I was previously a technology consultant in Accenture working on cloud computing projects for local and Australia-based clients. I was part of a pioneering group in Accenture focused on providing consulting and implementation services for converged IT infrastructure, cloud and virtualization solutions. My first startup was also focused on solving a problem in the EdTech sector, and then I got an opportunity to become an Entrepreneur-in-Residence in a venture capital firm called Future Now Ventures and the company is based in Australia and the Philippines. In April 2015, I decided to start a second technology venture and I named it CloudSwyft - with a vision to change the way how organizations develop technology skills. Then it raised seed investment led by Future Now Ventures. Now CloudSwyft has been growing very fast with customers and partners not just in the Philippines but other major countries in Asia Pacific, such as Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.

What were the biggest initial hurdles that you had to face when building your business and how did you overcome them?

One of the biggest initial hurdles were funding and building the right Team. We were able to overcome all these challenges by finding the right investors that share the same vision in CloudSwyft apart from this, we would be able to learn from the right investors on how we can grow our business because they also understand and have experience in the market we are in. Some of our company’s prominent practices are being lean, efficiently agile, and “scrappy” in a good way as much as possible and it is applied from management tier to all the way down to the rest of the Team.

What is it in your company that makes it different from others in the domain?

One of our core differentiators is our ability to provide Hands-On Labs experience in learning Technology skills. Having hands-on lab environments enables students and employees learn various technology skills by performing actual hands-on scenarios and activities that help gain practical skills on a specific technology skill-set. Our Hands-On Labs Access also comes with our Digital Hands-On Lab Accomplished Badge Credentials that provides a tangible proof of everyone’s learning achievements. Another aspect is our Blended Learning Experience service which completes the modality of learning future-ready skills in a modern digital landscape.

What was your business’ mission statement? How has that mission evolved in the time since?

CloudSwyft aims to change the way how organizations develop technology skills. Our mission has evolved in parallel with how digital and technology skills have evolved as well across focus on “Future-Ready” skills as well as when we were able to widen our reach across Asia Pacific apart from Philippines, locally. Now, we are on a bolder vision and mission to drive future-ready technology skills upskilling and reskilling of the next generation of 21st century workforce across the Asia Pacific region.

Dann Angelo De Guzman Founder and CEO of CloudSwyft Global Systems, Inc. -

Dann Angelo De Guzman founded CloudSwyft in 2015 with a vision to change the way how organizations develop technology skills; Dann was then 25 years old. Today, at the age of 29 he was able to manage and run his software company and able to manage to raise venture capital investment since the founding of the company from Future Now Ventures, one of the sough-after venture capital firms in the Philippines and Australia; as well as raised capital from WSI Group in 2018, one of the largest IT Distribution companies in the Philippines. Dann is also one of the youngest tech entrepreneurs and CEOs in the Philippines, most especially across the Enterprise software industry, making an impact in higher-education sector and industry upskilling.

“Technology and Digital Transformation will definitely contribute to the evolution of the Future of Work. The jobs of today are on the verge of disruption in amidst of industry skills gap. It is a very timely momentum for the Asia Pacific organizations to be at the forefront of bridging education challenges and driving future-ready skills across the region”