The Valcann Story

In 2014, I was finishing my master’s degree in Computer Science at the Center for Informatics of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). At the time, I was deep into research and development on a new private cloud technology that was just emerging in the market: Openstack. Alongside my academic and professional work, I built an offering that delivered business applications (ERP) as SaaS, running on Openstack. That was the birth of Valcann!

Anderson, Bruno, Renato, Diego, Leandro and Charles

The investment in the hardware layer was steep, and raising money in the market was not an option. So, over a few casual conversations with my old high school friend Renato Andrade, I decided to invite him to invest in the new business. Renato agreed and helped me finance what would become the infrastructure we needed to go after more customers. As new customers came on board, looking after the entire chain grew more and more challenging. Then, in 2016, I decided to discontinue the Openstack-based offering and focus on another technology that was clearly emerging as the trend: Amazon Web Services (AWS). No longer having to worry about physical infrastructure let me focus more on automation and, above all, on scalability.

As demand grew, new challenges emerged. I reached out to two friends I had worked with at other companies to help me with infrastructure and applications, respectively: Bruno Lira and Anderson Souza. By then, we were already serving a little over a dozen customers. Demand kept climbing. That was when I realized that automation, which until then we had treated merely as an accelerator, would in fact be the foundation of our growth strategy, and we began to invest heavily in it. What I still lacked was someone to support me in that effort — until Renato mentioned a college friend who could help us: Charles.

At that point, our customers were essentially micro and small businesses. But at a certain moment, our first project with a large customer arrived! Meeting this new demand would take one more person on the team; otherwise, it would be impossible. As soon as we had confirmation that the deal had closed, I picked up the phone and called a friend from my industry days who would be a perfect fit for the project: Leandro Ferreira. Together, Renato, Bruno, Anderson, Charles, Leandro and I formed the core of what Valcann would be from then on. With these guys, I was always certain — as I still am — that we could do anything.

The challenge now was how to scale the business. With the tech market growing at a dizzying pace, hiring professionals for the team was simply not viable for such a small operation with so few resources. Faced with that challenge, we made a decision: we would go against the grain of the market, and our entire team would be trained in-house, under the motto “we grow our own stars.” We put a number of initiatives in place to reinforce that direction, such as launching an internship program and partnering with higher education institutions in technology — like CESAR School — among others. With each new cohort of the program, which began in 2018, new professionals were trained and the team grew ever more robust, always under the strong influence of our core principles: customer obsession, scientific rigor, creativity and delivering results.

Over that time, we came to serve more and more customers. Recognition of Valcann’s technical capability became our greatest asset. We delivered large projects across the most diverse disciplines of Cloud Computing, such as the migration journey, application modernization, reliability engineering and many others — not to mention the adoption of innovative technologies like data analytics, blockchain and serverless. Through it all, one statement has always been at the heart of Valcann: “We are engineers. We solve problems. Simple as that.”

That is Valcann’s DNA. As our manifesto puts it:

"Valcann’s product is intelligence. The intelligence to solve the widest range of problems with cloud solutions that ensure security, efficiency, organization, stability and even savings. An intelligence recognized internationally, and recognized even more by those who work with us. Because, for Valcann, intelligence means treating the cloud as a tool. And making our commitment and attentiveness to our customers our true hallmark."

Now, as part of EPI-USE and GroupElephant, we set out to keep growing: broadening our offerings, operating globally and, above all, serving our customers with solutions that bring even greater transformation and impact to their businesses.

Valcann 4.0. Valcann, Cloud Intelligence. Valcann, an EPI-USE company!