Cloudwerx appoints Cloud Sherpas alum Brendan Connolly as COO

Reunites several former Cloud Sherpas as Connolly set to lead agentic AI services.

Cloudwerx has appointed Brendan Connolly as chief operating officer and, data and AI lead, with a remit to expand agentic AI offerings.

Connolly previously served as managing director, data and AI go-to-market lead ANZ at Accenture and has held senior roles at BearingPoint, Pactera and Cloud Sherpas.

His appointment reunites several Cloud Sherpas alumni, including CEO Toby Wilcock, chief growth officer Alyssia Tennant, chief strategy and innovation officer John Cosgrove and CTO Chris Baldock.

Connolly was drawn to Cloudwerx because the company has thrown out the old service delivery playbook, including not being afraid to cannibalise old revenue streams to arrive at a new way of working.

“This approach is really resonating with clients and fixes so many problems of traditional services delivery — overruns, budget blow-outs and poor quality deliverables,” he told CRN Australia.

The leadership team understood that reforming delivery without reforming design does not work, especially in the current era of agentic AI.

Following its acquisition of data and AI consultancy Lightfold, Cloudwerx has built two proprietary frameworks that underpin its agentic AI program: Delivery units and Tesseract.

Delivery Units are modular, fixed-price building blocks that clients redeem for a range of data, AI and Salesforce deliverables, offering flexible project planning and predictable costs.

Tesseract is a modular design system that standardises quality and outcomes across AI, cloud data and Salesforce projects, supporting consistent delivery as agentic AI evolves.

Connolly emphasised that Cloudwerx’s model answers customer demand for timely, predictable outcomes in data and AI projects.

“Clients deserve to see partners showing up differently and delivering on the promise of AI today, not some point in the future,” he said.

The firm wants to deepen partner integrations with Salesforce and Snowflake and expand its presence in the local and regional channel ecosystem and beyond.

“Our ambition is to be the world’s first genuine productised services delivery firm,” he said.

As he takes the reins, Connolly’s priority will be to help Cloudwerx scale its productised delivery model, which he says is an industry first with wide-ranging potential.

“I firmly believe that the Cloudwerx model will become a global industry standard,” he said.