Mission is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and Managed Cloud Service Provider with deep expertise in launching and leveraging the power of the cloud. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Mission CTO Jonathan LaCour to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Jonathan LaCour’s Background
Can you tell us more about your background and what led you to your role as CTO at Mission? LaCour said:
“I started my career in Enterprise Healthcare and then became the founding CTO of a successful startup. Later, I joined DreamHost, where I had the opportunity to lead major cloud initiatives, including launching the first public object storage service on Ceph and an OpenStack public cloud. I also helped spin off InkTank, which was later acquired by Red Hat.”
“At Mission, I’ve focused on integrating platform, product, and service delivery to drive customer success. I led the development of Mission Control—now used by over 4,000 active users, 5,000 AWS accounts, and generating over 1,000 recommendations from our TAMs—and helped launch Mission Cloud Score on the AWS Marketplace. My approach as CTO is product-minded, centered on the idea of “services as software” to solve complex business challenges more effectively with technology.”
“As CTO at Mission, my role spans across product vision, technical leadership, and customer advocacy. I lead our platform and service innovation efforts, ensuring we’re aligned with AWS advancements and solving real-world business challenges with technology. That means thinking beyond tools. We’re constantly evolving how we package our expertise into scalable, intuitive offerings, including our Mission Control cloud software services platform.”
“Ultimately, my focus is on helping our customers get the most value from the cloud. That requires a product-minded approach to services, one where we blend deep technical skill with usability and results. I also spend a lot of time supporting our go-to-market team to anticipate where the cloud is heading, mainly around trends like AI integration and next-gen observability.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has Mission’s technology evolved, particularly with AI, cloud modernization, or AWS integrations? LaCour noted:
“At Mission, our technology has evolved significantly as we’ve leaned into AI, cloud modernization, and deeper integration with AWS. From day one, we’ve focused on helping customers get the most out of their cloud investment—but over the past few years, the advent of GenAI has truly accelerated that mission.”
“We’ve been doing AI before it was called AI – natural language processing (NLP), intelligent document processing (IDP), and predictive machine learning have been core competencies for many years. As generative AI has gained significant traction, we’ve had the opportunity to build really cool products and workloads with generative AI and machine learning for AWS customers. We’re helping customers deploy everything from intelligent document processing to chatbots and call center analytics—leveraging AWS’ powerful suite of AI/ML services, including Amazon SageMaker and Bedrock.”
“On the modernization front, we’ve helped some of the world’s most interesting enterprises shift from legacy architectures to modern, cloud-native solutions—think containers, serverless, and microservices. We support the Boston Celtics in their cloud transformation journey, which began with an AWS migration and then proceeded to containerization, elasticity, and powerful data analytics, statistical modeling, and predictive ML to drive on-court success from a massive, constantly growing corpus of data.”
“Our relationship with AWS has only gotten stronger. We signed a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS in 2024, strengthening our partnership. This last year, we were acquired by CDW and became CDW’s dedicated AWS practice, allowing us to serve more AWS customers with greater resources and capabilities.”
“We’re committed to helping our customers modernize, intelligently adopt AI, build for the future, and innovate fearlessly on AWS.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What makes Mission’s approach to AWS cloud services stand out from competitors? LaCour affirmed:
“Mission is quite unique in the AWS partner ecosystem, which is generally populated with pure-play consulting partners, VARs, and a handful of MSPs. Mission is a truly full-service AWS partner, combining value-added resale, cloud-native managed services, agile professional services, and our innovative Mission Control cloud services platform.”
“We take a strategic, outcomes-driven approach to the cloud. Many providers focus narrowly on execution, spinning up infrastructure, migrating workloads, or handling day-to-day operations. We go further by aligning every engagement with the business goals behind the technology. That means helping our customers modernize, optimize, and innovate in ways that actually move the needle.”
“Another key differentiator is how we integrate engineering excellence with a strong service mindset. We bring deep AWS expertise, but we deliver it through flexible, collaborative partnerships. We offer many different types of engagement models that best suit each customer’s needs. Our teams don’t just drop in and deploy. They work alongside our customers, helping them build internal capabilities and navigate the complexities of cloud transformation.”
“We also stay ahead of the curve on where the cloud is headed, from AI integration to cost efficiency to modern architectures. That forward-looking perspective allows us to advise not just on where AWS is today, but where it’s going and how our customers can be ready for what’s next.”
Role Of Cloud Infrastructure
How do you see the role of cloud infrastructure evolving over the next 3–5 years, especially in the enterprise space? LaCour predicts:
“Much of the narrative in IT has shifted disproportionately to AI as we ride the early innovation wave. But it’s important to remember that cloud infrastructure and AI go hand-in-hand, and are ultimately two sides of the same IT coin. Cloud transformation continues to be critical, with a surprisingly large percentage of enterprise IT workloads living on-prem on aging hardware. With that in mind, the next 3-5 years will be incredibly exciting, as AI finds its way into all aspects of cloud infrastructure services.”
“For example, Amazon QuickSight (under the umbrella of Amazon Quick Suite), now consolidates business-intelligence, natural-language query, document- and data-search, and workflow automation into a unified analytics and AI workspace. Existing QuickSight capabilities (interactive dashboards, SPICE analytics, embedded visuals) continue seamlessly, while new modules such as Quick Research, Quick Flows, Quick Automate, and Quick Index extend the platform’s scope from insight to action. This evolution underscores how cloud infrastructure and AI are converging: enterprises aren’t just moving workloads, they are building flexible, AI-native environments on top of them.”
“As AI continues to drive the evolution of cloud, our entire mental model of cloud adoption, operations, and optimization will fundamentally shift. AI-powered cloud operations agents will change the way we monitor, manage, and operate our IT estates. Building cloud-native applications will become increasingly automated, with AI-native engineers becoming incredibly productive. Coupling predictive Machine Learning with agentic generative AI will create even more opportunities for disruption, as our systems will be able to predict, assess, and remediate issues in our infrastructure completely autonomously.”
“Public cloud has been transformative to businesses globally, and the explosion of generative AI innovation integrated with cloud services will drive a second wave of transformation in the enterprise.”
Challenges Faced
What types of business challenges do your clients typically come to Mission with, and how does your team approach solving them? LaCour pointed out:
“Most of our clients come to us at a point of inflection: They’re either scaling aggressively, rethinking legacy infrastructure, or trying to integrate emerging technologies like GenAI into their operations. Common themes include cost overruns, a lack of in-house cloud expertise, and growing complexity across environments.”
“Every organization is at a different stage in its cloud journey, so we prioritize understanding the business drivers first, not just the technical symptoms. From there, we bring in cross-functional teams across architecture, operations, and FinOps to create a tailored plan. We also emphasize education and enablement. Our goal isn’t to create dependency, it’s to elevate our customers’ capabilities by offering them the right expertise at the right time.”
Advice For Businesses
What advice would you give to businesses that are just beginning their cloud modernization journey? LaCour recommended:
“Start with clarity — know why you’re modernizing, not just that you should. The cloud is an incredibly powerful tool, but maximizing business impact requires you to align to your business objectives. Too many organizations jump into cloud transformation without a clear strategy, and that’s where they run into cost or complexity issues down the line.”
“Also, don’t try to boil the ocean. Prioritize a few impactful workloads, set up the right governance and cost controls early, and make learning part of the journey. Cloud success isn’t a one-time event, it’s an agile and continuous process of optimization and innovation. And lastly, find the right partner. You don’t need to go it alone, especially when the stakes are high.”
Trends In Cloud Computing
What trends or innovations in cloud computing are you most excited about right now? LaCour concluded:
“Many businesses have spent the last decade-plus evolving and modernizing their workloads by creating fleets of microservices. The justification for these efforts has been enhancing resiliency, simplifying operations, and enabling independent scaling and development. While many of these promises have been realized, microservices could prove even more transformative thanks to the emergence of MCP (Model Context Protocol). MCP provides a standard mechanism for connecting external systems to large language models, providing deep, real-time context and a library of “tools” that allow LLMs to take action.”
“Existing microservices can become MCP servers with minimal effort, allowing LLMs to interrogate them regarding the current state and make direct API calls to effect change. This is especially interesting as LLMs continue to evolve with deep reasoning and problem-solving capabilities. With an arsenal of microservices providing MCP interfaces, off-the-shelf models can orchestrate and execute solutions to extremely complex problems.”
“In addition to MCP, I have closely followed the progress that hyperscalers have made in building custom silicon. Gone are the days when workloads were tightly coupled to instruction sets. A large percentage of workloads can improve performance while also reducing cost by 30-50% by moving from x86 to AWS Graviton. Mission customers that have been heavily dependent on Microsoft Windows servers can drive even greater optimization by moving to Linux. In addition to Graviton, AWS has created Inferentia and Trainium, which are purpose-built silicon for high-performance, cost-effective inference and training.”
