Cloud has matured, but for many organisations the promise remains unfulfilled: complexity is increasing, costs are disappointing and independent advice is scarcer than it seems. Nieuwegein-based cloud specialist inQdo wants to change that, and is bringing one of the Netherlands' most experienced AWS strategists on board to do so.
inQdo has built a reputation as a reliable AWS partner that solves technically complex challenges. Now the company is taking its next step: from technical executor to strategic sparring partner. To make that happen, managing director Dennis van Bavel has brought on one of the Netherlands' most experienced AWS veterans as strategic advisor: Edwin van Nuil. The reason is as simple as it is urgent: cloud has become a commodity, but the advisory has not kept pace
Edwin van Nuil helped build the Dutch AWS market from its earliest days. In 1998 he founded Oblivion, a software and internet consultancy that began experimenting with Amazon Web Services early on. In 2014 he spun off the growing cloud practice into a separate company, Oblivion Cloud Control, which in 2018 became the first in the Benelux to achieve AWS Premier Consulting Partner status. Following the acquisition by Xebia in 2021, he remained active there for several more years as CEO Cloud AWS, latterly in a global role.
Xebia was a different world. Where Oblivion Cloud Control had operated in a small, focused environment close to its clients, Xebia quickly grew into an international organisation with operations across sixteen countries. That scale brought different structures with it. Van Nuil noticed the distance to clients increasing, and found himself less often sitting at the table for substantive conversations than he had been used to. "I wanted to get back to the intimate side of things, to a direct line with the client, to a place where you can oversee the full scope without constantly having to throw things over internal walls."
Too late to the table
That loss of client contact is not just a personal feeling of Van Nuil's. It reflects a broader development in the market. Earlier this year, the Dutch Court of Audit found that the central government had moved largely into the cloud without the required risk assessments, with limited visibility into the services used and available alternatives. In the private sector, the situation is not materially different. Cloud partners are typically brought in once the technical direction has already been set. By that point, the most important decisions have already been made: which platform, which architecture, what degree of vendor lock-in. Whoever joins at that stage can still optimise, but can no longer steer. That is why inQdo wants to be at the table earlier, with the business, not just with IT.
"We often get involved at the point where the technical choices have already been made..."
"We often get involved at the point where the technical choices have already been made," says Van Bavel. "At that stage it's about filling in the details, not about setting the direction." That is a missed opportunity, because the greatest room for impact lies in the early stages of a project. Being involved earlier means thinking along on whether a SaaS solution is sufficient or whether something needs to be built custom, on architectural principles, on how much flexibility an organisation will need further down the line.
Van Nuil recognises that pattern. At his previous company he worked for large organisations including Tempo-Team, ABN Amro and Wolters Kluwer, always from the business side. That gave him the freedom to choose the technology that fitted the problem, not the other way around. "When you're sitting at the table with the business, you can deploy all the techniques that fit the challenge. That makes you flexible, but also far more effective. We delivered projects on time and within budget because we understood what was really going on."
inQdo is an AWS Advanced Partner and IBM Silver Partner, partnerships that give clients direct access to the latest technology and deep product knowledge. But a partnership is not a straitjacket. Van Nuil is candid about that tension: as a cloud specialist, you can quickly be seen as an extension of the vendor. But whoever sits at the table before the vendor does advises from the client's challenge, not from a partner interest. In practice, that means developing proprietary frameworks that are not tied to a single platform, so that a solution running on AWS today can move to a European provider or a different environment tomorrow. "We make sure clients always have the freedom to make different choices," says Van Bavel. "That starts with the architecture you put in place at the beginning."
The construction company as proof
A recent project with a large construction company illustrates what that approach looks like in practice. inQdo organised a workshop, not with the IT department, but with the business: the people on the shop floor, the decision-makers, everyone who works with the process on a daily basis. The subject was a critical business process in which data integrity is of vital importance. Technology barely came up that day.
"We simply asked: what are you looking for? What do you want to see?" says Van Bavel. On the basis of that single workshop, a working proof of concept was delivered within a week and a half. So tangible that three other construction companies joined the initiative of their own accord. "One of them said: I've seen three solutions this year. This is the first one I can see actually addresses our needs."
AI played a crucial role in that, not as an end in itself but as an accelerator. Where a comparable project would previously have taken months, inQdo compressed it into a week and a half. "That's how you maintain momentum with the client," says Van Bavel. "The business case becomes tangible before doubt sets in." AI also helps his consultants get up to speed more quickly in a new and unfamiliar domain. The terminology a client uses, processes they are not yet familiar with, insights that would normally take weeks to develop, are now within reach. "You get drawn into the domain and can engage in the conversation at the client's level far more quickly."
"That's how you maintain momentum with the client, the business case becomes tangible before doubt sets in."
AI is changing the playing field for organisations at pace. That brings opportunities, as the construction company case shows, but it also raises new questions. Which data passes through which network lines? Who has access to what information? And to what extent does an organisation remain in control of its own environment? These are questions that are coming up more and more frequently, even if they are not always asked explicitly.
Sovereignty: cutting through the hype
The political agenda is full of it, and concerns in the market are real: according to the 2026 Dutch IT Sourcing Study by Whitelane Research, sovereign IT has a significant impact on IT strategy for 62 per cent of the public sector, and concern is growing in the business world too. Yet inQdo rarely receives the question unprompted from clients. The awareness is there; the translation into concrete action is not. And creating that awareness is precisely where inQdo focuses, not by steering clients towards a particular solution, but by helping them understand the implications of the choices they make.
A client recently wanted everything perfectly in order when it came to sovereignty, Van Bavel recounts. Until it emerged that he wanted to keep using Anthropic for his AI. "That's fine," says Van Bavel, "but you need to know that all the data you have analysed there ends up on American servers." Having that conversation, transparently and without a sales agenda, is precisely the role inQdo wants to play. Not making the choice for the client, but making sure the client knows what they are choosing.
The same applies to the broader trade-off around vendor lock-in. The convenience of building fully serverless is appealing, but it brings dependencies that are difficult to reverse later. An organisation that already knows it might want to move to a different environment in two years' time builds differently from one that has not considered this. "Think now about containers rather than going fully serverless," says Van Nuil. "That takes a little more effort, but gives you the freedom to choose later."
Pragmatism over ideology, then. Van Nuil puts it in historical perspective: "In the early days of cloud, everyone said the Dutch Central Bank required multicloud, but the reality was more nuanced than that. As a pragmatic partner, you could cut through the hype and show clients what the regulations actually required." That role as an independent sparring partner remains as important as ever, only the subject has shifted from cloud migration to sovereignty and AI governance.
Small scale as a differentiator
inQdo deliberately focuses on the upper mid-market, not on large enterprises, not on small businesses. That is not a limitation but a conscious choice that both Van Bavel and Van Nuil defend. It is precisely in that segment that the need for a partner who genuinely thinks along is greatest, and the willingness to build a long-term relationship of trust most present.
That relationship takes on a concrete form at inQdo. Staff are regularly present at client sites, use the client's office as a workspace and pick up conversations at the coffee machine about what is really going on. Equally, clients drop in at inQdo just as easily. "That kind of closeness is not something you build with rotating teams and annual contract renewals," says Van Bavel. Van Nuil describes it as a relationship that is not about maximising project scope, but about long-term commitment. "I don't come to do as much as possible, but to help you for as long as possible. Clients stayed not because they were tied to a contract, but because they wanted to."
That comes with an explicit promise to the client. "We come to a client with the intention of doing it for them, doing it together, and ultimately making sure the client can do it themselves," says Van Nuil. "We want to fulfil the role of trusted advisor and keep focusing on improvement and innovation." Not increasing dependency, but building the client's own agility.
That is the culture inQdo wants to develop further now that Van Nuil is on board. Not growing bigger for the sake of it, but becoming more relevant to clients who are looking for strategic partnership. In a market where many partners only get involved once the technical choices have largely been made, inQdo is deliberately positioning itself earlier in the process. For organisations seeking strategic partnership in a more intimate setting, that can deliver a fundamentally different kind of collaboration from what they are used to.
