Liberty Lake-based software and cloud-computing consulting company 2nd Watch Inc. has been named a premier consulting partner by Amazon Web Services LLC, a Seattle-based cloud-computing platform.

Jeff Aden, president and co-founder of 2nd Watch, says consulting companies are evaluated by Amazon on the quality of customer service, the number of clients it migrates to the cloud service, and providing training to employees in Amazon Web Services.

The Amazon Web Services website shows nearly 600 consulting partners globally, and 2nd Watch is one of 15 companies in the nation to receive the premier consulting partner designation, Aden says. He says the Amazon designation will help 2nd Watch compete with larger consulting firms throughout the country.

"It's great for the Spokane economy too because we'll be continuing to hire and continuing to grow locally, in Seattle, and around the nation," he says.

2nd Watch employs about 20 people, with about 15 of them based here, he says. The consulting firm expects to have more than 100 employees by the end of next year, with a majority of hiring likely to take place in the Spokane area, Aden says. He says the company anticipates needing more employees because a large number of companies are adopting cloud computing, which refers to storing and accessing data on removed servers rather than on-site.

Separately, 2nd Watch launched a web-applications comparison calculator in partnership with Amazon in October, Aden says. The calculator enables businesses to compare the cost to run a cloud service through Amazon Web Services with the cost of on-site server space.

"There's been a lot of noise in the marketplace about what cloud is," Aden says. Evaluating the cost of switching to the cloud involves more than counting the number of hard drives a company uses, he says. The calculator considers other factors, like annual growth rate of the technology infrastructure and the administrative cost of maintaining the equipment.

"Cloud depth is really this pay-for-what-you-use model," Aden says.

Once a user inputs the details of the IT infrastructure the business currently has, the calculator breaks down the cost of running the on-site server further, giving an estimate of how much money is being spent on maintenance and storage costs among other categories.

The calculator also gives an estimate of the annual savings of using cloud technology.