About

Thomas Blood

Founder, Rhyze GmbH

Twenty-five years in enterprise technology. Nine of them at Amazon Web Services as Principal Strategic Advisor and Enterprise Strategist, and latterly as its Commercial Sector Sustainability Leader for EMEA — sitting with boards and executive teams across banking, insurance, automotive, and the public sector, often at a point where a modernisation programme had stopped moving and nobody could say precisely why.

Co-author of Reaching Cloud Velocity (2020, second edition 2024), where my chapters include those on culture, teams, and the operating model. Based in Germany. I work in English and German.

Small by design

Rhyze is one person with a network, not a firm with a bench. That is a deliberate constraint, not a stage I am hoping to grow out of.

A firm with a bench has to keep the bench busy. That pressure arrives in the work as scope that grows without anyone deciding it should, as people who turn up before the problem is understood, and as an engagement that becomes harder to end than it was to begin. I have watched that mechanism from the inside often enough to want no part of it.

What you get instead is that the person you met is the person doing the work. No account layer, no rotating juniors, no handover to a delivery team you have never met. The limit is honest and I will state it early: I can hold a small number of engagements at once, so sometimes the answer is that I am not free until a particular month.

When the work needs more than me

Some engagements need capability I do not have. A carbon accounting model that has to survive an auditor, a specific regulatory reading, deep platform engineering — these are real and I do not pretend otherwise.

When that happens I bring in specialists from networks I have built across Europe and the United States. They work under my contract and my accountability, which means one commercial relationship, one person answering for the outcome, and no triangulation between suppliers when something goes wrong. I will tell you before anyone joins, who they are, and what specifically they are there to do.

The alternative — that I attempt the work myself and learn on your programme — is worse for you and I will not do it.

The short version

Published work, so that you can judge the thinking before you call: Reaching Cloud Velocity, second edition · Sustainability Magazine · AWS Enterprise Strategy blog · LinkedIn