Our Leadership Team

James Smith

CEO and Founder

With over 30 years in the tech industry, James Smith is an accomplished leader known for driving innovation and growth.

As the Founder and CEO of Critical Cloud, James brings a wealth of experience in cloud technology, DevOps, and managed services. His journey began as a Senior Software Engineer at Dell, where he helped launch Dell’s first pan-European e-commerce platforms, systems that served millions of users and processed over $10 million in transactions daily. He later became Chief Technology Officer at Adactus Limited, delivering large-scale digital solutions for major brands, including launching Pizza Hut’s first online ordering platform in the UK, which reached two million users and £50 million in its first year.

James’s entrepreneurial spirit led him to co-found DevOpsGroup in 2013, a cloud technology services venture that he guided from a two-person startup to a thriving international business. As CEO, he built DevOpsGroup into a high-growth scale-up, serving more hundreds of customers worldwide. Under his leadership, the company formed strategic alliances with industry giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, secured a multi-million-pound investment from BGF, and earned recognition as one of Wales’s fastest-growing companies. He crowned this success by overseeing DevOpsGroup’s acquisition in 2021.

A Vision for Critical Cloud

James believes that innovation-driven Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) are the engine of economic growth, but too often, they are bogged down by the complexity of technology.

At Critical Cloud, his mission is to help remove the cloud complexity barriers, enabling SMBs to be faster, more resilient, and infinitely productive. By optimising cloud management with AI-powered automation and expert engineering, Critical Cloud helps businesses eliminate inefficiencies, reduce costs, and focus their resources on building, scaling, and driving economic impact.

For James, the real measure of success isn’t just operational uptime, it’s how much time, money, and effort SMBs reclaim to invest in innovation, customer experience, and market expansion. By making cloud operations frictionless, Critical Cloud ensures that SMBs don’t just survive in the cloud age; they thrive, compete, and lead.