A New Zealand-based software-as-a-service company, Raygun, has joined the numerous other firms putting boots on the ground in Seattle to stake out territory at the epicenter of cloud computing.
Raygun, a maker of error- and performance issue identification and resolution services for cloud, mobile and web apps, will build its Raygun USA Seattle-based staff through “aggressive hiring,” said Josh Lowry, VP of sales. It plans to have 20 workers here in the next two to three months, up from five today. Most of the Seattle staff will be in sales, though CEO and co-founder John-Daniel Trask and the product VP will also be based here. The company has 30 employees at its headquarters in Wellington, New Zealand.
“We chose Seattle due to its close proximity to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, as well as to capitalize on the area’s top-tier technology sales, marketing and services talent to fuel a growing enterprise customer base,” Trask said in a statement. “The Seattle community has welcomed us with open arms, and we look forward to being part of and working with the great companies that are based here and to making a positive contribution and difference in the world.”
Customers and prospects have reached out to the company, taking staffers out for meals and introducing them to others in the tech community, he said.
Being close to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft is especially important, Lowry said, because of “the ability to tap into their software-development organizations.” Raygun already integrates into several AWS services, he said.
Raygun, founded in 2013, offers software as a service, used by a claimed 30,000 developers at companies including 3M, Autodesk, Box, Coca-Coca, HBO , Microsoft and Nordstrom. “Most companies do not know that 71 percent of end-users abandon applications and websites after one software error, and 40 percent abandon them after taking more than three seconds to load,” Tra
sk said in the statement.
Raygun is currently doing less than $5 million per year in U.S. sales but plans to expand that figure by 100 percent by the end of 2017 through selling to enterprise-level customers, Lowry said.
Seattle has become the international center for cloud computing, home to pioneering and market-leading AWS as well as second-place Microsoft Azure, and to DevOps firms like Chef whose software-development philosophy and approach are intertwined with cloud computing. Among the cloud-savvy companies that have located engineering offices here are Alibaba, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and VMware.
