Over the next few weeks, Startup50 will profile a few of the startups that have earned their way into the Big 50-2016 Startup Report. Today, we look at Webscale, a cloud-based application delivery startup.
Startup in the spotlight: Webscale
What they do: Provide a cloud-based application delivery platform.
Problem they solve: Consumers demand a friction-less user experience when shopping online. Slow, non-responsive websites unable to handle sudden marketing-driven surges in traffic
will turn a consumer away in seconds, and they’ll take your potential revenue with them. Most mid-market e-commerce businesses use static hosting solutions, which makes the preparation for these traffic surges expensive and restrictive.
Many also pay for reserve capacity in the cloud, capacity that goes unused for long periods of time. This problem is compounded by a lack of control because business owners don’t have adequate insight into the daily demands placed on their site and are unaware of the benefits of moving to the cloud.
Of the e-commerce businesses that understand the value of moving to the cloud, many don’t know how to get there, either because they are not large enough to have a trusted IT team to guide them, or they simply don’t trust the technology enough to depend on it.
How they solve it: Webscale is a cloud service deployed between a company’s websites and the Internet. Webscale monitors e-commerce websites for various issues. Are they experiencing a traffic surge? Do they need to scale up capacity? Has a server instance failed? Does it need to be replaced? Are page loads too slow because of bloated images or javascripts?
Webscale proactively resolves those issues, and the startup contends that it is the “only company using predictive analytics in this way.” The goal is to spot and resolve these issues before they cause disruption, “ensuring the website stays fast and live.”
In June, Webscale launched its Multi-Cloud DR service. This adds disaster recovery services to its existing feature set, which includes application control, predictive auto-scaling, security, and single screen management of application delivery controllers (ADC) and web application functions All of this is handled in the cloud.
Webscale’s Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery (DR) solution provides backend disaster recovery services across various cloud providers and regions. The initial release of the Webscale Multi-Cloud DR solution focuses specifically on the needs of e-commerce customers, enabling them to automatically failover during disaster scenarios to an alternate location with minimum downtime and data loss.
Headquarters: Mountain View, CA
CEO: Sonal Puri, CEO. Sonal previously served as CMO for Aryaka Networks. Prior to that, she ran global business operations, channels, and business development for Speedera Networks, where she also helped coordinate Speedera’s exit when that startup was acquired by Akamai.
Year Founded: 2012
Funding: Webscale has raised $7.86 million in funding, with backing from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Grotech Ventures, and individual angel investors. The startup is currently in negotiations to raise additional funding.
Competitive Landscape: Research firm MarketsandMarkets expects the global Application Delivery Network (ADN) market to grow from $3.23 billion in 2013 to $5.82 billion in 2018. This represents a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.5% during that timeframe.
Global Industry Analysts forecasts similar growth, predicting that the global ADN market will top $6.2B by 2020, expanding at a CAGR of 16.5%. Growth will be driven by “the growing importance of enterprise mobility, datacenter consolidation and virtualization, and increase in cloud IT deployments.”
Webscale’s competitors include NGINX, AVI Networks, Appcito, and the integrated offerings from various large cloud providers, such as Amazon ELB.
Key Differentiator: It’s only a matter of time until pretty much every application delivery platform moves to the cloud. I’m sure there will be some use cases that demand an on-premises solution, but most will not. Webscale has first-mover advantage, as well as the right team in place, to stake a big claim in this fast-growth market sector.
Customers Include: PlayStation, ThinkGeek, Fresh Produce, Skinit, and Michael Todd Beauty, among others.
Why they’re in the Big 50-2016: Webscale won the Startup50 online voting competition for the cloud sector in a landslide. In fact, Webscale earned the most votes of any startup in any of the Big 50-2016 online votes. CEO Sonal Puri’s extensive experience in this space is also a major competitive advantage. Finally, Webscale has already put together an impressive and long roster of e-commerce customers.
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