Dear Startup Investor,
There is a company in our Startup Investor portfolio that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
It’s one of the startups I like the most, but talk about the least.
The company is Appvance. I recommended it to you in January 2014.
Its founder and CEO is Kevin Surace, a highly respected technologist… and Fortune’s “Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2009.
Appvance occupies a critical niche in cybersecurity – testing software under duress from peak traffic. It uses the cloud to simulate millions of users piling into an app.
Since we recommended the company, it has met all its milestones (and then some).
But I’ve never been more excited about its prospects than I am now.
That’s because of a new breakthrough testing platform Kevin will be launching next quarter.
It’s for very large companies – the global 5,000, in other words. They have thousands of applications. So they have to make sure their apps are doing the job they’re supposed to be doing – beginning with their design and going through the development process to production support.
Maintaining quality assurance (QA) is not an easy task. And it gets harder as the sophistication of apps grows and the number of them that a company uses increases.
Appvance recently surveyed hundreds of chief information officers (CIOs). It found that the vast majority of them are looking for an improved and faster workflow.
And that is exactly what Appvance will be giving them.
It will be offering a QA platform at the beginning of next year that will cover performance, database, functional testing and several other applications.
Though not yet released, several companies have already made room for it in their 2016 budgets. A couple of powerful channels are also being made available to kick-start the rollout.
It has all the markings of a big hit.
Appvance is addressing this growing need before anyone else. Though the CIOs of large companies are primed to embrace such a product, Appvance says it’s the only outfit developing one.
Continuous Test Flow
Appvance is already featuring it on its site. It describes it as a “DevOps dream.”
I don’t want to get too technical here, but if you’re curious what DevOps means, here’s a pretty good definition…
The practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.
DevOps is hot and getting hotter all the time. It’s “where a lot of money will get spent,” Kevin told me.
Yet another reason why I’m so excited about Appvance’s ambitious move into the DevOps market.
Invest early and well,
Andy Gordon
Startup Investor Portfolio
