south african business link to experts

Advancements & Achievements« Back to Advancements & Achievements Listings

Following 500 Percent Growth and a New Presence in Silicon Valley, Disruptive ADC Solutions Firm SNAPT Offers Free Web Acceleration Services to SABLE Startups | SABLE Accelerator Network

Following 500 Percent Growth and a New Presence in Silicon Valley, Disruptive ADC Solutions Firm SNAPT Offers Free Web Acceleration Services to SABLE Startups

By Rowan Philp

Disruptive ADC solutions company, Snapt, now offers free licenses to all SABLE start-up members, which will solve their web acceleration and load balancing needs for a year at no cost. Having grown at well over 500% and established an office in Atlanta last year, the award-winning international solutions provider—whose 10,000 customers include NASA and Intel—accepted $1 million in investment funding this month as it expands further into US markets.

CEO Dave Blakey told SABLE that Snapt’s goal was to secure 1% of the world’s ADC market within 3 years, forecast to be worth $8 billion in 2019, and grow to 5% in the five years after. Ahead of their launch of an office in Silicon Valley this summer, Blakey said that the license offer was in solidarity with the dynamic start-ups within the SABLE family. Blakely recognizes the fact that “the high level ADC solutions are simply unaffordable for many small companies.”

(Interested companies can take advantage of the offer by emailing sales@snapt.net and requesting a Code for the free service, and can visit snapt.net for more information.)

Snapt offers the full suite of ADC solutions at a fraction of the cost of incumbents, due to its virtualized open-source R&D origins in South Africa, and its low marketing overheads stemming from its extraordinary trial-to-customer conversion rate of 85%. Its ADC and load balancer solutions “power fast, secure delivery of business-critical applications anytime, anywhere, on any device, platform, or cloud-based infrastructure”.

Benchmarked against equivalent high level solutions offered by US-based providers, the entry-level license has an equivalent product value of around $3,000. It also incorporates a GSLB tool, and the fastest support response time in the space: 3 minutes.

Blakey points out that the actual cost of an entry level Snapt license is only $450, as an open source-based software alternative to the traditional hardware-based ADC market, and due to Snapt’s stated mission to match the features of the best providers, while beating the costs of the cheapest providers. He stated that the offer followed a limited free license offer to start-ups at the RISE Conference in Hong Kong last month, where start-up founders were “blown away” by the value offering, and the opportunity for future savings and growth.

“Of course, the 450 bucks is not going to make or break the bank, but there will be start-ups within the SABLE community that will grow quickly, and when that time comes, they will have already deployed the solution and could upgrade and grow with us. By enabling them now, we hope both parties can reap the rewards in future.”

Last month, investment management firm, Convergence Partners, awarded Snapt a $1 million in growth funding, as the start-up enters a new phase of expansion and for the first time, marketing. “Earlier, we simply did not need marketing, as the product effectively sells itself; virtually everyone who does the demo buys the license,” he says. “Snapt is at an interesting point where the business is profitable, and it is plain to see that the product is good, and we have a lot of high-end clients and also a lot of small and medium sized businesses using the product. Now, we really want to go head to head with the market. That is why we went to Convergence; we really just want the funding for growth. We want to turn on the taps for our marketing.”

Blakely later adds, “Snapt’s success is proof that South African technology can lead the way for bright start-ups to disrupt the marketplace in the United States and globally.”

Chairman of Convergence Partners, Andile Ngcaba, said, “Load balancing in the network infrastructure and server environment is what differentiates successful companies in the digital domain. Snapt’s technology solutions give its customers this competitive edge. We are proud to be supporting a leading global tech player like Snapt.”

Last year, Georgia’s top tech incubator, Advanced Technology Development Center, included the startup in its elite ATDC "Select" membership, and Snapt is growing its Atlanta office. Blakey says he is also “very excited” about coming to Silicon Valley in July to establish a Snapt office on the west coast.

“Our customer breakdown now is about 60% in the US, 20% in Europe, and 20% in Asia, Australia, and Africa,” he says. “From enterprises to start-ups, the US market offers tremendous opportunities for growth. It is not only for people with a lot of servers that need load balancing, but also for people who might get bursts of traffic. It is a technology they should invest in already as redundancy, and had a lot of other benefits for them as well.”

At age 11, Blakely was ranked the world’s youngest A+ rated computer technician. He has not only layered disruptive innovations on pricing and support response –where his is the only company to publish response times– but also on the customer service model.

Last year, Snapt added a Global Server Load Balancer (GSLB) to its product suite, which is a DNS-based service for geographically distant infrastructures, and includes Layer 7 health checks and GeoIP-based routing. Yet to the astonishment of rivals, and even customers, Snapt has simply added the GSLB tools to its existing customers for free as a gesture which echoes some of the zero-cost value-adds to customers from Tesla.

“It is true; every single client of ours just got that for free,” says Blakely. “Our rivals have GSLB charge for those in every case. It’s the same with our patches and upgrades. “Should you really be punished because you bought the product last month, and not this month? We believe you should not lose out because you were an early adopter, so we will channel those features to you.”