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Can NYC-based DigitalOcean corner the cloud market one developer at a time?
East Coast startups may lack the funding of their Silicon Valley brethren. But that hasn’t been a problem for NYC-based DigitalOcean Inc., a cloud infrastructure provider founded in 2011. Its fiercely loyal following of individual developers is taking them to the Fortune 500, according to Julia Austin, the company’s chief technical officer.
A VMware Inc. alumna, Austin arrived in Boston in 2013 to discover a frothing startup scene. “I was blown away. I had no idea. I was very VMware, so I didn’t realize all these great things were happening here,” she said during an interview at theCUBE’s Boston, Massachusetts, studio.
Eventually, Austin made contact with NYC-headquartered DigitalOcean through her mentoring with TechStars, which funds tech-oriented companies. She was struck by DigitalOcean’s impressive growth (they now have almost 1 million registered users).
“The technology was superior in terms of how we think about simplicity and what developers really need from a cloud solution,” she told Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio.
DigitalOcean’s philosophy is that while developers need a performant, feature-rich platform, configuring it should be easy, she said. “It should be as close to one click as you can get as far as ‘this is my environment; this is the workload I’m going to go run; you figure it out and let me know what I need,'” she explained.
Double-duty developers
This simplified platform strategy is growing the company, including its teams of developers, Austin said. “The evolution has been fascinating. We started out with more of the hobbyist individual developer,” she said.
Next were startups that decided to keep DigitalOcean as they matured and scaled. Now developers hooked on the product are bringing it to work at Fortune 500 companies, Austin said. “They’re saying, ‘Actually, DigitalOcean can do a lot of the things we’re trying to do on other platforms,'” she said.
Watch the full interview below:
Photo: SiliconANGLE
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