SPEED MERCHANTS

Ever wondered how your favourite websites open so quickly? We sat down with Snapt to find out the ins and outs of load balancing.

Do you want to know how your favourite websites open quickly? So did we, so we called up Snapt co-founders Dave Blakey and Douglas Cherry to explain it all to us. You may have spotted the company name in the ‘ Women Who Make SA Work’ story in last month’s issue of PM. Snapt develops high-end solutions for application delivery, load balancing, web acceleration, caching and security for critical services. The company has been disrupting the market since 2012, and achieved year-on-year growth of 500 per cent in both 2015 and 2016.

Products and services are designed to improve and protect clients’ virtual infrastructure while providing fast delivery and a stellar customer experience. The ultimate ambition is to stay on the cutting edge, with a product that is powerful and easy to use. With some of the biggest companies in the world on their books – NASA, Target, MTV and Intel – we can’t see any reason for Snapt to not dominate for years to come.

POPULAR MECHANICS: Please explain what Snapt does to us as though we are 12 years old

Doug and Dave: At 12, kids these days are busy writing their own games, but here goes… Snapt is the leading software-only application delivery controller (ADC). We ensure that business- critical websites or services can handle huge amounts of traffic, are always online and lightning fast, and are secure from attackers.

PM: Load balancing is a very dynamic process, but why is it so hard that Snapt is the only company offering the service on the continent?

DD: Firstly, Africa has some incredible talent available, especially in the field of technology and computing. Load balancing has become something of a commodity term – anyone sending traffic to two servers is a load balancer. The field in which we compete is about taking a holistic look at the performance of something critical to a client’s business. We take responsibility for the delivery of your content, API, news or e- commerce store, for instance, and look to massively improve every component. This is a large and deeply technical solution with millions of lines of code. Operating at the level we do, it would be fair to say there are very few companies globally that do what we do. It’s great for us to be able to represent the African continent in this field of technology, knowing that we help to keep some of the biggest and most well-known websites online and performing at their peak, no matter the circumstances.

PM: Let’s talk about the future of cloud computing? It’s all just server farms built on rapidly improving hardware. Who wins the hardware war: Nvidia with Volta/ Tesla, or Google’s TPU?

DD: In some ways, neither! Cloud computing means so many different things to different people, but this question is really asking where computing power will come from. With so many IOT devices coming online, computational power will become a much more open and shared market, where devices all over the world can be used to process information as a mesh. Which players manage that, and with what currency (crypto, potentially) will be the exciting part.

In terms of cloud computing, as of today, just as everyone went from tin (hardware) to VM (virtual machines), and from VM to the cloud, the next step will be towards microservices and containerisation – vendor-neutral, bare-bones, efficient systems that can be scaled or moved with ease. As this continues to take hold, it is likely to spawn massive distributed mesh networks. We’re really excited to be a part of this future.

PM: Tell us more about pay-per-hour virtual machines – how do they make running websites more efficient?

DD: The Snapt ADC is also a powerful web accelerator. This means simple things like caching and off-loading computationally expensive processes from your web server, but, much more interestingly, it means accelerating content to your users. We all understand changing a website from loading in 20 seconds to 5 seconds being important, but did you know how important a change from 3 seconds to 2,5 seconds can be?

If an e-commerce site is making $100 000 per day, a one-second page delay can cost you about $2,5 million in lost sales every year. The Obama fundraising campaign increased its donation rate by 14 per cent just by decreasing page loads from 5 seconds to 2 seconds.

This is done transparently using Snapt, and requires no additional knowledge or tweaks to your web server or website.

We’ve also found that we are saving our average customer more than 40 per cent of their hosting fees by improving their infrastructure efficiency this way, which has a material impact on most any business.

PM: We know you probably can’t divulge client names, but what’s a really interesting project making use of Snapt’s services?

We can’t say, unfortunately, but Snapt is used by large educational bodies, a few government departments, healthcare groups, banks and e-commerce. Snapt has also been used in some pretty notable scientific studies relating to our solar system, which is really neat. We also have the largest music- and pop-culture content providers, as well as a favourite kids toy, and now content and gaming companies as clients.

In a way, Snapt is very much a behind-the-scenes solution, but it’s really awesome to know that we play an important part in some extremely exciting local and global companies. For this reason, we try ensure we are assisting the start-up and smaller Devops environments, too, because we are always wondering what the next great technology, service or idea will be to emerge, and we want to be a small part of all of these incredible stories.

PM: What’s the next step for the company?

Dave: Expansion. Snapt is the best solution for next-gen ADC deployments, and we are aggressively developing our brand and awareness over the next 12 months. We’ll be expanding around the globe, attending more shows, and just getting the product in front of as many people as we can.

Doug: We’re growing fast at the moment, and we need to make sure we keep pushing really hard. 65 per cent of our sales are from the US and we are doubling down in that market. We’re working with some cutting-edge technology partners and continuing to build really amazing products; we just need to keep doing this consistently, and stay true to our values and culture, and hopefully we’ll still be having a lot of fun along the way.

PM: Why is Snapt based in South Africa? Dave: The founders are all South African!

Moving forward, though, we can’t wait to leverage the growing talent pool available in South Africa to compete with global players – we have amazing people here, and it’s easier than ever to work globally, so we intend to continue using and growing great talent in South Africa.

Doug: We are very proud to be South African and we are always going to celebrate our roots here. We also have an incredible talent pool, as Dave points out, as well as a great way of life and, for now, we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. What is also amazing is how much goodwill there is globally towards South Africa. So many people in Silicon Valley have worked with or know South Africans and they really love to tell stories about how they have some or other connection to SA. There is also a really successful South African diaspora who are well connected and have learned a lot of the lessons that we are currently trying to learn, and they have an incredible generosity in leaning in to help us through opening up their networks and giving us advice. We feel that we have so much that is positive to work with and leverage precisely because we are South Africans.

PM: Outside of some coding knowledge, what’s the most important skill to have right now?

Dave: Problem solving. We don’t hire developers – we hire problem solvers. No one starts with knowledge of all the programming languages we use, but they can learn them quickly.

What we absolutely need is someone who can understand a client’s needs, the network, and also how to think about implementing, debugging, and creating solutions for the needs of today and tomorrow. I don’t even have a matric, and I’ve never looked at a developers’ university results. It’s all about how you think, and you can train yourself to approach things in the right way by tackling difficult problems.

Doug: I’d rather phrase it as what I think is really important to the business and, without a doubt, I would say its culture. Snapt has an incredible product and the company is on a great path, but it’s the people who will really get us to where we ultimately want to be. We set ourselves pretty lofty goals as an organisation, and we know that success will be found in the tiniest of margins.

We are building an incredible team that truly believes in our mission, that is supportive of one another, works as a unit and solves problems instead of creating friction, and it is this that will ultimately determine if we are those fractions better than the rest.

This is something we, as the company’s leaders, focus a lot of our energy on building and sustaining, and it’s a pleasure to be able to work with such a cosmopolitan group of genuinely great people.

‘If an e-commerce site is making $100 000 per day, a one-second page delay can cost you about $2,5 million in lost sales every year’