Snapt, the South African snap-on user interface provider, has built a 95 percent American clientele and has opened its first store in the United States.
Entrepreneur Dave Blakey founded Snapt more than a year ago when he realised open-source software (OSS) had become more accepted in the marketplace in comparison to ten years ago.
Speaking to HumanIPO, Blakey said: “We’ve only just begun so we’re only planning on actually launching enterprise sales properly in 2013 (in the USA).”
Snapt’s products are available in all countries, but Blakey said: “By definition we’re selling a product to people who have a lot of internet usage, which ends up being mostly in America and Europe.
“To most people, what OSS means is that it&ssquo;s free, but what it really means is that you can get the source code for the software and adjust it and contribute however you see fit. The side effect of this is that it is of course free, but the benefits are larger than that.
“A lot of people can work on the project and there aren’t bugs or extreme vulnerabilities hidden away because everyone can see the code and fix it.”
Snapt wants to take OSS to the next level and aims to “address the gap that’s left between what open source software gives and what business requires today.”
When businesses switch over to open-source software to save on expenses, they often do not know how to utilise the software.
Blakey said this is because a product might be very strong technically, but may not have proper support and/or reporting capacity. Snapt seeks to supply support though focussing on developing specific “snap-on” products and a user interface to facilitate reports that adds value to open source products and cater for the needs of people who are less technically inclined.
The two products that form part of Snapt’s Application Delivery Controller (ADC) is the Load Balancer and the Accelerator. The Load Balancer deals with controlling the web traffic as a website grows. It balances traffic intelligently across the multiple web servers that the website in question utilises.
The Accelerator, launched last month, includes advanced reporting, configuration, alerting, compression caches static content from the server and will serve it locally, which reduces the load on web servers. The Accelerator also “speeds up the content delivery to the user”.
The cache service that Snapt offers is similar to the Accelerator, but instead of dealing with the web server’s load, it deals with the end-user’s traffic.
Aside from setting up shop in the USA, Blakey said Snapt has plans to introduce a third piece of technology to the ADC package.
“This is going to be web security,” which protects web servers against attacks, “worms” and prevents hacking into servers. “We’re looking at launching it in the second or third quarter of 2013.”
This particular protection is different from anti-virus software because it protects web servers as opposed to end users.
