Autoscaling to the world from Umeå
In the early 2010s a renowned distributed systems research group at Umeå university led by Erik Elmroth and Johan Tordsson spinned-off to become Elastisys. They had been building a prototype who could predicit and autoscale on cloudservers and wanted to investigate if there was a market potential for their product. And they wanted to get some help from us at Uminova Innovation.
Andreas Lind, Business Developer at Uminova Innovation, have been working with Elastisys from the beginning and is clearly remembering the challenges they had.
– You could say that they were to early with their technical offering. The customers were not ready for this kind of product when we started to work with them in 2012, Andreas Lind says.
World leading competence
But already from the beginning they had some key advantages who has been crucial.
– Their biggest strength has always been their world leading competence within cloud computing. But also their stamina and their will to constantly move forward and develop the company, Andreas Lind continues.
– We had the technical expertise and some patents, but we were lacking on market know how and did not have any network among potential customers, Robert Winter, Elastisys CEO, explains.
Valuable arenas
Throughout the years Elastisys have received a lot of support from Uminova Innovation. Sales training, PR, business development and a venture coach in Silicon Valley is examples of the things we have been helping with. And the support has been very important for Elastisys according to Robert Winter.
– The possibilities to get in contact with companies all around the world to verify our offering at international conferences, matchmaking events and workshops with the industry have been very valuable for us. During the years we have gained a lot of knowledge on how the ecosystem works, which means that today we know how to initiate and present our offering to the market, Robert Winter says.
And in one way, Robert Winter himself is a perfect example of the support from Uminova Innovation. As a business developer at Uminova Innovation he was appointed as a acting CEO for Elastisys as a part of the business support. And then he ended up as the permanent CEO in 2017.
Strong market potential
Elastisys has now left our incubator and their future looks bright.
– The open source and cloud market are in strong growth and is not affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We are growing fast at the moment and is on a journey towards to have a bigger part of recurring revenues and the challenges that comes with that. We are constantly having a lack of competence and needs to organize ourself and our processes to be able to scale to the next level. Today we have many international customers and have employees on other locations than Umeå, but it is here in Umeå we want to have our biggest growth and want to further develop our competence within cloud, Robert Winter explains.
– Elastisys is working in a deep technical area and their competence is world leading. For them its all about to make even more customers understand this. If so, their future is really bright, Andreas Lind concludes.
Short fact about Elastisys AB
- Elastisys deliver value to customers faster through managed services, open source solutions or consulting services. They help transform even the most security-minded organizations into first class cloud-native software developers and operators.
- The company was founded in 2011.
- Has 28 employees in both Umeå and other locations in Sweden and internationally.
- The company is owned by the founders Erik Elmroth and Johan Tordsson together with PartnerInvest Norr, Almi Invest and Northern Light Capital.