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By Bryan Jones
AustinStartup
March 11, 2009
Larry, welcome to AustinStartup. Can you tell our readers a bit about what Phurnace does? Phurnace provides software automation tools that reduce errors and save time and money during the process of deploying web applications. Currently, IT departments in large companies struggle with moving applications into production on web application servers. The process is error prone and time consuming, and more often than not, relies on a collection of hand-crafted custom-written scripts. Companies have realized that this is not sustainable. Phurnace helps companies scale operations, reduce labor costs and improve the time to value of customer-facing applications.
Sounds great - so, who is your target audience? Phurnace targets large organizations across all industries that have two things in common: 1) an agile development methodology that supports highly iterative web applications such as online banking and airline ticketing; and 2) large production environments with hundreds or thousands of servers supporting their web applications.
Tell us a bit about how current “buzz words” like cloud computing and virtualization come into play? The same application deployment problems that exist in a data center also exist in a virtual or cloud computing environment. In fact they are exacerbated. There are more people, more changes and more dependencies in these environments, meaning more opportunity for errors, risk and failure. Our customers are using Phurnace like an “install shield” for web applications that need to be installed, configured, set up and deployed correctly in remote environments.
What impact, if any, has the current economic climate had on your business? In a strange way, the current economic climate is actually working in our favor. Companies are totally focused on cost reductions and savings. By automating application deployment processes, we can help customers focus IT resources on more strategic, revenue-generating projects – and transition IT from a cost center to a value center. Also, because of our unique Implementation model, we can deliver tangible savings and ROI in a matter of weeks. This has been a critical success factor in our ability to secure deals with customers such as a Fortune 50 bank and one of the largest US based airlines.
Impressive! Ok - How are you funded? Phurnace started out with a small amount of angel investment. After establishing initial traction, we secured venture funding from DFJ Mercury (Houston) and S3 Ventures (Austin). The company has raised a total of $5 million to-date.
Alright, what’s next for the company? We see 2009 as the year of customer growth. We have a strong product that is well engineered. Now we’re focusing on building our sales and marketing infrastructure to reach more customers in more markets. Our goal is to double our sales numbers every six months.
One final question - I know I’m curious and our readers probably are as well - where does the name Phurnace come from? The name Phurnace has interesting roots that are very Austin-inspired — a blend of high tech software and the music industry. One of our founders left the tech industry after the Internet bubble burst in 2001 and was a road manager for the punk band festival “The Warped Tour”. In the middle of the tour he was hired as the merchandising manager for the band “Flogging Molly”. He traveled the world with them. With this experience, he decided to return to Austin and start his own record label – but he needed a name. Being a software guy, he wrote a small program to go through the dictionary and change the spelling of words by changing letters and phonetics. That’s how Phurnace was created. He thought this was a great name for a punk rock record label. It was going to be HOT! Well the label never really got off the ground, but he purchased the web domain www.phurnace.com anyway. Several years later, when he and his partner decided to turn a UT Moot Corp project into a software company, the name was a no-brainer. What started as a hot record label, ended up as the name of one of Austin’s coolest software companies. |