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By Laura Hipp
Austin Business Journal
October 27, 2007
Austin-based Phurnace Software Inc. is ready to burst onto the information technology scene.
Boosted by $1.33 million in venture capital, company leaders expect to be out of the Austin Technology Incubator and to double their workforce to 20 people by spring.
The young company is drawing comparisons to successful incubator alumni, and was featured during the Beta Summit at the annual Innotech expo earlier this month.
In less than two months, Phurnace has grown from three employees to a total of 10 workers. It recently added a fifth board member and will, on Oct. 31, launch software that drastically reduces the time taken to manage Java EE applications -- from several hours to only minutes.
Phurnace has a handful of paying customers and allows individuals to take its product for a free test spin. Users are primarily Java developers and system administrators.
"Between now and Christmas, our objective is to take these people who are evaluating it and make them into paying customers," says CEO Larry Warnock, the former chief marketing officer at Vignette Corp.
Phurnace is focused on a technology niche in heavy demand, says Prabhudev Konana, professor of information management at the University of Texas.
Increased access to the Internet has pushed demand for stronger Web security that slows applications, he says.
"The kind of applications they are talking about is going to grow. No question about it," says Konana.
Isaac Barchas, director of the Austin Technology Incubator, also sees much promise in Phurnace's product.
"It's going to save their clients money and save their clients time," he says of the product.
He compares the company to BuildForge Inc., an incubator graduate bought by IBM Corp. last year. BuildForge automated the building process of software and counted Google and IBM among its customers.
The technology incubator, part of the IC2 Institute at the university, nurtures young companies as they gather investors to survive on their own. So far, less than 50 percent of the 150 companies that left the incubator thrived. Of those, four have had initial public offerings, and 30 to 40 are operating independently and generating profit.
Phurnace was started by Daniel Nelson, a former MBA student at the University of Texas, and his friend Robert Reeves, a Java developer. The two first talked the business over while visiting at the Ginger Man pub downtown.
Both had experience in software and understood the difficulties that go along with managing numerous applications that rely on each other.
"What we're doing is very much a better mousetrap," says Nelson, now vice president of products.
The company name came from Reeves, who once tried to run a small record label called Phurnace Records. The music never took off, but he kept the Web address. Reeves is vice president of technology.
In 2006, Nelson and Reeves won the state Moot Corp competition, a venture capital-raising simulation hosted by the University of Texas.
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