Kiwi start-up brings ‘Silicon Valley’ style innovation

Kiwi start-up brings ‘Silicon Valley’ style innovation to local businesses

API Talent wins Amazon Web Services’ Rising Star award for bold, collaborative approach

MEDIA RELEASE: 21 July 2016

Successful Kiwi start-up API Talent is providing a cheaper, easier way for local businesses to do what Silicon Valley does so well: experiment boldly, accepting failure along the way, as they develop innovative new products.

The New Zealand company hopes to drive New Zealand business innovation with the help of Amazon Web Services (AWS), along with its collaborative approach to helping clients develop new products. It recently won AWS’ Rising Star award for helping New Zealand businesses – from start-ups to Big Business – adopt this approach. Just two years’ old, it has just opened its second office, in Auckland.

“We want to help people ‘fail fast and move on’ like Silicon Valley does as that’s how you innovate,” says API co-founder Seb Krueger. “You experiment and some things work and others don’t, but that’s how you improve. With AWS, you can do this much faster and with less friction in the organisation.”

“AWS makes this much more possible, and API Talent uses these services, which are available within the AWS Cloud, as a part of what it offers its clients,” adds Krueger. “AWS offers a vast range of services, from networking to compute, to storage, databases and machine learning, and serverless compute, for as long as a company needs them – all on a pay pay-as-you-go basis.”

John McKenzie, general manager of ConveyIT, an online conveyancing service for lawyers, who has worked with API, says this really does make developing and improving your own services much easier and less expensive.

ConveyIT used API to further develop its service when it moved to the AWS Cloud recently. Particularly valuable was the ability to scale capacity up and down without having to invest in new computer equipment, says McKenzie. “You can add another server online really quickly and not have to wait weeks for one to arrive in a box and then mirror all your data on to it.”

Work with local ‘zoo’ start-up helped win award

API won the Rising Star award for its work with ConveyIT, as well as with successful New Zealand start-up company, STQRY, now called Area360.

API’s work for Area360, which began life as a mobile guide for Wellington Zoo’s visitors and has now gone international (Disney’s Family Museum is among its clients), saw API develop the global ticketing part of the Area360 app.

“We won the award for providing valuable consulting services to mid-size and enterprise-size customers – putting their customers first and obsessing over delivering quality outcomes. Our staff are 100 per cent AWS certified, with many holding multiple AWS certifications. Many of our team also hold at least one professional-level certification, and two hold all five current AWS certifications,” says Krueger.

Area360’s technology head, Andrew Reid, said: "We really appreciated the opportunity to work with API and are pleased to still be working with them. We had a tough deadline to reach and what was important was to bring people to the table who could do that – and API did just that."

API co-founder Wyn Ackroyd stressed that an important part of what API does is bring developers and IT professionals together and get them to collaborate – which it did in working for both Area360 and ConveyIT.

Its own team, which now numbers 17, works in sync this way to develop clients’ products. Known as DevOps, this collaborative approach leads to quicker, more reliable and cheaper development as it involves constant product testing, which leads to speedy product refinement. This is the Silicon Valley approach.

Ackroyd says start-ups love this approach, but it is harder for larger enterprises, which have a different culture and business processes. But ROI (return on investment) is excellent with this approach, he says.

API is growing fast and is expanding into Auckland, where it has opened a new office. Auckland general manager Andreas Mueller believes “we’ve only just started with what is possible using this cloud technology.

“An awful lot is possible when people aren’t constrained by hardware reliability, lead-times and costs in improving their services.”

“If you reduce the cost of failure in this way you have a lot more potential because people aren’t having to wait months and spend thousands of dollars just to get started. Using web services also means it’s scalable – you can have as much or a little capacity as you like, and the starting price is cheap.”

Ackroyd adds: “We want to make waves and influence the market, so people can innovate using the massive advantages that Amazon’s web services offer.

“We want New Zealand businesses to really develop their capabilities.”

Stefan Jansen, AWS Head of Channels and Alliances, Australia and New Zealand, said: “Our customers in New Zealand are telling us they want to work with partners who help them enable the greater agility, scalability and innovation the AWS Cloud provides. Through its customer-centric approach and its willingness to experiment in building solutions for customers, API Talent is very well placed and we congratulate them on winning the AWS Rising Star award.”

ends

© Scoop Media