Partner Article

SoftLayer Catalyst Programme supercharges European web startups

European Startups Choose SoftLayer for Infrastructure Support and Mentorship

SoftLayer Technologies, a leading provider of global cloud infrastructure, is helping jumpstart the business of several new European companies in the web, e-health, gaming and mobile apps markets with its Catalyst Startup Program. Going beyond the standard incubator program, which provides free infrastructure and hosting services, the Catalyst program provides entrepreneurs with strategic product, market and operating advice and mentorship.

“Being part of SoftLayer Catalyst has been a wonderful experience,” said Pablo Pantaleoni, co-founder and COO at Medtep, an e-health startup focused on improving communication between doctors and patients. “The infrastructure perfectly adapts to our demands and the way the SoftLayer team takes care of us is amazing. They are always available and ready to help. That’s exactly what we need now, when we are growing so quickly and need to adapt to that fast pace.”

Infrastructure to Scale

One of the core benefits for Catalyst participants is opportunity to use SoftLayer’s global infrastructure, which being built for Internet scale, provides the foundation for the most demanding technologies and innovative ideas of tomorrow. Timan Rebel, co-founder of Snowciety, a mobile tracking app that provides real-time visibility into where your friends are on the ski slopes, needed a robust platform to make sure his app delivers what it promises.

“Thanks to SoftLayer’s Catalyst program we are able to get the most out of our map server cluster. To show where your friends are on the slopes, we developed our own maps showing the pistes and lifts of almost all resorts in the world, which required us to build a ‘Google Maps’-like environment. This was not an easy thing to scale!” said Rebel. “SoftLayer’s combination of virtual and dedicated servers is really working out well for us and the mentoring we get from the engineering team is helping us forward tremendously.”

ComodIT, a startup that provides a simple way to quickly deploy and manage completely configured IT infrastructures, was able to seamlessly demonstrate the power of its proposition once it began working with SoftLayer’s infrastructure. “We’ve been doing that through complex deployment and orchestration scenarios on a mix of both physical and virtual environment,” comments Daniel Bartz, ComodIT’s CEO. “We have benefited greatly from the Catalyst Program, which has allowed us to build showcase labs and cloud environments.”

Greater Market Visibility

The SoftLayer Catalyst Program also fuels its members’ success with marketing and public relations initiatives that give the startups greater exposure. “SoftLayer has gone above and beyond what we could have expected from our hosting service, even providing us with developer leads and nominating us for The Europas People’s Choice award,” said Adam Palmer, CEO of gaming startup Gramble. “We are very happy with our decision to join SoftLayer Catalyst.”

Gramble, PeerReach, Snowciety and ComodIT are among 60 companies that are the first class of startups to join SoftLayer’s European Catalyst Program which was initiated in September 2012.

“In only a few months we have brought many impressive new companies on board. Seeing them succeed pushes us even further,” said Paul Ford, SoftLayer’s vice president of Community Development. “We have a local team that is very actively involved in the European startup scene, engaging with these companies directly or via accelerators such as Seedcamp, Inlea Fundation, Startup Sauna or Springboard. We have ambitious plans for 2013 and want to offer help to more aspiring startups, strengthen existing and establish new partnerships, and cover more markets.”

Limetree, a web based multimedia family album, has just recently joined the Catalyst Program. Daniel Zacarias, CTO at Limetree: “We are moving our API backend to SoftLayer and are really enjoying the flexibility and affordable performance that the platform gives us. The support has also been outstanding. We are really looking forward to growing with SoftLayer.”

To learn more about the Catalyst Program and its application guidelines, visit www.softlayer.com/catalyst or e-mail startups@softlayer.com.

About SoftLayer Technologies

SoftLayer operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. Spanning 13 data centers in the United States, Asia and Europe and a global footprint of network points of presence, SoftLayer’s modular architecture provides unparalleled performance and control, with a full-featured API and sophisticated automation controlling a flexible platform that seamlessly spans physical and virtual devices, and a global network for secure, low-latency communications. With 100,000 servers under management, SoftLayer is the largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider in the world with a portfolio of leading-edge customers from Web startups to global enterprises. For more information, please visit softlayer.com.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lesley Booth .