Backed by US$3.1 million in private funding, Canberra-headquartered Nitric is building momentum helping IT partners simplify cloud application development.
In February 2024, the firm launched its Nitric framework – a cloud application development solution that helps solve the challenge of “build[ing] as quickly and efficiently for the cloud as you can without locking yourself into one vendor,” co-founder and co-CEO Jye Cusch told CRN.
Cusch and Nitric’s co-founder and CTO Tim Holm recognised this challenge while working at cloud banking solution vendor Temenos, helping manage its clients’ cloud applications.
“We saw that all of the [cloud] solutions at the time in the market either make you make one of two trade-offs; either you lock yourself in and you can move really fast and run with these native services, or you keep things portable and you do kind of a half measure,” Cusch said.
“We started Nitric with the only goal really to solve portability as a problem and allow people to use the fully managed native services of each cloud, but do it in a way that doesn't lock them into those clouds. So you can get the best of both worlds; move quick and stay portable.”
Uptake with IT partners
IT consultancies are among Nitric’s core customers, including the likes of US-based firms Impower and Uptech Studio. These consultancies are looking for two things.
“One is get started fast and be set up with best practices for a specific cloud or above that cloud,” said Nitric’s co-CEO Steve Demchuk.
“But…when they get into a customer and start growing, they want escape hatches; they want to be able to add more on to those core services that we start them off with.”
“A good way to say it is we get them started really fast, and then once they start using it, they have all these options to extend it.”
Demchuk said consulting firms that help clients use new AI services from the likes of AWS and Azure “are doing that across cloud providers versus being somebody that's just for AWS.”
“We've had a handful of those types of consultancies come to us and basically say your solution is perfect for what we need [and say] ‘we have working APIs on day one, we can demonstrate to a customer the different use cases that each cloud provider is providing and then actually build it for them when they make a choice.’”
Automating infrastructure
IT partners are also looking “to deliver the same quality of solution but with a smaller team,” said Cusch.
“…one of the areas where we take a pretty significant burden off their plate is [with] platform engineering or the DevOps side of things, so the scale of their team can grow without necessarily needing to grow their DevOps team.”
One Australian IT partner that Nitric helped in this regard was at-home health technology company Drop Bio Health.
Nitric said its framework helped Drop Bio Health avoid a 30 per cent increase in its DevOps team’s headcount and increase application deployment frequency 12-fold via automation.
“We started writing applications for people in production and realising that infrastructure, the primary method that people like to do that is actually writing code to provision all the infrastructure,” Demchuk said.
“What we're seeing is the experienced technicians who worked on all that are all now moving on to automating that, and we've actually already done that.”
A booming market
Demchuk cited interest from venture capitalists in the cloud infrastructure market and many new startups launching in the space. Big technology players have also introduced solutions similar to Nitric’s, like Microsoft’s Radius.
“We actually have a lot of alignment with how these folks think, we just happen to be a bit ahead with having support for multiple clouds and multiple languages and really embracing this new call for automating infrastructure,” Demchuk said.
“Obviously AI is dominating the venture capital side right now, but I think about it in gold digging [terms]; guess who also made a tonne of money? It was the people selling tools when there were gold rushes.”
“Just think about everyone trying to get to the cloud and use AI; they need accelerators to get there, and so we just see a huge market, a trillion-dollar type market for helping people get there.”
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