Packetloop team moves into R&D 'Nirvana' as Arbor courts Australian skills
- 03 April, 2014 15:25
An Australian security-analytics startup, founded as Packetloop and purchased in September by global security concern Arbor Networks, has cut the ribbon on a high-tech Sydney R&D lab that PacketLoop founder Scott Crane believes will make the company even more attractive to the best of Australia's IT security talent.
At around 450 square metres, Crane told CSO Australia the new facility is “Nirvana” for a team of engineers that started out in a 54 square-metre office but now find themselves part of a global sales and technical support network that has put the business on a whole new level.
Arbor's new office was designed with inspiration from noted favourite employers like Google, Facebook and Atlassian but “we haven't got a monorail carriage,” Crane – now director of product management with Arbor Networks – laughed.
It does, however, have pretty much everything else. “We're competing in Australia's software development market with the likes of Atlassian for talent,” he continued, “so we've got to be able to offer a good environment and job satisfaction. The equipment is absolutely state of the art, and the environment is geared around giving staff the ability to accelerate and excel at what they do.”
The ability to lure Australian software developers into the Arbor fold has added even greater appeal to an acquisition that already brought Arbor a skilled and dedicated local team, according to Arbor vice president of engineering Kris Lamb.
“We were really attracted to the team that the founding team built up over the previous 18 to 24 months, and we're really excited about the opportunity to bring them into the Arbor family,” Lamb told CSO Australia.
“We felt they were doing something really innovative, with really forward-leaning technology in the security analytics solution they had built. It really was a key piece of technology that solved some new security problems for customers and clients – and it was a team of really innovative software development and business individuals.”
In the wake of the Arbor acquisition, Crane and his team redoubled their efforts to bring their Prevail Security Analytics platform to a global audience, recently releasing a newly branded version that applies intelligent data analysis to massive volumes of security data.
Keeping up with the demand for that solution, and the process of continuous improvement around it, will keep the development team busy in its new surrounds. That team, under Crane's direction, now numbers twelve but with the additional space in the new facility he expects this to quickly grow to 30 on the back of “very aggressive plans into 2015 and 2016”.
“Arbor has given us the multiplier that we didn't have before,” Crane said.
“It has given us the ability to accelerate development plans on multiple fronts, whereas we were previously bringing things to market fairly slowly and dramatically. Now, things that would have taken us two years to do, we've been able to do in three to four months with Arbor's backing.”