Opus has set itself apart from other competitors by ramping up its storage capacity with
multiple expansions of its Hillsboro data center, and investments in new data center operations in Texas and northern Virginia. With nearly
1.5 megawatts of capacity spread across those locations, Opus has several layers of redundancy so clients can easily recover data if there's a failure at one of the centers.
In a recent test of the company's hyperscale offerings – the ability of its data centers to quickly scale up to its users' large, complex data – OpusCloud outperformed Amazon and Microsoft. "For us to do that comparison, it showed us where we were at and that we know what we do well," Hulbert said.
FIVE TALENT SOFTWARE
For Oregon tech firms that were early to embrace the cloud's potential, the reward has been rapid growth.
Companies like Five Talent Software are a perfect example. Founded in 2004, the Bend software consultancy's employee count has roughly tripled in the last five years, as its clients' needs have evolved from simple app development to management of complex, data-rich websites, apps and connected devices. Five Talent has leveraged existing cloud technologies, specifically embracing Amazon Web Services (AWS), to become a software solutions provider for a growing number of small and enterprise clients. The company is a certified consulting partner for AWS.
"Five years ago, most of our clients came to us because we were a software company," Five Talent Chief Technical Officer Ryan Comingdeer said. "Now, 40 percent of the clients coming in the door are coming in because we know cloud technology."
With Amazon and other major hosts dominating the public cloud landscape, users have access to thousands of services offered by giant players like AWS. Much of Five Talent's sky-high growth has come from helping users maximize those features. The mass migration of data has turned the company into a cloud development and architecture consulting firm, as well as a software design firm.
"Whether you're a startup company seeking venture capital funding or an enterprise client, what the cloud has done for those companies is allowed a more rapid development process, because you're leveraging someone else's infrastructure," Comingdeer said. "We've absolutely grown because of what the cloud is for us."
Concentric Sky
A prolific software designer and major player in Eugene's tech scene, Concentric Sky has found massive success in the business of digital credentials.
The company's Badgr app lets thousands of clients around the world certify users' achievements in the form of an online "badge." The technology has a variety of uses in credentialing, whether it's certifying that a student has passed an online course or that a job applicant has received the proper professional certification. The digital badge enables the information to be instantly verified by an organization.
But Concentric Sky is also a software consulting business. Helping clients manage their cloud hosting needs gave them the knowledge to scale up for its own explosive growth in data when Badgr took off in 2015.
"The availability of cloud-based infrastructure and cloud computing resources has made it a lot easier for us to expand that business rapidly," Concentric Sky President Cale Bruckner said.
The company has built data centers for Badgr in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia, as the number of organizations using it has risen to roughly 10,000.
As cloud technology has become an everyday fact of life, "The software that's available in terms of managing your cloud infrastructure and technology has become easier to work with than in the past," Bruckner said. "That reduces cost for startups that are relying on cloud infrastructure ... I think a business 10 years ago would have spent a long time thinking about (data) infrastructure and how you're going to build it. Today it's about architectural decisions that need to be made. There is a cost to running cloud infrastructure, but if you're smart about how you make use of the technology, you can scale it up as you go and there are lots of tools to control the costs."
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