Feature

GLOBAL AMBITIONS DRIVE ‘REMOTE FIRST’ SOFTWARE COMPANY

From day one, Payara Services Ltd has been driven by a global vision. It has customers all over the world and its 35 members of staff are scattered across the Americas, Asia, Europe … and Malvern.

BY HELEN COMPSON

In April, during Payara’s fifth year in business, this open source software company was awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in international trade after increasing its annual revenue by 107% during the previous three years and more than doubling its level of export sales. The trajectory is in keeping with the targets set by founder Steve Millidge. Payara Services grew out of the successful C2B2 IT consultancy he had established a decade previously, but if anything, C2B2 made him realise he wanted to do things differently. “In the end, I had 14 or 15 staff turning over £1.5m a year,” he said, “but consultancy companies are quite tough to run. They are difficult to scale, because you have to have good consultants and you have to find them a steady stream of work, while starting from zero each year. “So we decided Payara would be a very different beast. We decided it would be immediately global and immediately sell to the world and, with that, hire staff around the world. It would be ‘remote first’ rather than operate directly out of the office in Malvern.” That offered two huge benefits, he said. One was the global sales potential and the other, the unbridled access to talent. The end result - thanks to an incredibly diverse staffing profile - is that Payara reflects a multitude of cultures, has native speakers of a plethora of languages and has the ability to cover just about every time zone on the planet. Steve, who hails from Whitley Bay on the North-East coast, gained a degree in physics from the University of Nottingham and then, after graduation, kept heading south. His first job was with the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, a Ministry of Defence scientific research unit in Malvern, researching semi-conductors and imaging. He later moved over to its software engineering centre, having spent an increasing amount of time on the computer-driven side of things. In the mid-1990s, he left the Civil Service to join the commercial IT software company that ultimately shaped his world-view. “I was a consultant and went all over the globe, trouble-shooting IT problems,” he said. “I worked with Oracle (Cloud Infrastructure Platform) for quite a few years and so I’ve worked in most cities in Europe, for a week at a time, and travelled widely across the US.” Come 2002 and what Steve describes as the ‘post-Millennium hangover’, he was made redundant during the recession that spread through the IT industry. He launched C2B2 in response. Fast forward to 2016 and the founding of Payara Services, Steve refocused on GlassFish, an open source software (so called because it is available and can be redistributed free of charge as long as the original coding is retained within the programme). It was an Oracle product and Steve knew it well. “Glassfish is a really small type of fish people put in their tropical fish tanks; one of our employees discovered a fish called payara, which is a big beast of a fish found in the Amazon,” he laughed. “We liked that!” Under the terms of an open source licence, software developers can design their own version of the programme, so when commercial support for GlassFish ended in 2014, Payara Server was created as a drop-in replacement. While the Payara Community Edition can be downloaded by anyone, anywhere in the world, free of charge, the Enterprise Edition is designed for mission critical production environments, provides additional features and capabilities, and comes complete with a support package paid for by subscription.

Steve said: “It seems paradoxical to give a product away for free, but the Community Edition gives us zero-cost distribution and the means of driving up the use of the software, which is key. “The next phase is to help those users recognize the benefits of running the stable, secure, and fully supported edition of the software - Payara Enterprise. The fact they can be anywhere in the world gives us great growth potential.” The software itself is used to build internet-enabled applications and the turning point is when it becomes the backbone of a mission-critical system. Rakuten Card used it to build a credit card portal for its customers, for example, and BMW migrated from GlassFish to Payara Server because of the compatibility and support it offered for its existing Jakarta EE (Java EE) applications. Once the software is integral to a service or production line, users want that comprehensive support the Payara Enterprise package offers. Today, Payara Services Ltd turns over £2m a year, but Steve regards his company as being at the ‘intermediate’ stage. “We have proven people want to use the software, so the next few years will be spent scaling up the organisation,” he said. “We are currently self-funded, with no outside venture or capital finance, basically because we grew out of the consultancy and that supported us for the first few years. “One of the key elements that binds our global team together is our set of seven key core values, in particular Passion and Openness: passion in what we do, and a very open culture, with closeness as a team. We work together as a very well-oiled machine, and we wouldn’t have this business without our amazing people. “The challenge now is to grow by around 30 to 35% a year. When we get to 50 members of staff, we’ll probably start looking at outside finance. “The plan is to expand our global software company and offer organisations around the world access to secure, stable, and supported environments to run their mission critical applications in production.”

It seems paradoxical to give a product away for free, but the Community Edition gives us zero-cost distribution and the means of driving up the use of the software, which is key.