RALEIGH – Amazon and Apple aren’t the only companies that have been eyeing up Raleigh.

After a lengthy search, the San-Francisco-based cloud technology company Sysdig is announcing today that it plans to open an office in Raleigh as its second headquarters for its global engineering and operations.

The exact location has yet to be confirmed, but its CEO Suresh Vasudevan told WRAL TechWire that they plan to sign a lease this week and it would be close to NC State University. Operations are expected to begin at the end of the month.

“We considered about half a dozen other major metropolitan areas on the east coast and central US,” said Vasudevan, declining to name them specifically.

“But we picked Raleigh because the area is rich with technical talent from acclaimed universities, and there is a longstanding history of innovation.”

Another motivating factor, he acknowledged, was the fact that Raleigh is home to many of its partners and customers, including Red Hat and IBM. However, he couldn’t say whether the company also received any tax incentive to make the move.

The rapidly growing startup, which provides security, monitoring, and forensics for containers and microservices, is now seeking to hire engineers, customer support, customer success and sales personnel.

In total, around 30 employees will be added to their already 150-strong team, the CEO said.

Hiring locally is a priority, Vasudevan added. “We aren’t moving to Raleigh just for some office space,” he said. “We are investing in the people, the innovation, and the tech culture that thrives in the area. We need people with experience in Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Java, and more importantly, a vision of what the next generation of applications will look like. We are confident we will find these highly technical minds in Raleigh.”

Skyrocketing demand

Let’s backtrack five years ago. A young, Italian computer engineer by the name of Loris Degioanni was temporarily unemployed. He needed a break after selling the start-up he had co-founded seven years earlier, CACE Technologies, the network analyzer company behind popular tools like Wireshark and Winpcap.

After taking a few months off to ski the Western Alps, he was ready for another adventure. And more importantly, he saw a gap in the market.

At the time, with the widespread adoption of the cloud and the advent of containers, he realized that containers and microservices would require a radically new approach to monitoring, security and forensics.

He raised an initial $2.3 million in seed money, and in 2013 launched Sysdig and its open source software “in [his] backyard with a world class team”. Two years later, the company rolled out its commercial monitoring software, Sysdig Monitor, followed by its commercial security platform in October 2017. Over the last five years, the company has raised a total of $50 million in venture capital.

According to Vasudevan, who took over as CEO this April, demand for its platform is “skyrocketing”.

“Our growth is due in part to increased Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift adoption,” he explained. “As companies move to the cloud, they need a completely new way to capture the performance and security data essential to effectively running their business-critical applications. Through our innovations, Sysdig unlocks a completely new source of machine data, which enables us to provide the deepest visibility into containers and microservices.”

In the past few months alone, the company certified its container intelligence platform for Red Hat’s OpenShift-based container platform. It also announced a partnership with IBM to support the Sysdig Cloud-Native Intelligence Platform in IBM Cloud.

“We’re really excited about this growth, but this we’re still at the beginning of a tremendous run,” said Vasudevan.

“We are confident this move will increase our ability to innovate, service enterprise customers, and more deeply partner with the Raleigh-based companies [that] are shaping the future of cloud-native applications.”

In addition to corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California, Sysdig also has offices in London, UK; Belgrade, Serbia; and Davis, California.