Geek of the Week: Scott Grout
Another week, another geek! This week’s Geek of the Week is what many would consider a local hero. He is a CEO of an up and coming cloud company that’s in the business of web performance optimization. This startup is located in…Silicon…no wait, Portland, Oregon! No, really – Portland. In fact, you shouldn’t even be surprised. Places like Silicon Valley, New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, and even Seattle seem to get all the ‘tech’ love. Unfortunately, Oregon has taken a back seat in the media in regard to being known as a tech hot spot. But, it actually sports an incredible startup ecosystem. This CEO likely could have taken a senior management position in one of the “more established” places in the US, though he chose to focus on Oregon. In his view, Oregon is missing middle tier companies and thus will focus on developing this tier. He once said, “For a proper conical structure you’ve got to have a good middle class of companies.”
Before we get into it, allow us to introduce this week’s Geek of the Week winner: Scott Grout, CEO of Cedexis!
Founded in 2009, Cedexis is helps their clients build a faster web. They optimize performance across data centers, CDNs and clouds. The essential goal is to ensure 100% availability and improve latency. All around great offering. But, that’s not what caught our attention. This past week, Cedexis was in the news when they introduced the “Buffer Killer” for streaming videos. When you watch a video and it begins buffering, some industry analysts say up to 80% of the viewers watching that video will immediately close the window and begin searching for other content to watch. However, when media organizations begin using Cedexis, they gain access to a crowd based video platform that leverages cloud infrastructure to ensure that videos do not display the dreaded “buffering” dialog. Cedexis uses what it calls OTT Video, which uses multiple content distribution networks to deliver video that it claims is on par with broadcast television. By always ensuring that there is a node available ready to serve content to your end users, Cedexis says that your end users will receive an improved end user experience. Cedexis says that its customers on average receive a 45% improvement in buffering. Cedexis goes on to say that videos will load 18% faster and video failure decreased a remarkable 44% on average.
Mr. Grout has an incredible team behind him as well. In fact, when Mr. Grout came to Cedexis, they were just about ready to scale the business. However, Mr. Grout’s experience in publicly traded companies has afforded Cedexis some good exposure and momentum in 2015 and beyond.
As for Scott himself: he is a technology executive with more than fifteen years as CEO of public and private fast-growing networking and enterprise SW companies. Prior to Cedexis, he was President and CEO of both Radisys and Chorum Technologies – both located in Portland, Oregon. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Operations Research) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Masters in Business from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Congratulations Scott!
