Whole Reach

WholeReach · industry directory

Technology

The companies that define the technology industry, each read on the same nine-check website rubric — a 0–100 score with the exact fixes — alongside the concepts, the developments and the questions that shape the field.

37companies tracked
30sites scored
83average site score
7blocked our scanner

The companies

30 companies in the technology industry, each graded on the nine things that decide whether a buyer or an AI assistant can find and trust them online. Open any name for the full write-up and the specific fixes.

CompanyHQ / regionSite score
CrowdStrikewww.crowdstrike.comUS (Austin TX HQ)100 0 to fix
Dell Technologieswww.dell.comUS (Round Rock TX HQ, Austin metro)100 0 to fix
GitLababout.gitlab.comglobal100 0 to fix
Salesforcewww.salesforce.comglobal100 0 to fix
Zscalerwww.zscaler.comglobal100 0 to fix
Amazon Web Servicesaws.amazon.comglobal92 1 to fix
Dockerwww.docker.comglobal92 1 to fix
Microsoftwww.microsoft.comglobal92 1 to fix
Oktawww.okta.comglobal92 1 to fix
SailPointwww.sailpoint.comUS (Austin TX HQ)92 1 to fix
Stripestripe.comglobal92 1 to fix
Google Cloudcloud.google.comglobal90 1 to fix
HubSpotwww.hubspot.comglobal88 1 to fix
Twiliowww.twilio.comglobal88 1 to fix
NXP Semiconductorswww.nxp.comglobal (Austin TX US operations)84 2 to fix
Q2 Holdingswww.q2.comUS (Austin TX HQ)84 2 to fix
Bumblebumble.comUS (Austin TX HQ)82 2 to fix
Microsoft Azureazure.microsoft.comglobal82 2 to fix
IBMwww.ibm.comglobal (long-standing Austin TX site)80 2 to fix
Terraform (HashiCorp)developer.hashicorp.com/terraformglobal80 2 to fix
Workdaywww.workday.comglobal80 2 to fix
Databrickswww.databricks.comglobal78 2 to fix
Atlassianwww.atlassian.comglobal76 2 to fix
Snowflakewww.snowflake.comglobal74 3 to fix
Datadogwww.datadoghq.comglobal73 2 to fix
PostgreSQLwww.postgresql.orgglobal70 3 to fix
GitHubgithub.comglobal66 3 to fix
Palo Alto Networkswww.paloaltonetworks.comglobal66 3 to fix
Reactreact.devglobal58 4 to fix
Kuberneteskubernetes.ioglobal53 4 to fix

70+ solid   45–69 gaps   under 45 costing customers

Sites we couldn’t reach

7 businesses whose website blocked our scanner — common when a site filters datacenter traffic, and not a sign the site is broken. A blocked site is never scored zero.

AMD · www.amd.com ↗Indeed · www.indeed.com ↗Oracle · www.oracle.com ↗SAP · www.sap.com ↗ServiceNow · www.servicenow.com ↗Silicon Labs · www.silabs.com ↗Tesla · www.tesla.com ↗

Who defines the technology market

The firms, funds and institutions that set the terms in technology — context, not local listings; never scored.

Amazon Web Servicestechnology source

The largest cloud platform; its primitives and pricing set the baseline for B2B infrastructure costs.

AMDtechnology source

CPUs, GPUs and AI accelerators; its Austin campus is a long-standing major local engineering site.

Atlassiancompetitor

Jira and Confluence; the canonical low-touch, self-serve-to-enterprise go-to-market story.

Austin Technology Councilauthority

Austin's technology industry association - member programming, State of Tech reporting and executive roundtables.

Bumbleadopter

Austin-headquartered app company - one of the city's most visible consumer technology employers.

Capital Factoryauthority

Austin's central startup hub, accelerator and investor network - the room where local tech deals get introduced.

CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)authority

Home of Kubernetes and the cloud-native project landscape; its graduation status signals production readiness.

CrowdStrikecompetitor

Austin-headquartered cloud-native endpoint protection and threat intelligence; a flagship local enterprise vendor.

Databrickscompetitor

Lakehouse architecture for analytics and AI workloads - the main rival in enterprise data platforms.

Datadogcompetitor

Metrics, logs and traces in one platform - the reference case for usage-based pricing and land-and-expand.

Dell Technologiescompetitor

Round Rock-headquartered servers, storage, PCs and AI infrastructure - the Austin region's anchor technology employer.

Dockertechnology source

Container images and local development environments - the unit software now ships in.

Forresterauthority

Wave evaluations and Total Economic Impact studies used to build the business case.

G2authority

Verified user reviews and Grid reports; the second thing a buyer checks after a vendor's own site.

Gartnerauthority

Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities - the research enterprise buyers cite to justify a shortlist.

GitHubcompetitor

Where most software is hosted and reviewed - Actions, Copilot and the default developer distribution channel.

GitLabcompetitor

Single-application DevOps with source, CI/CD and security scanning; open core plus self-managed deployment.

Google Cloudtechnology source

Data, AI and Kubernetes-centric cloud - the origin of much of the cloud-native stack.

Hacker Newsauthority

Where technical audiences surface and judge things; a referral source, not a rival.

HubSpotcompetitor

Mid-market CRM and marketing suite, and the most-cited example of inbound and freemium-led growth.

IBMcompetitor

Consulting, hybrid cloud, Red Hat and watsonx; its Austin campus is one of the city's oldest tech operations.

IEEE Spectrumauthority

The engineering profession's own publication - the most citable robotics and hardware source there is.

Indeedcompetitor

Austin-headquartered job marketplace selling employer subscriptions and sponsored placement - a major local software employer.

Kubernetestechnology source

The portability layer that makes multi-cloud, VPC and on-prem deployment of the same product realistic.

Technology guides

AI & LLMs

Large language models, assistants, prompting, agents and applications - including plain-language explanation for non-technical readers.

AI assistants & agents

Systems that take actions rather than answer questions - the current centre of gravity, and now the main feature race inside enterprise software.

Open models & local AI

Running capable models without a hyperscaler - self-hosting, open weights, on-prem and VPC inference for regulated buyers.

Developer tools & software

Frameworks, dev tooling, open source, CI/CD, coding workflows and the agentic coding assistants reshaping them.

Cloud & infrastructure

Compute, data centers, APIs, platforms, Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code - plus what cloud spend actually costs.

Cybersecurity

Threats, breaches, privacy and defense - endpoint, cloud, identity and software supply chain.

Robotics & automation

Humanoids and mobile robots, industrial and warehouse automation, drones - and the machines a buyer can actually purchase today.

Startups, funding & the Austin tech market

New companies, rounds and the business of tech, with Austin as a first-class market: Dell, Oracle, IBM, Indeed, CrowdStrike, Tesla, AMD, NXP, Silicon Labs, Q2 and SailPoint.

Safety, policy & regulation

The constraint layer that increasingly decides what ships - AI rules, provenance, data residency and sector regulation.

SaaS metrics & unit economics

ARR, MRR, net and gross retention, churn, CAC, LTV, payback, magic number and the rule of 40 - how software businesses are judged.

Pricing & packaging

Seat-based versus usage-based and hybrid pricing, freemium tiers, land-and-expand motions, and what AI features do to a per-seat model.

Go-to-market: PLG vs sales-led

Product-led self-serve adoption against enterprise field sales - and the hybrid motion most B2B software now runs.

Enterprise buying & procurement

MQL to SQL, pipeline coverage, POCs and pilots, RFPs, security reviews, MSAs, DPAs and SLAs - the real path from interest to signature.

Compliance & certifications

SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, HIPAA and GDPR - the audit evidence that decides whether a deal can even start.

Identity, access & zero trust

SSO, SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning, RBAC and least privilege - the enterprise checklist that gates every seat.

Reliability, observability & incident response

Uptime commitments and nines, SRE practice, error budgets, monitoring and tracing, on-call, incidents and blameless postmortems.

Concepts

ARR / MRR
Annual and monthly recurring revenue - the normalized subscription run-rate a software business is valued on.
NRR / GRR (net and gross revenue retention)
NRR is revenue from existing customers a year later including expansion, minus churn and downgrades - above 100% means growth without new logos. GRR strips expansion out, can never exceed 100%, and shows the true leak rate.
Churn
Customers or revenue lost in a period; logo churn counts accounts, revenue churn counts dollars.
CAC (customer acquisition cost)
Fully loaded sales and marketing spend divided by new customers won.
LTV (lifetime value)
Gross-margin revenue expected from a customer over the whole relationship; usually read as an LTV:CAC ratio.
CAC payback period
Months of gross profit needed to earn back what it cost to win the customer - the cash-efficiency number boards watch.
Magic number
Net new ARR divided by prior-period sales and marketing spend - a quick read on whether growth spend is working.
Rule of 40
Growth rate plus profit margin should clear 40 - the shorthand test for balancing growth against burn.
PLG vs sales-led
Product-led growth lets the product itself drive signup, adoption and expansion before anyone talks to sales; sales-led growth runs on reps, demos and negotiated contracts. Most B2B software now runs a hybrid of both.
Freemium
A permanently free tier used as the top of funnel, with paid tiers gated on scale, teams or admin controls.
Land and expand
Win a small team or single use case, then grow seats, products and spend inside the same account.
Seat-based vs usage-based pricing
Charging per named or active user is predictable but decouples price from value once AI does the work; charging per unit consumed - API calls, tokens, events, compute - tracks value but makes forecasting harder. Hybrids are now common.
TCV / ACV
Total contract value across the whole term versus annual contract value in a single year - the two numbers deals get quoted in.
Pipeline coverage
Open pipeline divided by the quota it must produce; 3x to 4x is the common planning rule.
MQL / SQL
Marketing qualified lead (fits the profile and engaged) versus sales qualified lead (sales has accepted it as real).
POC / pilot
A scoped trial with success criteria agreed up front; without written criteria it becomes an unpaid deployment.
RFP
Request for proposal - the formal, scored procurement process large and public-sector buyers run.
MSA
Master service agreement - the umbrella contract; individual orders attach as order forms or SOWs.
DPA
Data processing agreement - the contract governing personal data a vendor handles, required under GDPR.
SLA
Service level agreement - the committed uptime and response targets, with service credits when they are missed.
Uptime / nines
Availability expressed as nines: 99.9% allows about 8.8 hours of downtime a year, 99.99% about 53 minutes.
SOC 2
An independent audit report on security controls; Type I tests design at a point in time, Type II tests operation over months.
ISO 27001
International certification for an information security management system - the standard European and global buyers ask for.
FedRAMP
The US federal authorization program for cloud services; expensive and slow, but the price of selling to federal agencies.
HIPAA
US health-data rules; handling protected health information requires safeguards and a signed business associate agreement.
GDPR
EU data protection regulation covering lawful basis, subject rights, transfers and breach notification.
SSO / SAML
Single sign-on via a corporate identity provider; SAML and OIDC are the protocols enterprises require before rollout.
SCIM
The provisioning standard that creates, updates and - critically - deprovisions accounts automatically when staff leave.
RBAC
Role-based access control - permissions attached to roles rather than individuals, the basis of least privilege.
API-first
Designing the API as the primary product surface so the UI, partners and agents all consume the same contract.
Webhook
An outbound HTTP callback fired on an event, so consumers get pushed updates instead of polling.
SDK
A language-specific client library wrapping an API with auth, retries and types - it is what shortens time to first call.
REST vs GraphQL
Fixed resource endpoints versus a single endpoint where the client specifies exactly the fields it wants.
Rate limit
A cap on requests per interval that protects shared capacity; well-behaved clients back off and retry.
Multi-tenant vs single-tenant
Many customers sharing one logically isolated instance versus a dedicated instance per customer - cost and scale against isolation.
VPC deployment
Running the vendor's software inside the customer's own cloud account so data never leaves their perimeter.
On-prem
Software installed in the customer's own datacenter - still required in defense, healthcare and parts of finance.
Technical debt
The future cost of shortcuts taken today; it compounds as interest paid in slower releases and more incidents.
Incident & postmortem
A tracked service disruption, then a blameless write-up of timeline, contributing causes and concrete follow-up actions.
SRE (site reliability engineering)
Operating production with software engineering methods - SLOs, error budgets and toil reduction.
Observability
Logs, metrics and traces together, enough to ask new questions of a live system without shipping new code.
CI/CD
Continuous integration and delivery - every change is built, tested and shipped through an automated pipeline.
IaC (infrastructure as code)
Declaring infrastructure in version-controlled files so environments are reviewable, repeatable and rebuildable.
Zero trust
Never trust, always verify - every request is authenticated and authorized regardless of network location.
SBOM & supply-chain security
A software bill of materials listing every dependency, so a newly disclosed vulnerability can be traced to what shipped.

What’s happening

Questions people ask

What does SaaS actually mean when a vendor says the product is cloud-based?

define subscription software the vendor hosts and operates; contrast with licensed software the buyer installs and patches

What is SOC 2 and does it mean a vendor is secure?

explain it is an attestation that controls the vendor described were operating, not a security guarantee or a certification; say what the trust services criteria cover

What is the difference between a SOC 2 Type 1 and a Type 2 report?

Type 1 is design at a point in time, Type 2 is operating effectiveness over an observation window; note the window length varies and should be read off the report

How is ISO 27001 different from SOC 2?

ISO 27001 certifies a management system against a standard, SOC 2 attests to controls for a report reader; explain which one European and which one US buyers usually ask for

What is usage-based pricing in software?

define billing tied to consumption units rather than headcount, and name the common units without quoting anyone's rates

What is an AI agent and how is it different from a chatbot?

agents plan, call tools and take multi-step actions; chatbots answer; say plainly which one the product in question actually is

What is zero trust, and why did the firewall stop being the perimeter?

identity replaced the network boundary; reference NIST SP 800-207 rather than a vendor's definition

What is an SBOM and why is procurement asking us for one?

a machine-readable inventory of components; explain the supply-chain incidents that made it a contract term

What is single sign-on and why is it sometimes a paid add-on?

explain SAML/OIDC and the SSO tax debate honestly; do not claim a particular vendor's tier pricing

What is technical debt in terms a non-engineer can act on?

frame it as deferred work that raises the cost of every future change; give the symptoms a buyer can observe from outside

What is the difference between multi-tenant and single-tenant software?

shared infrastructure with logical isolation versus a dedicated instance; explain the cost and control tradeoff without implying one is inherently insecure

What does 99.9% uptime actually allow in downtime per month?

do the arithmetic plainly, then explain that the definition of downtime in the SLA matters more than the number of nines

What is FedRAMP and do we need it?

explain the authorization process and who it applies to; whether the buyer needs it depends on their agency customers, so ask rather than assert

What is observability and how is it different from monitoring?

monitoring answers known questions, observability lets you ask new ones; name logs, metrics and traces

Should we build this internally or buy a vendor product?

give the decision framework - is it core to the product, do you have the team to run it for five years, what is the true carrying cost - but the answer depends on the buyer's roadmap and headcount

How do we decide whether a capability is core enough to build ourselves?

differentiating versus table-stakes; build what customers pay you for, buy the rest

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