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According to Urban Dictionary, “Gorilla Logic is the half-witted way of figuring out a problem,asking a question or giving someone an explanation that makes no sense at all.”
Well, I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that CEO Stu Stern and VP of Engineering Ed Schwarz, the founders of Boulder’s Gorilla Logic had something else in mind when they left their high-ranking posts at Sun Microsystems to found their technology services firm in 2002.
After all, in 2011, Gorilla Logic appeared on Inc. Magazine’s annual exclusive ranking of the
country’s 5000 fastest growing private companies. It shares the honor of having been selected for this list with household name companies like Microsoft, Zappos and Jamba Juice - even though Gorilla Logic itself is a firm specializing in enterprise web and mobile delivery for Fortune 500 companies.
“We develop apps but people are coming to us not so much for graphic design as for technical expertise.," Stern said. "The common thread for us is big, complex software engineering. ”
The key to Gorilla Logic’s success here is the co-founders’ combined 60 years of experience in enterprise systems development, rollouts and upgrades.
Stern ran Java Consulting Worldwide for Sun Microsystems before founding Gorilla Logic and was VP of Equity Trading Systems for UBS before that. At UBS, then PaineWebber, he was part of the executive committee that created the original Financial Information Exchange (FIX) protocol, which still underpins electronic trading on the global equity markets today.
Schwarz, who started the global e-business consulting organization at Sun Microsystems, worked as a developer and manager in the financial industry, including a stint as the VP of Municipal Bond Research Systems at Moody’s Investors Services.
Almost by accident, Gorilla Logic has become a leader in open sourcing automated test tools for mobile and web apps. Stern explained that the automated testing tools actually grew out of the company’s own commitment to Agile development as a best practice. Agile development, he explained, demands that you stay agile, responding to a changing business and technology landscape. However, when industry trends dictate a fundamental change to software, automated playback and testing is a key in making sure that your changes are not “breaking” the software.
Gorilla Logic’s first tool was FlexMonkey, a tool they were developing for themselves but threw out onto the web. The tool generated so much interest, business and brand awareness that they kept putting new tools out as open source projects.
Last year, Gorilla Logic spun off of its mobile app testing software into a new business, CloudMonkey LLC. Including CloudMonkey, 2013 revenue was $12.2 million, a 17% increase in annual revenue. Revenue growth was 56% in 2012 and 70% in 2011.
The name Gorilla Logic says something about the company’s commitment to Agile development and its tendency to open source projects. These approaches might seem reckless to the General Electrics and Proctor & Gambles of the world. Like with most destructive creativity, though, what seems monkey-brained can turn out to be pure genius.
Many years in the industry have given Stern and Shwarz insight into enterprise application development. Now, they are creating a niche for Gorilla Logic and value to the industry by leveraging collaboration among cross-functional teams and a flexible, open-ended approach to enterprise solutions and mobile testing tools.
“I came from a big Fortune 500 company,” said Stern. “There’s an awful lot of politics and bureaucracy that you get in very, very large organizations …and people focus on jockeying for positions or furthering their own political agendas, so certainly one of the things I learned is that it can be a lot more satisfying to work in a smaller organization where what you’re consumed with all day long are questions about the business and the customers as opposed to working around bureaucracy….”
