As a go-to partner for many Fortune 1000 companies, RapDev provides custom site reliability and DevOps solutions to help expertly guide organizations through their Engineering and DevOps transformations from beginning to end. Pulse 2.0 caught up with RapDev founder Tameem Hourani to learn more about how the company helps organizations adopt Datadog and ServiceNow using cloud-native best practices.
Tameem Hourani’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Hourani said:
“I grew up in the Middle East with a strong liking for all kinds of tech. I started hosting music servers around the age of 12, and then moved to host bulletin boards (before Reddit was a thing) to help people download movies and video games. At 18, I moved to Boston to go to Wentworth Institute of Technology to study Computer Engineering. The plan was to get my degree and return home to work with my father, but that plan didn’t last long. I joined a small pharma company to help build their data center, and about 6mo later I got fired (long story). I had 90 days to find another job since I was on a student visa, and I ended up at EMC. I spent 5 years there becoming a network engineer and getting a few Cisco certifications. I then spent a short stint at PTC, followed by Wayfair for 3 years. My time at Wayfair was invaluable, learning how large distributed systems are built and run, and how a high-velocity engineering organization functions. We were doing 600+ deploys a day to production, and the systems behind supporting that velocity were impressive. After my time at Wayfair, I left to start RapDev.”
Beginning of RapDev
How did the idea for RapDev come together? Hourani explained:
“While at Wayfair, we were using both Datadog and ServiceNow to support running production. We were very early adopters of Datadog, working closely with their product teams to build out the platform and request features. With ServiceNow, we were using homegrown integrations to bypass their licensing requirements. We had about 3,000 engineers interacting with ServiceNow through Slack, and only needed five actual users on the platform itself. As these use cases gained traction and we started sharing our stories at conferences and on blogs, I started noticing other customers looking to solve similar problems to what we were doing at Wayfair. It was clear that there was a gap in the market with how to use Datadog and ServiceNow to run a modern production operation, and Wayfair was leading the charge. As a result, I decided to take the leap and start RapDev, helping customers deploy Datadog and ServiceNow using modern methodologies.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Hourani shared:
“This is a great question, and it changes a lot. You go through so many milestones building a company, the first ones are small like your biggest deal or your first renewal customer. I love our holiday parties because it always brings me back to the first time we had one, it was just four of us and our partners at a local bar. The four of us are still close and still talk about that party. There are also memories like the first deal we sold that I wasn’t involved in or the first project that I wasn’t involved in. We once had a customer that would never let us finish the project, a big well-known sports organization.That was a rough time, but now also a funny memory.”
Company Culture
How would you describe the RapDev’s culture and how do you keep it as you grow? Hourani stated:
“This is very important. I take our culture very seriously and when I think about it, it’s quite simple. It boils down to being present and being transparent. We hide nothing at RapDev, everything is available to all of our employees. We share the good and the bad. Finances, hiring, areas for improvement, it’s all out on the table. This helps build trust between everyone on the team, especially when it’s coming from the leads at the company. I’m also big on spending time together. We have two weeks a year where we fly the whole company into the Boston office. We call them Winter Week and Summer Week. For five days, the whole company gets to work together, collaborate, grab dinner and drinks, work on a hackathon, the list goes on. There’s no better way to keep the team together than being with each other in person.”
Core Solutions
What are RapDev’s core services, products and features? Hourani detailed:
“We are the world’s largest Datadog implementer, and a ServiceNow partner focused on modern implementations for the platform. What that means is we focus on good tech, good engineering, and very strong delivery. Having brilliant engineers on the team means you can really trust them to solve any problem, and we make sure we keep a high bar with all the hiring we do. Our goal is to bring an engineering-first approach to helping customers deploy Datadog and ServiceNow. We don’t do slideware, and we don’t waste time with discoveries and assessments. We get straight to work and we value time to deployment.”
Market Dynamics in Ever-Evolving Tech Landscape
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently and, if so, how did you and RapDev navigate them? Hournai explained:
“Of course – always. There are constant challenges as a growing startup. Sometimes it’s the economy, sometimes it’s customers not paying, sometimes it’s competitors or new technology. There’s never been a time in our existence that has not had its challenges. I’d say one of the most recent challenges is also one of our biggest opportunities, like most other consulting firms, it’s the maturity of GenAI and its accuracy/capabilities. If we were a low-cost outsourcing company, I would be very concerned today. Fortunately, we’ve always been focused on high-quality engineering, which means we are being tapped by our customers to help optimize their need for low-cost offshoring companies. It’s a great position to be in, but also a challenge when customers start to ask why they can’t use GenAI to replace our skill set.”
RapDev Milestones
What have been some of RapDev’s most significant milestones? Hourani cited:
“There have been many. If I think back to when we started, our first milestone was the deal that gave me the opportunity to leave Wayfair. It was a $200k deal, and it gave us enough runway to afford payroll for 5 months. Today, our two-week payroll is 4x that deal, crazy to think about. Another milestone is our first real office (outside WeWork). We moved all our gear ourselves down Boylston Street. Loaded our monitors on our desk chairs and rolled them down a block to our new space. Another milestone was our first non-engineering and non-sales hire. We hired someone to help with finance, marketing, recruiting, operations, basically everything that needed to get done. We have kept things extremely frugal which is what has allowed us to grow, and that forced me to question every hire we make that’s not directly contributing to revenue. Another milestone was our first $1 million deal. That same year we closed seven deals that were over $1 million. Most recently, we crossed 100 people at RapDev, another huge milestone.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Hournai highlighted:
“We’ve worked with a number of really innovative companies spanning healthcare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, automotive and many others. The return our clients receive by streamlining some critical processes is amazing. Our published case studies focus on a number of different use cases, and can be found here.”
Funding
When asking Hourani about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“We’re 100% bootstrapped. We never raised any funding and have no investors. We have no board of directors either. Twenty-five percent of RapDev is owned by the employees, which is how we all share upside. We’ve grown at a pretty steady rate over the past six years, winning Boston’s second fastest-growing company two years in a row. We’ve also placed on the Inc 5000 list of fastest growing companies a few times, and most recently the North American 2024 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list.”
Growth Formula
How do you keep the momentum going? What’s the formula for growth? Hourani pointed out:
“The key to building momentum is taking care of existing customers. It’s infinitely easier, cheaper, and higher CSAT to renew existing customers. We have historically tracked about a 60/40 split in revenue, 60 coming from existing customers and 40 from new. By maintaining this you get a compounding growth effect, which significantly grows your company as you start to scale. This year should close around the same rate.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is RapDev pursuing? Hourani assessed:
“This is measured as a factor of NNACV the partner companies are selling. For ServiceNow, the services TAM is about 1.5x the NNACV sold each quarter. For Datadog there’s no official number, but I estimate it to be around 0.5x the NNACV. I think as Datadog continues to expand into the security space, that multiple will increase, also opening revenue streams for the MSSP segment.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates RapDev from its competition? Hourani affirmed:
“We are an engineering-first company. Not consulting, not business process, not BA – engineering. This means we don’t waste time on paperwork, slideware, assessments, and unnecessary business processes. We find ways to deliver value quickly to customers, not getting caught up in bureaucracy and red tape. We also don’t believe in change orders or asking customers for more money to complete a project. We are responsible for delivering what the customer was promised, for the cost they were promised. We like to think of our team as the ninjas, or the cleanup crew that comes in after another partner has done a poor job. We’re more expensive than most of our competitors, but we always make sure we don’t leave a job unfinished and a customer unhappy.”
Future Plans
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Hourani concluded:
“We will continue to grow and scale, and may look at some M&A activity in 2025 to help us expand into South America and Asia. Those two geographies have been a little tough for us to crack historically.”
