SOUTH BEND — As a technology startup, Trek10 has just begun its journey.
It’s off to a quick start, though.
Andy Warzon founded the company with Jim Abercrombie and Shane Fimbel about a year and half ago. The firm — which specializes in cloud-based IT infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services — set up an office in April at Union Station Technology Center and completed a round of seed funding earlier this summer from an investor group that included Elevate Ventures and The Judd Leighton Foundation.
Trek10 has six full-time employees right now, but 25 to 30 people could be working there by the end of 2016.
The company’s big upside lies in its specialty — infrastructure as a service — which is a new but growing field in technology.
Most people who use the Internet are familiar with the concept of software as a service. The term means that, instead of downloading software onto a computer’s hard drive, the program is accessible on any device with an Internet connection. Web-based email is one common example of software as a service. Other examples include everything from Netflix to online banking.
Infrastructure as a service refers to the practice of taking the low-level components of IT infrastructure — hardware, servers — and delivering it as a service over the Internet, or “the cloud” as it’s been nicknamed.
Amazon Web Services, which is owned by the online retailer Amazon.com, is the largest player in the infrastructure-as-a-service market. Multinational corporations, government agencies and other large institutions are using it.
“This is a really powerful set of tools, but a lot of companies don’t know how to use it,” Warzon said. “We help companies get on Amazon Web Services and support them 24/7 once they’re on there.”