A TECH company has opened its first office in the USA.

Web hosting firm Hyve Managed Hosting, based in Richmond Place in Brighton, competes with global giants Microsoft and Amazon, and has opened a new office

in Santa Monica in Los Angeles.

Co-founder Jake Madders said: “It’s a really cool area on the West Coast.

“We have a handful of clients in the USA, and European customers who want an American presence.

“We’re still hiring out there, so we’re doing a lot of Skype interviews.

“It’s really exciting.”

Jake said the company, which had a revenue of £9 million last year, has received no investment since he and Jon Lucas set it up in 2001.

He said: “Jon and I started the company on the side of our real jobs.

“We were just playing to begin with.

“We were all working from home until seven years ago, when we got an office in Crawley, and then we moved to Brighton four years ago.

“It’s really been an exponential curve.”

Hyve rents floor space in data centres all over the world, and works with internet providers in those countries to host demanding applications, such as video streaming.

Jake said: “It’s about having multiple, multiple back-ups.

“Our clients cannot tolerate any down time.

“We even have diesel generators at some of our data centres as one form of back-up.

“A lot of people come to us for security.”

The company has opened ten new data centres

across the world this year, including in New York,

Miami, Boston, Madrid and Tokyo.

Hyve hosts IT applications on dedicated servers, private cloud or enterprise cloud environments, and provides additional services including cyber security protection and disaster recovery.

Jake said: “We set ourselves apart from the big boys as we add a managing layer to our service, but it’s really about the personal relationships we have with our customers.

“Our clients want

to be able to get on the phone and have a proper chat

about what we can do for them.

“With Amazon and Microsoft you have to input everything yourself, or if you call them you end up speaking to different people in a call centre each time – unless you can afford to pay around £50,000 a month.

“We offer a support engineer who knows the client’s business, and they get to know them.”

Co-founder Jon added: “Each customer relationship is built around engineers they know by name and who understand their business and technology.

“It’s a major reason why our clients want to work with Hyve, wherever they are in the world.”