Portsmouth: Loadbalancer builds on decade of profitable growth

Loadbalancer.org, a Portsmouth-based provider of loadbalancers to the global IT community, has appointed Russell Winter as head of global business development. Worldwide sales at the company, which has offices in the US, Canada and Germany, have seen 12,000 deployments in 74 countries, increasing at 30% a year since being founded in 2003 by owners Malcolm and Karen Turnbull. 

Winter, a former venture capitalist whose time in the US included helping to sell internet-startup SideStep for over $200 million, said: “I feel I'm back in Silicon Valley with another exciting, rapidly-growing software company. I’ll mainly be working on adding more technology partnerships, building closer ties with IT decision-makers in all types of organisations and generating greater awareness of the brand.”

Malcolm Turnbull, who launched an industry-first cloud load-balancing solution for Amazon Web Services in 2009, said: “Russell’s arrival at Loadbalancer.org is fantastic for us.  He was very successful in Silicon Valley and his passion for IT really shines through, which bodes well. The main thing for us is to build up at a steady pace because we have always been very customer focused.” 

Loadbalancers, which are also known as application-delivery controllers in the IT industry, manage activity on IT systems to prevent collapses under the strain of sudden bursts of traffic or equipment failures, enabling everyday websites to provide fast and reliable browsing for consumers.  

Loadbalancer.org recently moved into a new £1.4m global corporate headquarters at Compass House, Portsmouth. Its high-profile customers include NASA, the BBC, the United States Postal Service, BT, Mercedes Benz, ASOS, Vodafone, SEGA, Estee Lauder, O2, Bacardi, River Island, the NHS, Premier Inn, Verizon and Selfridges & Co.