AI & LLMs
Large language models, assistants, prompting, agents and applications - including plain-language explanation for non-technical readers.
WholeReach · industry directory
The companies that define the ai industry, each read on the same nine-check website rubric — a 0–100 score with the exact fixes — alongside the concepts, the developments and the questions that shape the field.
30 companies in the ai industry, each graded on the nine things that decide whether a buyer or an AI assistant can find and trust them online. Open any name for the full write-up and the specific fixes.
| Company | HQ / region | Site score |
|---|---|---|
| CrowdStrikewww.crowdstrike.com | US (Austin TX HQ) | 100 0 to fix |
| Dell Technologieswww.dell.com | US (Round Rock TX HQ, Austin metro) | 100 0 to fix |
| GitLababout.gitlab.com | global | 100 0 to fix |
| Salesforcewww.salesforce.com | global | 100 0 to fix |
| Zscalerwww.zscaler.com | global | 100 0 to fix |
| Amazon Web Servicesaws.amazon.com | global | 92 1 to fix |
| Dockerwww.docker.com | global | 92 1 to fix |
| Microsoftwww.microsoft.com | global | 92 1 to fix |
| Oktawww.okta.com | global | 92 1 to fix |
| SailPointwww.sailpoint.com | US (Austin TX HQ) | 92 1 to fix |
| Stripestripe.com | global | 92 1 to fix |
| Google Cloudcloud.google.com | global | 90 1 to fix |
| HubSpotwww.hubspot.com | global | 88 1 to fix |
| Twiliowww.twilio.com | global | 88 1 to fix |
| NXP Semiconductorswww.nxp.com | global (Austin TX US operations) | 84 2 to fix |
| Q2 Holdingswww.q2.com | US (Austin TX HQ) | 84 2 to fix |
| Bumblebumble.com | US (Austin TX HQ) | 82 2 to fix |
| Microsoft Azureazure.microsoft.com | global | 82 2 to fix |
| IBMwww.ibm.com | global (long-standing Austin TX site) | 80 2 to fix |
| Terraform (HashiCorp)developer.hashicorp.com/terraform | global | 80 2 to fix |
| Workdaywww.workday.com | global | 80 2 to fix |
| Databrickswww.databricks.com | global | 78 2 to fix |
| Atlassianwww.atlassian.com | global | 76 2 to fix |
| Snowflakewww.snowflake.com | global | 74 3 to fix |
| Datadogwww.datadoghq.com | global | 73 2 to fix |
| PostgreSQLwww.postgresql.org | global | 70 3 to fix |
| GitHubgithub.com | global | 66 3 to fix |
| Palo Alto Networkswww.paloaltonetworks.com | global | 66 3 to fix |
| Reactreact.dev | global | 58 4 to fix |
| Kuberneteskubernetes.io | global | 53 4 to fix |
70+ solid 45–69 gaps under 45 costing customers
7 businesses whose website blocked our scanner — common when a site filters datacenter traffic, and not a sign the site is broken. A blocked site is never scored zero.
The firms, funds and institutions that set the terms in ai — context, not local listings; never scored.
The largest cloud platform; its primitives and pricing set the baseline for B2B infrastructure costs.
CPUs, GPUs and AI accelerators; its Austin campus is a long-standing major local engineering site.
Jira and Confluence; the canonical low-touch, self-serve-to-enterprise go-to-market story.
Austin's technology industry association - member programming, State of Tech reporting and executive roundtables.
Austin-headquartered app company - one of the city's most visible consumer technology employers.
Austin's central startup hub, accelerator and investor network - the room where local tech deals get introduced.
Home of Kubernetes and the cloud-native project landscape; its graduation status signals production readiness.
Austin-headquartered cloud-native endpoint protection and threat intelligence; a flagship local enterprise vendor.
Lakehouse architecture for analytics and AI workloads - the main rival in enterprise data platforms.
Metrics, logs and traces in one platform - the reference case for usage-based pricing and land-and-expand.
Round Rock-headquartered servers, storage, PCs and AI infrastructure - the Austin region's anchor technology employer.
Container images and local development environments - the unit software now ships in.
Wave evaluations and Total Economic Impact studies used to build the business case.
Verified user reviews and Grid reports; the second thing a buyer checks after a vendor's own site.
Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities - the research enterprise buyers cite to justify a shortlist.
Where most software is hosted and reviewed - Actions, Copilot and the default developer distribution channel.
Single-application DevOps with source, CI/CD and security scanning; open core plus self-managed deployment.
Data, AI and Kubernetes-centric cloud - the origin of much of the cloud-native stack.
Where technical audiences surface and judge things; a referral source, not a rival.
Mid-market CRM and marketing suite, and the most-cited example of inbound and freemium-led growth.
Consulting, hybrid cloud, Red Hat and watsonx; its Austin campus is one of the city's oldest tech operations.
The engineering profession's own publication - the most citable robotics and hardware source there is.
Austin-headquartered job marketplace selling employer subscriptions and sponsored placement - a major local software employer.
The portability layer that makes multi-cloud, VPC and on-prem deployment of the same product realistic.
Large language models, assistants, prompting, agents and applications - including plain-language explanation for non-technical readers.
Systems that take actions rather than answer questions - the current centre of gravity, and now the main feature race inside enterprise software.
Running capable models without a hyperscaler - self-hosting, open weights, on-prem and VPC inference for regulated buyers.
Frameworks, dev tooling, open source, CI/CD, coding workflows and the agentic coding assistants reshaping them.
Compute, data centers, APIs, platforms, Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code - plus what cloud spend actually costs.
Threats, breaches, privacy and defense - endpoint, cloud, identity and software supply chain.
Humanoids and mobile robots, industrial and warehouse automation, drones - and the machines a buyer can actually purchase today.
New companies, rounds and the business of tech, with Austin as a first-class market: Dell, Oracle, IBM, Indeed, CrowdStrike, Tesla, AMD, NXP, Silicon Labs, Q2 and SailPoint.
The constraint layer that increasingly decides what ships - AI rules, provenance, data residency and sector regulation.
ARR, MRR, net and gross retention, churn, CAC, LTV, payback, magic number and the rule of 40 - how software businesses are judged.
Seat-based versus usage-based and hybrid pricing, freemium tiers, land-and-expand motions, and what AI features do to a per-seat model.
Product-led self-serve adoption against enterprise field sales - and the hybrid motion most B2B software now runs.
MQL to SQL, pipeline coverage, POCs and pilots, RFPs, security reviews, MSAs, DPAs and SLAs - the real path from interest to signature.
SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, HIPAA and GDPR - the audit evidence that decides whether a deal can even start.
SSO, SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning, RBAC and least privilege - the enterprise checklist that gates every seat.
Uptime commitments and nines, SRE practice, error budgets, monitoring and tracing, on-call, incidents and blameless postmortems.
define subscription software the vendor hosts and operates; contrast with licensed software the buyer installs and patches
explain it is an attestation that controls the vendor described were operating, not a security guarantee or a certification; say what the trust services criteria cover
Type 1 is design at a point in time, Type 2 is operating effectiveness over an observation window; note the window length varies and should be read off the report
ISO 27001 certifies a management system against a standard, SOC 2 attests to controls for a report reader; explain which one European and which one US buyers usually ask for
define billing tied to consumption units rather than headcount, and name the common units without quoting anyone's rates
agents plan, call tools and take multi-step actions; chatbots answer; say plainly which one the product in question actually is
identity replaced the network boundary; reference NIST SP 800-207 rather than a vendor's definition
a machine-readable inventory of components; explain the supply-chain incidents that made it a contract term
explain SAML/OIDC and the SSO tax debate honestly; do not claim a particular vendor's tier pricing
frame it as deferred work that raises the cost of every future change; give the symptoms a buyer can observe from outside
shared infrastructure with logical isolation versus a dedicated instance; explain the cost and control tradeoff without implying one is inherently insecure
do the arithmetic plainly, then explain that the definition of downtime in the SLA matters more than the number of nines
explain the authorization process and who it applies to; whether the buyer needs it depends on their agency customers, so ask rather than assert
monitoring answers known questions, observability lets you ask new ones; name logs, metrics and traces
give the decision framework - is it core to the product, do you have the team to run it for five years, what is the true carrying cost - but the answer depends on the buyer's roadmap and headcount
differentiating versus table-stakes; build what customers pay you for, buy the rest
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