Top tech companies in Houston, Texas

Long a centre of global activity for energy and other industrial sectors, Houston has also rapidly developed as a technology powerhouse. At last count, more than 243,000 people were employed in Metro Houston as tech workers. 

Tech startups are drawn to the area by myriad factors: a strong talent base, a great location and a business-friendly government. A total of 17 colleges and universities are located in Houston while 26 are within a 50-mile radius, offering higher education in a wide range of academic disciplines.

The Greater Houston region also offers easy access to seaports, airports and rail services for national and international trade and transportation.

What’s more, local and state tax structures are favourable to businesses and individuals, too. The state and local governments both provide a variety of investment programs, grants and other financial incentives for business relocation and expansion.

Houston first rose to fame as the “world capital of energy” way back in the early 1900s with the discovery of substantial stores of oil and natural gas in the area. Since then, the economy has diversified across many different spheres, including but not limited to related fields such as aerospace, heavy manufacturing and, more recently, ESG (environment, social and governance). 

In fact, the City of Houston recently launched an ESG initiative designed to fully integrate ESG into the investment decision-making process.

In the tech sector, Houston is particularly noteworthy for software development, data analytics and cybersecurity. Some of the region’s hottest startups today provide platforms or services aimed at highly specialised vertical or horizontal categories. Here we take a look at six of the top tech companies in Houston.

VertexOne

As the world’s natural resources become scarcer, conservation is incumbent on all of us. Conservation efforts are afoot not just to reduce carbon footprints, but to preserve clean supplies of the life-sustaining substance of water, for example.

In the United States, much of the nation’s water supply infrastructure was laid down during the early to mid-1900s. As a result, many water pipes are now entering obsolescence, bringing about increased incidents of leaks and bursts.

Founded in 1996, VertexOne is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider for the utilities industry. Recently, VertexOne worked with the South Reno Public Utility District to find a way to convert real-time data about water into useful insights. In contrast to the utility’s previous manual process, the new FXsmart platform is able to automatically detect continuous or potentially high-volume leaks and to alert customers immediately, before damage is done.

Meanwhile, VertexOne still offers a highly flexible set of services across other aspects of utility management, including billing systems, customer data management and customer engagement.

Innovapptive

It’s perplexing but true that many app developers today still follow the traditional approach of “first web, then mobile”, even when creating an app that will be used primarily on mobile devices.

A successful app instead is based on the needs of its users. It also aligns with their work environments, while taking into account differences such as the smaller screen size of mobile devices.

Innovapptive’s integrated suite of connected worker apps takes a mobile-first approach to its apps for operations, maintenance and warehouse teams. As a result, the startup reports improvements of 20% in increased work capacity, 30% in reduced downtime, and 60% in maintenance backlog reductions.

Innovapptive produces easy-to-use apps that connect to enterprise backend systems such as SAP and focus on mobile-oriented features like checklists and operational dashboards.

Hexagon

In the industrial operations and maintenance arena, technology workers are often called upon to work with not just one but two types of data.

There’s the usual information technology (IT data), but there’s also operational technology (OT), a type of data used for monitoring IoT devices, industrial processes and industry events — and for making adjustments to the system as needed.

Hexagon’s PAS CyberIntegrity software is specifically built to make industrial operations based on OT highly secure and to improve risk management across a company’s OT endpoints.

The product now includes a risk rating feature to quickly identify which potential risks are of greatest concern in the current environment.

Gubaboo

About 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience, according to data from SlideShare.

Personalisation is clearly important just about everywhere in retail, but it’s safe to assume that it takes on extra relevance to customers making big-ticket purchases such as automobiles.

With personalisation in mind, Houston tech company Gubaboo Car Dealerships has developed a platform that uses chatbots to launch sophisticated conversations with customers directly on the website on a 24/7 basis. The idea is to give visitors the same warm and friendly treatment they would get from a human sales rep.

Already in use among thousands of dealers for brands like Lexus, Toyota and Land Rover, the platform also comes with built-in tools for providing trade valuations, making real-time lending decisions and accepting payments.

Ontellus

Vertical clouds are gaining increasing attention these days. As the name implies, they are typically geared to meeting the needs of a specific vertical market, such as finance, retail, manufacturing, life sciences and oil/gas. Most vertical clouds use a software as a service (SaaS) business model, but these clouds can also be offered as Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

A couple of examples of existing vertical clouds include Oracle Manufacturing Cloud and Virtustream Healthcare Cloud. But all three of the major cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — are also getting in on the vertical cloud market.

While not a vertical cloud provider per se, Houston-based Ontellus brings an innovative twist to how the cloud can meet vertical market needs. Through its web portals for records retrieval, Ontellus offers different services to several types of vertical market customers, including legal, insurance claims, life sciences, special investigations and data custodians.

For custodians, Ontellus focuses on secure and efficient methods of uploading records.

ePromis ERP

Discussions about cloud computing often revolve around topics such as how customers can save money by avoiding purchases of hardware servers and software licences while improving scalability and security. 

Cloud customers can also save considerable sums on application development and integration, especially when signing on for a SaaS solution which is highly specialised. A downside to this approach, though, is that SaaS solutions are not always customisable enough to meet all of a customer’s requirements.

ePromis ERP, however, manages to provide powerful horizontal ERP solutions that are also easily customisable to ERP requirements in specific vertical markets, such as construction, manufacturing, healthcare, distribution and professional services.

A few of the manifold available features include CRM, business intelligence, resource planning and scheduling, asset management, and consolidated dashboards and reporting. Beyond all that, ePromis ERP is designed for easy integration with other business software. 

Top tech companies in other cities

We hope you enjoyed this shortlist. Next up, consider checking out the top tech companies in Austin if you’d like to remain in Texas or head east and check out the top tech companies in New York City.