With more than 2,100 customers around the world including more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500, Workiva Inc. stands out as one of the most influential enterprise vendors to have emerged in the wake of the infrastructure-as-a-service revolution. Dave Tucker, the senior director of platform development at the firm, dropped by theCUBE against the backdrop of its ongoing IPO preparations to share the inside track on one of the biggest success stories in the cloud with SiliconANGLE John Furrier.

Workiva didn’t always count itself among the fastest growing software-as-a-service providers in the industry. When it hit the scene in 2008 under the name WebFillings, the startup was merely an up-and-comer with a radical idea: automate how public companies report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a process that for decades has been performed manually. Changing something etched so deeply into the corporate psyche required the team to concentrate its entire resources on the challenge, something that it simply couldn’t have done had it launched a few years earlier.

Fortunately for Workiva, however, it entered the market around the same time that the world’s biggest web companies started experimenting with the notion of making hardware resources available for consumption over the net on a pay-as-you-go basis. The public cloud was still in its infancy, but Tucker and the fellow industry veterans at the startup saw past the initial doubts to recognize the tremendous value in the model.

“Many of us came from enterprise backgrounds so we understood the big license fees, the pain of trying to deploy into an enterprise data center,” Tucker explained. “So when we came across Google App Engine, we fell in love with the technology and built everything on it.” Needless to say, that bet has paid off.

The decision to deliver its compliance management platform through the cloud instead of stretching the budget for private infrastructure made it possible for Workiva to focus on growth and do so without the logistical challenges traditionally involved in scaling a service-based operation, Tucker said. The firm has implemented the principles of agile software development in its strategy to try and make the most out of that elasticity, he noted, rolling out updates almost daily and encouraging engineers to communicate directly with customers to identify emerging demands.

Tucker told Furrier that collaboration has been enhanced by the fact that the Workiva team doesn’t need to spend time maintaining infrastructure. “That is very much the trend, to have your developers just focus on solving the problem and write code,” he said. “Being able to have this entire platform running on your laptop and move that into the cloud and scale is a great model to work with.”

Tucker said he sees the recent addition of a purpose-built container service to Google Compute Engine as an evolution of that paradigm that promotes the underlying goal of freeing up software engineers to do what they do best.

Containers provide an additional layer of abstraction that makes it easier to move applications from one location to another, which is useful for pushing code to the cloud, while streamlining service delivery. That is highly conducive to what Workiva is trying to accomplish with its platform.

“A lot of work is done in Excel and other products on the desktop and we allow users to take those processes and do them collaboratively in the cloud,” Tucker said. And it’s all thanks to the “the ability to just write code and have that code deployed and managed.”

Watch the full video (16:32).