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Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

Invensys

INVENSYS, A COMPANY FORMED BY MERGING TWO MULTINATIONAL CONGLOMERATES

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The true potential of the internet has been exposed towards the entire world within these couple of decades. There are many flourishing businesses in the tech market especially in the field of advanced software and telecommunication.

But, how many of these companies master their reputation in the technical world and industrial production as well? Software companies and production industry are two diametrically opposite points of a circle. But, Invensys, the global tech company has been successfully running its business for the last 20 years.

Invensys, founded in 1999 is a famous company divided into three segments, namely, software, industrial automation and energy controls. The company was formed by merging two gigantic multinational companies, BTR plc and Siebe plc. Though Invensys was founded in 1999, the actual history of the company dates back to the 1800s when Augustus Siebe started working for the Deane brothers.

In the 1800s

Born in 1788, Augustus Siebe was a famous British Engineering who was hired by the Deane brothers. Since Siebe specialized in designing diving tools and types of equipment, he was giving a project to modify the then-existing helmets for underwater activities.

Seeing his great improvement and contribution in the field, Charles Parsley, leader of the Royal Navy also made some suggestions to improvise his existing inventions. Once his work brought a revolution in the world of marine engineering, he moved to London and opened up his own company in 1819. This great man passed away on 15th April 1872 due to chronic bronchitis.

How Invensys was formed?

Siebe plc was originally formed in 1920 but it started making a significant presence in the world of engineering since the 1970s. The company made a lot of acquisitions starting from 1972. Some of the acquired companies are James North and Sons, CompAir, Foxboro Company, Triconex, Eurotherm, Esscor and many more.

The last company that Siebe acquired before merging with BTR plc was Esscor. All these companies made Siebe a versatile conglomerate pioneering in excellent software products, power industry, petrochemical industry and whatnot.

On the other hand, BTR plc was originally established as B.F. Goodrich Company and transformed itself into BTR Limited in 1956. The company started flourishing under the leadership of Sir Owen Green and made a lot of big acquisitions in 1982.

BTR started buying companies outside the UK which included the U.S, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Germany. By the time BTR merged, it happened to be famous for building products, polymers, packaging and materials engineering.
Finally, in 1999 both the companies shake hands-on mutual grounds to form Invensys.

Fate of Invensys


After a couple of years of the establishment of Invensys, Invensys Rails Systems was formed in 2001. In 2004, Invensys Controls was formed which was mainly created to monitor the control system (also included climate control) and its applications.

During these five years from 1999, Invensys went through a lot of crisis and even had the chance of dissolution. But, the company was somehow saved and opened another new sector, Invensys Operations Management in 2009.

Again after a couple of years, the business started falling with share prices dropping to almost 50%. The company decided to sale Invensys Rails followed by the entire company in 2013 to Schneider Electric. The entire acquisition was finally completed on 17th January 2014. The amount was finalized to £3.4 billion.

About Schneider Electric

The company was built in the 19th century by the Schneider brothers and since then they have owned the steel as well as the machinery market. Gradually, the company also entered into the market of construction and electricity in the 20th century and emerged out as one of the companies in recent days to focus on energy management.

The company invests quite an impressive amount of fund in this area keeping in mind the abrupt environment changes. In 2010, the company with Alstom, created Aster to provide support to the newly founded business in the area of efficient energy consumption and eco-friendly environment.

The company is currently headquartered in France with more than 155,000 employees. The company has gained unexpected recognition in India given that it was given the award of Best French Group in India in 2018.

vmware

VMWARE, SUCCESS STORY OF A 21 YEARS OLD SOFTWARE COMPANY

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Once the internet made a spark in the tech world, the IT industry started brimming with profits. It is since the mid-1990s that so many new companies have been established in the tech market and almost all of them have become business tycoons today.

Even the telecommunication industry who sold hardware products, today with the help of AI and ML are creating advanced technologies and software. Terminologies such as cloud computing, fog computing, artificial intelligence and many more have become very common these days. In this tech-driven world, it has shown the highest potential of development which leads to the positive growth curve for establishing a career in this field. VMware is one such company that mainly focuses on cloud computing, developing advanced software and services accordingly. The company was founded in Palo Alto, California by five tech enthusiasts namely Diane Green, Edouard Bugnion, Scott Devine, Mendel Rosenblum and Edward Wang. Diane Green was made the CEO of the company and by the end of the year, the company had only 20 employees.

The Founders

Diane Green after receiving her Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering went to pursue her Master’s in Naval Architecture. She is an MIT graduate who received her second Master’s degree in Computer Science. Before founding VMware, Green worked in several companies like Tandem Computers, Silicon Graphics etc. Green was also a member of Google board of directors and she founded her start-up called Bebop which was acquired in 2015.

Edouard Bugnion is also an engineer who received his Bachelor’s from ETH Zurich followed by his Master’s degree from Stanford University. After co-founding VMware, he is also the founder of Nuova Systems, a company that was later acquired by Cisco. Bugnion is also an angel investor.
Scott Devine completed his B.S. from Cornell University followed by post-graduating from Stanford University. His main paradigm is operating systems and computer architecture and currently serves as Principal Engineer in VMware.

After completing his Bachelor’s from the University of Virginia, Mendel Rosenblum pursued his PhD from the University of California. Apart from co-founding VMware, Rosenblum is also a professor at the University of Stanford and resigned from VMware in 2008 after his wife, Diane Green was fired.

Edward Wang went to the University of California and holds two Bachelor’s degrees in Electrical and Computer Science Engineering. He then completed both his M.S. and PhD in Computer Science. Currently, he serves in VMware as Principal Engineer and he is also the recipient of Lifetime Achievement Award from Usenix.

Founding Story

Though the company was founded in 1998, VMware launched itself officially at the DEMO Conference in February 1999. The company presented its first product, Workstation 1.0 in this conference which allowed the user to use more than one O.S from a single PC.

Shortly after the presentation of the product, the company received around $1 million in bookings for Workstation 1.0. In the year 2001, the company launched VMware GSX Serves and VMware ESX Server and made an entry into the server market. In 2003, the company went outside America for the first time with establishing its significant presence in Europe. The next year came up with the big news of the company’s acquisition by EMC Corporation (present-day DELL) for $635 million.

A new beginning

One year after the acquisition, the company opened offices in India and China as well. In this year the company reached 1,000 employees. In 2007, the company finally received its first IPO with $29 per share and the day ended with $51 per share. The company’s annual revenue turned to $1.9 billion at the end of 2008. In the same year, Diane Green was replaced by Paul Maritz as the new CEO of the company.

In 2009, the company received the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award in the category of software. By 2011, the company established R&D offices in China, India, Israel, United States and Bulgaria. This year the company’s total employees turned out to be 11,000 throughout the world.
The company’s success followed by acquiring Nicira in 2012 for $1.26 billion followed by making the largest acquisition of VMware in 2014, that is, AirWatch for $1.54 billion.

Present Day

In 2017, the company was listed third in America as one of the highest paying companies. The company’s latest acquisition was Carbon Black in October 2019 for $2.1 million. Currently, the company has 24,000 employees with Pat Gelsinger as the CEO. The products of the company include server software, cloud management software, networking products etc.

cisco

CISCO SYSTEMS, A BLESSING IN THE SPHERE OF TELECOMMUNICATION AND NETWORKING

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Smart and advanced networking is what connects the world more efficient today transferring data within a fraction of second. There are many huge companies that today sells product both software and hardware-based on telecommunication engineering. Cisco Systems is one such company, in fact, one of the biggest multinational conglomerates with more than 74,000 employees around the globe. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California with Chuck Robbins as the current Chairman and CEO of the company. Cisco was founded in 10th December 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner.

About the founders

Born into a Catholic family in Pennsylvania, Bosack went to La Salle College High School followed by Wharton School in 1973. He pursued his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and right after graduating joined Digital Equipment Corporation. Bosack worked there as a hardware engineer and he was highly interested in networking. Bosack went to Stanford University to study Computer Science where he started working under a project dealing with the network router. During this time, he met Lerner at the Business School Lab and both of them got married.


Lerner was from North California and received her undergraduate degree from California State University. In 1977, she graduated from Claremont Graduate School with a Master’s in econometrics after which she went to Stanford and received another Master’s degree in Statistics and Computer Science. Since both of them were working on the same project of managing a computer network, they started working in their home and developing routers from scratch. They turned their garage into an office and finally co-founded Cisco in 1984.

Early History of Cisco

Since both of them were a part of Stanford University, they started there early research and development in the campus itself. In 1984, the couple created a technology that helped to communicate each computer of Stanford with each other through a multiprotocol router called “Blue Box”. Even before the company barely scratched the surface the co-founders were accused of replicating ideas and software in 1986. After going through a lot of hustle-bustle the company finally went public in February 1990 and was added in the NASDAQ stock exchange. The legal disputes of Cisco finally ended in August 1990 when Lerner was fired along with his husband signing off from the company.

Cisco was the first company in the tech industry to sell routers with multiple network protocols making that a very big advantage for the company. The company made an impressive amount of acquisitions in the 1990s which includes companies like Stratacom and Current Corporation. Even when the dot-com boom crushed the market, Cisco stood still as one of the most valuable companies with it’s market value rounding up to $500 billion.

Intermediate Phase of Cisco

Once Cisco started expanding around the world, it also established firm roots on the market of India as well. The company established a Globalization Centre in Bangalore spending around $1 billion for it. In the year 2011, the company started cutting expenditures strictly as the profit wasn’t up to the mark. Around 3,000 employees were eliminated through early retirement plans and the $1 billion was cut from the annual expenses of the company.

Present-day Cisco with Chuck Robbins

Chuck Robbins joined Cisco in 1997 as an Account Manager but once he reached the executive position, he brought an entirely new era for the realm of Cisco. He brought cloud computing to the company threading to the networking tech of Cisco and more advanced software. Robbins after becoming the CEO of the company in 2015, mainly focused I two things, cloud computing and software-subscription revenue. Robbin’s main motive was to bring more modernization into the company by both updating their products as well as methods of getting things done. Besides cloud computing, Robbins also promoted fog computing in his company and founded OpenFog Consortium with ARM Holdings, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Princeton University.

After the mid-2015, Cisco acquired companies like ParStream, Lancope, and AppDynamics etc. With advancing in the field of modern tech, Robbins didn’t step back from delving into the segment of AI and ML which made him acquire Accompany, an AI-based start-up for $270 million.
The company has been featured several times in several business magazines which include Cisco securing 444th rank in the list of Forbes Global 2000. The company had total equity of $43.2 billion in 2018.

Wadhwani

Romesh Wadhwani, A Billionaire To Be Listed Among World’s Richest Tech People

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Romesh Wadhwani is one of the most influential and powerful people in the world of tech start-ups. He is famous for his start-up Symphony Technology Group (STG), a private firm that is created to invest and provide financial backups to the start-ups and operating companies. Wadhwani in spite of suffering from physical disability made it to one of the best engineering institutions of India and curved his career from scratch. He is also a great philanthropist who currently resides in Palo Alto, California, the U.S with a net worth of $3.3 billion.

The life story of Wadhwani

Romesh Wadhwani was born during the most vulnerable phase of India, that is, in 1947 and moved to India from Karachi when he was just an infant. When he was two years old, Wadhwani got affected by Polio. But, throughout his journey, Wadhwani proved that it was not a shortcoming for him. Initially, he faced a lot of trouble to get admission in the junior school but at the end, he made it to IIT Bombay where he studied Electrical Engineering. After completing his Bachelor’s degree, he went to Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh to acquire a Master’s degree followed by PhD from the same university.

Wadhwani was never really interested to do a 9to5 job especially because he hated the thought of working for someone. So, after he graduated in 1972 he decided to stay back in America and start his own company. A lot of trouble came his way because of three main reasons, first he absolutely had no business idea given that he belonged to a family no business background and not acquiring a degree in
the business field, second, the start-up culture was absolutely not developed in Pittsburgh especially related to technology and third, he wasn’t even a citizen of America back then. streaming

Wadhwani overcame a lot of obstacles and finally convinced a venture capitalist to pay him $150,000 for his start-up. Wadhwani developed more than just a single start-up namely Aspect The success of Symphony Technology Group Development (software firm) and Symphony Technology Group. The former one was acquired by i2 Technologies in 1999 for $9.3 billion and the latter was founded in 2002. STG brought an immense amount of success to Wadhwani and currently, he plays the role of Executive Chairman. Since Wadhwani was a great philanthropist, he founded the Wadhwani Foundation mainly to focus on developing economies with huge potential. His main interest was in India because he noticed that when he moved to the U.S and started his own business the start-up culture of India was not developed. He, in one of his interviews, said that it would be impossible for him to start his own business had he planned to do it in India. So, he greatly focused on the economy of India and especially to the entrepreneurial domain.

The success of Symphony Technology Group

Wadhwani founded the firm in 2002 as an investment firm based on Palo Alto. STG is the parent company to other many products of Symphony like Symphony Teleca Corporation, Symphony Health Solutions etc. Symphony Teleca Corporation was formed in February 2012 after Teleca merged with

Symphony and started providing software solutions and Symphony Health Solutions was established in May of the same year after it acquired Healthcare Analytics. In the same year, the company also received a funding of $870 million and declared to invest in making better software solutions and services.

2013 for Symphony started with the acquisition of LexisNexis Screening Business from Reed Elsevier followed by Symphony Health Solutions named as the leading Research Firm in the market in May 2013.
In 2014, the company acquired Jobrapido, a firm known worldwide for talent acquisition; MDdatacor LLC, a data integration company that provided with patient’s information and many more.

This company was acquired by Symphony to form Symphony Performance Health. In September 2014, STG was named as the top R&D service provider by Zinnov and it also acquired McGraw-Hill Construction for $320 million. In April 2015, HARMAN acquired Symphony Teleca from STG which was pretty bad news for the company but STG coped up with it pretty well.

Apart from health solutions, STG also has many other products and released a few more in 2016. Some of the new products were demonstrated in 2016 HIMSS Conference.
In January 2017, the company acquired Fishbowl, a platform for the restaurant industry for $2 billion.
The company made a lot of acquisitions like this which is pretty impressive for a team with less than fifty members. The estimated annual revenue of the company is around $2.6 billion and the latest acquisition of the company was in Aril 2019 (RedSeal).

fitbit

SUCCESS STORY OF FITBIT, LIVE YOUR LIFE IN A HEALTHIER WAY

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When maintaining a proper diet or leading healthier lifestyle bumps into our way, we often tend to master the postponing game. Do you know why? Somewhere we are not encouraged enough to wake up every morning and have a good workout and wait till it turns into a serious health issue.

There is a minor part of the population who consciously tracks their fitness metrics and follows a healthy lifestyle. Honestly, many of us think that it’s an extravagant lifestyle to keep track of your health records and especially the Indians show minimal efforts henceforth. So, to keep your health records in track in an interesting way and give some push to yourself, Eric Friedman and James Park launched Fitbit in 2007, a company that produces smart wearable devices to track your health. It is interesting how Fitbit rose from just an idea twelve years ago given that it almost hit dead end several times and now competes with business tycoons like Apple and Xiaomi.

James Park

After passing out from University School at Cleveland, Ohio, Park went to Harvard for studying Computer Science but eventually dropped out. He joined Morgan Stanley as a Peon in 1998 and continued for a year. In October 1999, Park co-founded Epesi Technologies, a B2B integration software followed by co-founding Wind-Up Labs in 2002. Park’s life story is something that catches the attention of today’s generation, isn’t it? Dropping out of college and creating such a massive empire for himself.
Park along with Friedman thought of doing something incredible with the small sensors and hence came up with the idea of Fitbit to digitalize even the fitness and health of normal people.

Eric Friedman

Friedman is a Computer Science engineer who completed both his Bachelor’s and Masters from Yale University. After passing out in 2000, Friedman joined Epesi Technologies as a Software Engineer and then co-founded Wind-Up Labs with Park in August 2002. Friedman also worked for Microsoft in his early career and before co-founding Fitbit he worked at CNET Networks and Engineer Manager. Currently, he is serving as the CTO of Fitbit.

The beginning and the Turmoil

Already after founding Wind-Up Labs, both Park and Friedman didn’t have any intention to stop. They wanted to do something unique with small sensors and discovered a huge potential in the sphere of health. If small devices can be made out to track personal fitness data, they thought they might have a really good audience. At first, they created just a small circuit board within a wooden box as a prototype which helped them raise $400,000 and eventually more once they started furnishing their experimental gadgets.

In 9th September 2008, both of them attended the TechCrunch 50 Conference and received 2,000 pre-orders for their product in a single day. They accepted the order and realized later that it was a not-so-good move as they didn’t have a manufacturing unit at all. After a few months of the constant search for an appropriate supplier, the product started showing some flaws. The fate of Fitbit turned upside down and the co-founders thought of giving up. But after the topsy-turvy, they were finally able to launch the fitness tracker in 2009. They shipped around 5,000 units of this tracker and received another 2,000 pre-booking. Since there was no third party in the business, Fitbit made a robust profit out of it.

The Success

In 2011, Fitbit introduced another new tracker much better than the previous one as this one came with an altimeter and many other modifications. At the end of 2014, the company’s annual revenue summed up to $745.4 million and in the next year the company filed for its first IPO and the amount was $358 million. This year turned out to be one of the best for the company as more than 18 million fitness trackers were sold given that no new products were launched in this year.

The company also has a pretty impressive list of acquisitions starting from March 2015. Fitbit acquired Firstar in 5th March 2015 for $17.8 million followed by acquiring Coin, a credit card company in 2016. In 2017, the company acquired a smartwatch based start-up, Vector Watch SRL and in the next year a software company called Twine Health.

The company currently manufactures fitness trackers mainly for heart rate, sleep quality and number of steps. Though the company has faced a few shady plots for revealing too much information about Fitbit’s users to each other through its feature, still the company has managed to stay on the top in terms of wearable technology.

Search Engine Land, Success Story Of A Publication Company Pioneering In The World Of Search Marketing

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The most used and the most popular search engines that have been dominating the market since the arrival of the internet are namely Yahoo! and Google. And even before Google was launched in the market, it was Yahoo! that ruled in the web search engine. But, with time many search engines came up, few of them dissolved while the rest of them are just trying hard to exist on the web. So, a lot of confusion arises regarding search engines and search marketing. To eradicate this problem from the domain of search engine, SEO and SEM permanently especially for the people who are aspiring content creators, Danny Sullivan along with Chris Sherman founded Search Engine Land in 2006.

Search Engine Land is basically a publication that has got every news, information and trendy topic related to the search engine on the website. It is a very popular platform used by content creators, search marketers and consumers from different fields as well.

Danny Sullivan

Born in 1965, Sullivan was brought up in California. He pursued his Bachelor’s degree from the University of California and started working as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register. Sullivan was intrigued by the internet and left the job as the reporter in 1995. He wanted to delve deeper into the world of search engines and hence started doing research about these engines and posted guidelines on the web which was popular as A Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engine. In 1996 he became Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Watch.

Sullivan’s guide continued for years and he finally co-founded Search Engine Land in 2006. The parent company of Search Engine Land was Third Door Media and Sullivan served as the Chief Content Officer of the company from 2006 to 2017. Sullivan, after founding Search Engine Land was named as one of the 50 marketing influencers in 2015. After he retired from the company, Sullivan announced that he will be joining Google as an Advisor.

Chris Sherman

Sherman went to the University of California, San Diego and pursued his Bachelor’s degree in visual arts followed by acquiring a degree in Interactive Educational Technology from Stanford University. In 1988, Sherman was named the Vice President, Technology of Leadership Studies International followed by becoming the Executive Editor of SearchEngineWatch.com. In November 2006, Sherman joined Third Door Media and in the next year, he became the Founding Editor of Search Engine Land.

Founding Search Engine Land

How many of you are confused between Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch? Search Engine Land is under the company Third Door Media which was founded by Sullivan in 2006 as a digital agency to provide services in the area of marketing technologies, SEO, SMX, and related services. On the other hand, Search Engine Watch is the company that both Sullivan and Sherman worked for co-founding Search Engine Land. Search Engine Land was launched as the product of the company, Third Media Door in the same year when it was founded.

When Sullivan become a newspaper journalist and started off his career in 1995, the Internet just started gaining popularity. So, with people around him who wanted to advertise their websites through search engines barely had any idea about how they are ranked in a search engine at all or how they can improve their rank. This motivated Sullivan to do research about it, publish on the internet about search engine guideless which ultimately led to founding his own company after a decade.

The popularity of Search Engine Land

With the arrival of this new era of digital marketing, every start-up or freelancer or the content creators needs to understand the importance of SEO and SEM. Sullivan, in one of his interviews, said that he since day 1 has preferred to emphasize SEO and its importance though there were much negative feedbacks initially. But, with the site providing ample news, suggestions, updates, and guides about SEO, SEM and more, the company is leading in the publication world for technology. It covers every aspect of the search marketing industry that one user can probably lookup for on the internet and the company also conducts events and conferences around the world.

Currently, the company is having around ten team members with its headquarters based on New England. The estimated annual revenue of the company is $4.4 million and to date there hasn’t been any funding round for Search Engine Land. The website tracks more than 1 million monthly visitors and it is ranked 52,645 among all the global websites.