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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.

adp

Pay Up, America! – Success Story of Automatic Data Processing

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Automatic Data Processing, Inc., referred to as ADP, is a leading provider of payroll management services in the US. It is regarded as one of the very few companies in the US, that had an AAA credit rating issued by both Standard & Poors and Moody’s. Here’s a look at everything you need to know about the growth of ADP.

About the Founder

Henry Taub was born on September 20, 1927, in Paterson. The American businessman who has both Hungarian and Jewish ancestry co-founded ADP. Taub attended Eastside High School, and did his graduate studies from the New York University in accounting, graduated in 1947. Two years later, in 1949, Taub founded Automatic Payrolls Inc., which was a payroll processing service in New Jersey. That company later came to be Automatic Data Processing and grew to become the leading computerized payroll management service in the U.S.

He retired from ADP in the mid-1980s. Taub served as the president from 1949 to 1970 and then worked as a CEO for seven years till 1977. Also, he was a chairman till 1985, served as an honorary board member till his death.

After retirement from ADP in the 1980s, Taub served as a Board of Governor in American Technion Society between 1990 and 2003. He passed away in 2011, owing to complications which arose as a result of his leukaemia.

While at ATS, his wife and he were responsible for handling several projects such as the Henry and Marilyn Taub Science and Technology Center, a Faculty Recruitment Program and the Taub Fund for the Future.

Founding ADP

n 1949, Henry Taub and his brother Joe together founded Automatic Payrolls, Inc. which served as a manual payroll processing company. The brothers were joined by Frank Lautenberg and in 1957, Lautenberg, who had previously worked in the sales and marketing division, became a partner.

While starting, the brothers had to make do with a shoestring operation and so often delivered payrolls by bus and even cleaned their own offices during the night.

Henry provided the vision and strategy for the company, while Joe managed the operation and regular running of the company. Meanwhile, Lautenberg handled all the sales and marketing the company had to do to gain clients.

After four years, in 1961, the company switched names to Automatic Data Processing, Inc. and upgraded their manual business to a more automated form which utilized card machines, printing machines, and computers.

The company went public the same year, employing over 125 people, and having around 300 clients. ADP generated revenues worth US$400,000 in its first year.

When the business started picking up, the brothers decided to expand, and so, in 1965 they set up a branch in the UK.

By 1970, Lautenberg had taken over as the president and ADP switched over from the American Stock Exchange to the New York Stock Exchange. In 1974, they acquired Time Sharing Limited, which was a company that specialised in providing computer-related services, and a year later they acquired Cybernetics.

By 1972, the company had several dealer franchises and renamed its auto-division, ADP Dealer Services to CDK Global. Lautenberg remained the CEO until he resigned when he became a part of the US Senate in 1982.

Bringing in the Big Bucks

The company grew exponentially in the 1980s and by 1985 was making more than $1 billion a year. The company handled almost 20% of the entire American payroll market. Such growth helped propel them into other avenues such as employee services management.

In the 1990s, ADP acquired HR companies such as Autonom, GSI, and Chessington Computer Centre which handled administrative services. By the early 2000’s they were expanding aggressively, having acquired companies such as Kerridge Computer Co.

which specialised in creating dealer management systems for auto part dealers. A year later, ADP made its foray into the world of brokerage and insurance, by setting up the ADP Brokerage Service Group. In 2010, they bought the auto-marketing enterprise Cobalt, to improve their footing in the field of automobile manufacturing.

Automatic Data Processing Inc

Fast forward seven years to 2017, Automatic Data Processing Inc. was employing more than 56,000 people worldwide and generated revenues over $12 billion.

This helped the company become the largest HR service provider in the Northern half of the world, with services spread across Europe and North America. In 2018, the company acquired WorkMarket, which helps companies manage freelancers and contractors.

The company now operates in over 112 countries and has won several accolades and laurels such as, “Most Admired Fortune 500 Company”, “100% CEI rating” and 47th on a list of Best places to work by Computer World.

Such growth rates and revenues make it clear, without reasonable doubt that ADP is the largest HR service provider for the whole of North America, Europe, Latin America and the Pacific Rim.

With the handling of employees becoming a growing concern for companies around the world, it is safe to say that the company will be making big bucks in the years to come.

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.

EPAM

Teaching America how to Code: Success Story of EPAM

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EPAM Systems, Inc., better known as EPAM, is an international company offering software and IT related services. The company has a global presence with centres spread across North America, Asia, Australia and even Europe. EPAM is without a doubt one of the largest companies to emerge out of Belarus. So how did this IT giant spring from such humble backgrounds to become the world’s leading software consultation service provider? Here’s a look at what turned EPAM from just another novel idea to a thriving business.

About the Founder

Dobkin was born and brought up in Minsk, Belarus to a watchmaker father and medical assistant mother. His elder brother is an engineer, while his sister was a programmer with an innate interest in coding. Meanwhile, Dobkin attended the Byelorussian National University and graduated with an MS in electrical engineering. Shortly after college, he migrated to Russia and worked for software companies over there. Programming, Dobkin noticed always brought quick results, and so he realised that if he was going to grow, this was the field he needed to learn and explore.

He started his own programming business in 1991. By the time he was 31, he had emigrated without even knowing how to speak English with just $2000 in his account. But his dedication helped him as he learnt English on the job and he bought a car with his savings. He then got himself a job at Prudential, and he and his family stayed with his sister who was working as a programmer in the US. When his company collapsed, he contacted his childhood friend in Minsk and set up yet another software company. In the US, he continued working, switching from Colgate Palmolive to SAP Labs.

Together with his partner David Scott, he opened EPAM Systems’ first office on Emmons Drive while his daughters were in college and school respectively. As his clientele were mainly companies from the US and from Europe the financial collapse of Russia in 1998 did not affect EPAM. Slowly, yet surely, the company started to grow. Their first major client was the fashion brand Bally, which approached them looking for help building a Salesforce Automation platform for their North America-based operations.

Founding EPAM

EPAM was founded by Belarusians Arkadiy Dobkin in New Jersey, and Leo Lozner in Minsk on a partnership basis way back in 1993. His biggest struggle came in 2001, when the economic crisis hit America, rendering a major client, one who provided about 70% of his total business, went broke. The fall-out from that crisis led to a very tense and stress-ridden period wherein Dobkin had to cut salaries and acquire new clients fast. Within five years, he removed himself from the fickle field of technology and started focusing on management and operations. Dobkin recalls how his biggest challenge during the 1990s was convincing people he could be trusted, due to rising tension between the US and Russia at the time. Potential clients would be very wary regarding security issues, and winning their trust never happened overnight.

EPAM Systems

Initially, people would turn to him when they had no money to approach an American company, but EPAM would take up their work and do it well, convincing them of the company’s quality and reliability. It merged and incorporated to become EPAM Systems in 2002 and has since then grown exponentially, spreading to several continents and employing over 30,100 people. EPAM is an acronym for Effective Programming for America and is also a slogan they use for marketing promises.

Resounding Success

By 2004, the company was generating over $30.1 million in revenues, growing consistently at 1,840.8 %! The number of employees was also doubling, with the company having only 1,001 employees at that time, to its 1400 in each centre now. India’s outsourcing market overflowing, having entered the industry much earlier than others and the fact that Americans trusted Soviet Engineering all helped Dobkin mould EPAM into what it is now.

Soon EPAM roped in clients such as Reuters, Colgate-Palmolive, CareFirst BCBS, Encores, Samsung America and the London Stock Exchange. In 2004, they acquired Fathom Technology, a Hungarian software development company and this sets off an expansion plan that results in more clients in Europe. By the end of 2005, the company had over 1300 employees.

By 2008, the company acquired new clients in the form of Google and UBS and grew its workforce to over 4300 employees. In 2012, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange and was the first public offering by an Eastern European outsourcing company. In 2018, the company launched a search engine called InfoNgen 7.0, which was extremely intuitive and customizable.

Later the same year, they launched Telescope AI, which is a platform that helps run operations by using Artificial Intelligence. This year, EPAM decided to expand to even more verticals and announced that it was the lead investor for Ben Franklin Technology Partners’ blockchain venture. The company is also on the verge of opening its new office in Ukraine.

The company has continued to grow and expand and now has clients from all over the world, and enjoys a growth rate of 20%, generating over $1.15bn in revenues. The company has over 10 main offices in five countries around the world, each employing over 1400 people. It is safe to say that things are looking up for EPAM as it continues teaching America how to program!

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).