Your Tech Story

Story

Arrow Electronics

Arrow Electronics – Story of a company from Radio Row to the Fortune 500 list.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Arrow Electronics is a very famous Fortune 500 company established in the electronics industry. The company mainly focuses on distribution and other value-added services of various electronic components. Currently, Arrow Electronics is the largest US company in terms of total revenue. The journey of this multinational conglomerate began with a retail store in Manhattan opened by Maurice Goldberg in 1935. Today, the headquarters of the company is based in Centennial, Colorado. It is a publicly traded company with more than 19,000 employees. Michael J. Long is the present CEO and President of the company.

The Founding Story Of Arrow Electronics

In 1935, Maurice Goldberg opened a retail store called Arrow Radio on Cortlandt Street. This place was situated in lower Manhattan and it was very famous for Radio Row where the distribution of various electronic components began. Maurice established Arrow Radio to sell radios and various radio parts to retail customers. The sale for both radio and its parts peaked during the 1940s and the company decided to seek a franchise to sell new parts. Apart from selling radios from companies like Philco, GE, and RCA, two companies including RCA and Cornell Dubilier first franchised Arrow. Finally, the organization, Arrow Electronics was incorporated in 1946.

Arrow Electronics
Image source: bizj.us

Expansion Of Arrow Electronics

After Arrow Electronics was incorporated, the company received some additional franchises in the 1950s and started selling electronic components to industrial firms. Since the sales of the company were increasing it decided to open another office in Long Island in 1956. The company decided to file its first IPO in 1961 and thus it was able to list its share in the American Stock Exchange. During this time, the total sales of the company summed up to $4 million.

Gradually, the industrial division of the company started to dominate as industrial customers were more in number. The expansion continued as Arrow Electronics opened additional offices in New Jersey, Totowa, Norwalk, and Conneticut. In the 1960s, Company shifted its headquarters to Farmingdale, New York, and gain in 2011 shifted to Colorado.

In 1968, there was a change in the ownership of Arrow Electronics as three graduates from the Harvard Business School, Glenn, Green, and Waddell acquired the controlling interest of the company. These three investors led a private investor group and they acquired Arrow as they saw it as an opportunity to consolidate the fallen pieces of the electronics industry. In the early 1970s, Company ranked 12 in the list of US electronics distributors while Avnet topped the list.

This decade also witnessed the growth of Arrow’s electronics business as it won the semiconductor franchises led by Texas Instruments. During this time the company opened 20 new sales offices in the US. By the end of the decade, the electronics distribution business of Arrow was a big hit and the sales escalated to $177 million. From number 12, the company became the second-largest electronics distributor in the US.

Present Days

Through frequent public bond offerings, the company tried to fund its growth along with some acquisitions. Till the end of the 1960s, Arrow continued its retail operation and it ceased to operate in the 1970s. Arrow exclusively focused on the electronics business and established a real-time computer system to make the business more productive. In 1979, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and by the end of the year, it made a major acquisition that helped it gain customers from the Western US. The acquisition of the company continued as it acquired Kierulff Electronics to adopt a new growth strategy.

During this time, Stephen Kaufman, a former partner of McKinsey & Company joined Arrow as the President of the Electronics Distribution Division. And, it was under his leadership that the company expanded into Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. It also completed acquiring more than 50 companies and reached global sales of $9 billion at the beginning of the 21st century.

Michael J. Long – CEO

Michael Long joined Arrow Electronics in 1991 when the company merged with Schweber Electronics. In 1994, Long became the President of Capstone Electronics, a company under Arrow and in May 2009 became the CEO of Arrow Electronics. Long has a business degree from the University of Wisconsin.

Verisign

Verisign – The American Company Famous For Web Domain Name Registry.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Verisign is a famous American company known for its authoritative domain registry business. While surfing the internet, we visit several web pages every day. If we notice the URL of these web pages, we can find .com, .net, etc at the end of the addresses. These are known as domain names and when an individual or a company wants to launch a website online, it needs to be registered under a certain domain name. Verisign is responsible domain name registry for two of the most extensively used domains, namely, .com and .net. It is the main business of the company apart from which it offers a variety of security services. 

About Verisign

James Bidzos established Verisign Inc in April 1995. The company’s headquarters is based in Reston, Virginia, US. It is responsible for operating a diverse array of network infrastructure with two top-level domains in the internet root nameservers. It is also responsible for country-code top-level domains like .cc and .tv and also back-end systems for top-level domains like .gov and .edu. This is the core business unit of Verisign and apart from that it offers distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), security services for cyber threats, etc. 

Verisign also had an authentication business unit that was sold to Symantec in 2010. The deal was closed at $1.28 billion and it included Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, Verisign Trust Seal, public key infrastructure, and Verisign Identity Protection Services. The ownership again changed in 2017 when Symantec sold it to DigiCert. Verisign also let go of its Security Service Customer Contracts to NeuStar Inc in 2018. 

Verisign
Image source: wikimedia.org

History Of The Company

Verisign was originally a part of the RSA Security certification services business unit. The parent company is an American-based business that specializes in network security using encryption. Verisign was formed as a spin-off in 1995 and this newly formed company received the RSA-held licenses for key cryptographic patents. These licenses were set to expire in 2000 and it was also a time-limited agreement. The new company that was formed operated as a certificate authority (CA) to ensure trust for the internet through digital authentication. 

From 1995 to 2010, Verisign operated on a large scale and in various sectors from military to retail applications. It had more than 3 million certificates that making it the largest CA in the world. But in 2010, it sold its authentication business unit to Symantec, and the same year the company announced that it would be moving from California to Northern Virginia. Verisign started acquiring different companies after a few years of the spin-off. In 2000, it acquired Network Solutions that was responsible for operating the domains .net, .com, and .org. The company operated these domains under an agreement with Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the United States Department of Commerce. 

Business Growth And Expansion

The acquisition of Network Solutions formed the powerhouse of the core and the largest business unit of Verisign. After three years, Verisign decided to divest the Network Solutions retail but at the same time retained the business of domain registry. It was a very flourishing business and since it became the center of Verisign the company put its maximum focus on domain registry. By the end of 2010, the company reported annual revenue of $681 million which was 10 percent more than that of 2009. Verisign, over the years, has also faced many controversies regarding domain names, especially from the US government. 

James Bidzos – Founder And CEO

James Bidzos is the founder and CEO of the domain registry company, Verisign. Initially, he was not appointed the CEO of the company. But, after the resignation of Mark McLaughlin in 2011, James became the next CEO. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors at Verisign. In 1986, James joined RSA and according to him, the company was a big failure as there was no product and customers. It was under his leadership that RSA developed an encryption toolkit and landed contracts with Motorola and Novell. He also served as CEO of RSA before the spin-off in 1995. 

Angi Inc.

Angi Inc. – The Largest Marketplace And Review Service Of America.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Before the internet era, one would only get to know about things through radio or TV. But the most reliable source of information used to be the word of mouth. But this type of information system, despite being the most accurate and reliable, did not have the reach. One could only provide information about a particular, topic like a sort of home decor service or the service of a hospital, etc., to people they knew. Though there used to be directories like Yellow pages and ads in the newspaper that would help to an extent, with limited reach and were the static approach. The arrival of the internet and the fact that it is accessible to all has helped companies like Angi. Angi is an online platform that facilitates review services on a broad spectrum of things to help people analyze what would suit their particular needs. Angi Inc. is as reliable a platform as mouth-to-mouth marketing has been, just with a broader reach. It is an internet content and information platform and one of the largest home service websites in America where people can put or read reviews on local businesses and contractors.

About The Company

Angi Inc. previously known as ANGI Homeservices Inc. is a publically traded home service website for putting and viewing reviews about nearby businesses and contractors. The company was founded in 1995 and trades on Nasdaq as ANGI. William S. Oesterle and Angie Hicks are the founders of Angi, and IAC is the current owner of the company. The platform provides an online marketplace for businesses and offers review services to people. Angi’s corporate headquarters is based in Denver, Colorado. As of 2019, 4500 people are working for Angi, and it made annual revenues worth US$1.132 billion in the same year. Angi and HomeAdvisor are its major subsidiaries.

Angi Inc.
Image source: townnews.com

Founding Angi Inc.

The idea behind Angi’s founding came up to Angie Hicks when he was looking for some reliable construction contractor for his boss William S. Oesterle in the suburban Columbus, Ohio in 1995. The search resulted in Hicks joining Oesterle to start a call-in service in Columbus for its natives, where they could rate a certain home or lawn care service. For that, Hicks went door-to-door and asked people to sign up for reviewing local contractors. In a year in Columbus, Hicks was able to recruit 1000 members and also raised money for the new business.
In 1996, the founder acquired Unified Neighbors a company providing similar review services. In 2012, the company name was changed to HomeAdvisor, and it made acquisitions like Werkspot (2013) and MyHammer (2016). In 2010, the company raised $25 million in capital to operate its other wing, Angie’s List. Angi went public on the NASDAQ exchange in 2011. In 2014, the company opened another branch of Werkspot.nl in Italy. The year 2015 noted the most growth for the company, as the recorded annual revenues for the year was $300 million.
The next year, Angi made its Angie’s List a freemium service having over 10 million reviews over it for free. The platform provided additional services on the paid subscription for the same. In October 2017, IAC acquired Angi and merged Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor into one. The new company was renamed ANGI Homeservices. Another name change for Angie’s List and ANGI Homeservices took place in 2021. The former was renamed Angi, and the latter now is known as Angi Inc.

The CEO At Angi Inc.

Oisin Hanrahan is the current Chief Executive Officer of Angi Inc. He went to the Harvard Business School and earned a Master of Business Administration. He has also got a master’s in Finance from the London School of Economics as well as a Business, Economics, and Social Sciences degree, which he received from Trinity College Dublin.
Hanrahan is a well-known entrepreneur, as he has founded companies like MiCandidate and Clearwater Group. He has also co-founded The Undergraduate Awards. He joined Angi in 2018 when one of his founded companies was acquired by Angi. Before becoming the CEO of Angi, he served the company as the CPO (Chief Product Officer). In February 2021, Hanrahan was named the CEO of Angi Inc.

J2 Global

J2 Global – A Renowned Digital Media And Cloud Computing Company In The US.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Digital media has shown unbound opportunities in the 21st century especially now that every nation wants to go digital. And, in recent years, the potential of cloud platforms and their demand has increased rapidly. J2 Global is a company that has established itself in the digital media and cloud computing industry. The company has over 4,000 employees and its total assets sum up to nearly $3.5 billion. J2 Global is based in Los Angeles, California and it mainly provides internet services through Business Cloud Services and Digital Media.

About J2 Global

J2 Global is a publicly traded tech company that was founded in December 1995. Jaye Muller and Jack Reiley co-founded J2 Globals. The company has two business divisions, namely, Business Cloud Services and Digital Media Division (Ziff Davis). There are several firms under the business cloud division of the company. Some of them are eVoice, UnityFax, Excel Micro, VIPRE, etc. And, the digital media division of the company includes brands like PC Magazine, Everyday Health, IGN.com, and Mashable. J2 Global has also been the recipient of many prestigious awards. In 2012, the company was recognized in the InformationWeek 500 list of technology companies. Next year, J2 Global was featured in the Forbes list (rank 40) of America’s Best Small Companies.

J2 Global
Image source: media.bizj.us

The Idea Behind J2 Global

The idea of founding J2 Global came from Jaye Muller who was an established musician hailing from East Berlin. He also studied electronics which was another interest of his apart from music. As a musician, Muller traveled a lot and he needed to change hotels almost every day. This created an inconvenience for Muller as he received the fax and voice mails one or two days late and his privacy was compromised as the hotel staff read or listened to his confidential messages. So, when he started researching for any commercial service or product that would help him receive his day-to-day voice mails and faxes on a personal device, he found none. This is when he along with Reiley decided to open a business and fill the void.

Initially, Muller started creating a rough plan for an email-based retrieval system for receiving and sending voice mail and faxes. He was working with a telecommunication company based in Australia to develop the prototype. In 1995 Jaye Muller and Jack Reiley founded the company J2 Global which back then was known as JFax.com. In 2000, the company’s name was changed to J2 Global Communications and again in December 2011, it was changed to J2 Global.

Major Events Of The Company

With the advent of the 21st century, J2 decided to expand the company through some acquisitions. So, in 2000, J2 acquired SureTalk.com, a California-based company that offered online messaging services. It also acquired common stocks for TimeShift which is a web-based technology company. The same year, J2 acquired one of its biggest market rivals, eFax, a company that provided free internet faxing service. Initially, when the company was launched it operated only with the business cloud division and in 2012 the digital media division was launched. This new division was created after the acquisition of a digital publisher called Zeff Davis Inc. Recently, it has acquired many companies that include IGN Entertainment, MetroFax, Backup Connect BV, Business Critical Software, SaferVPN, etc. J2 currently has a global network across more than 50 countries.

About The Founders

Jaye Muller is a famous German musician and a successful entrepreneur who co-founded J2 Global with Jack Reiley. In 1995, he established J2 Global to eradicate the problem of receiving delayed faxes and voice mails. He remained an active part of the company till 2004 and a shareholder till 2016. Before coming into the internet business, he released two solo albums but put his music career on hold for some time as he exclusively focused on J2.

Jack Reiley also comes from a musical background as he was a songwriter, record producer, and disc jockey. Apart from co-writing songs, Reiley also released a solo album called Western Justice. He passed away in April 2015.

Sina Corporation

Sina Corporation – A Chinese Tech Company Providing A Microblogging Platform Similar To Twitter.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Sina Corporation is a famous multinational conglomerate based in China. It has three headquarters in Shanghai, Beijing, and the Cayman Islands. In November 1998, Wang Zhidong, Wang Yan, Ben Tsiang, and Hurst Lin founded Sina Corporation. The company had mainly four lines of business which are Sina Weibo, Sina Mobile, Sina Online, and Sinanet. Currently, Charles Chao is the CEO of the company has more than 60,000 employees. There are more than 100 million people worldwide who use the products and services of Sina Corporation. In 2003, the company was named “China’s Media of the Year” by Southern Weekend.

About Sina Corporation

The four founders founded Sina Corporation in Beijing in 1998 and after a couple of years established its financial headquarters in Shanghai. The company mainly focuses on offering its platform and services to Chinese users globally. It has 100 million registered users of which 10 million engages in free-based services. Apart from the users of China, the company also has Chinese users from North America.

Sina provides different types of services worldwide and has thirteen access points within Greater China and also tailored pages for overseas nations. International markets include Japan, Korea, the US, Australia, Europe, and Germany. The microblogging platform of Sina is also very famous such that more than 5,000 companies and across 2,500 media organizations in China use it.

Sina Corporation
Image source: g.foolcdn.com

Major Sina Businesses

Though the company has four business lines, Sina Weibo is the most famous and revenue-generating of all. Sina Weibo is a microblog social network, a platform similar to Twitter, and the largest social networking service in the Chinese language. Based on the number of active users, Sina Weibo dominates 56.5% of the microblogging market in China. In the Sina Weibo platform, the company has more than 500 million active users and the browsing time is also comparatively more than any other competitors of Sina.

The cloud computing market of Sina Corporation also dominates the Chinese market. This is because Sina App Engine (SAE) is the earliest and the largest such platform in the country. Sina launched this platform in 2009 and this product is dedicated to web deployment, and hosting services for various corporations as well as independent developers. Currently, more than 300,000 developers in China are using the SAE platform.

History Of The Company

Sina Corporation was founded as a result of the merger between the two largest Chinese websites. In 1996, the most traffic generated internet portal of China SRSNet was established which later merged with Sinanet, a website that was developed in 1995 for the American Chinese community. After the merger of these two websites, Sina Corporation was founded and the services were extended to North America and Hong Kong. The merger lead Sina Corporation to outrun its rivals like Sohu and NetEase in terms of the most visited portal site. Sina Corporation started expanding very quickly in terms of launching new services and that way it attracted new customers.

In April 2000, Sina Corporation became the first company to get approved for listing in the Nasdaq National market through a variable interest entity (VIE) in the Cayman Islands. Sina was closely followed by its rivals in the following months of the same year to get listed in the same. In 2000, the official website of the company was selected for online coverage for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. In 2015, the online portal of Sina was attacked as there were certain allegations that it contained distorted facts and violated morality. Recently, Blizzard Entertainment sued Sina Games related to a game called Glorius Saga.

Charles Chao – CEO of Sina Corporation

Charles Chao is the current president and CEO of Sina Corporation. He joined the company back in 1999 when Sina faced various obstacles to get listed in NASDAQ. Charles made great efforts to establish Sina as a VIE which cleared the path for the company. Charles, before becoming the CEO of the company, also served as the CFO and COO. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Sina Corporation.

Rackspace Technology

Rackspace Technology – Helping Business Grow By Managing Cloud For Them.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Cloud computing is the field that has contributed a lot to the IT industry. In fact, the very technology is the basis of many leading companies and their success. Though cloud computing has been there for a while now, and many have adopted it for their businesses. But there are still many struggling to adapt to the rapidly changing environment and requirements for cloud computing. To solve these issues for businesses, Rackspace Technology came with its cloud computing platforms and management tools. For the past more than twenty years, the company has not only grown itself but has helped its client grow as well.
Rackspace is mainly known for its private cloud environment named OpenStack. OpenStack is a reliable cloud environment based on Red Hat, which has been built to provide affordable deployment, updating, and support for cloud solutions to companies.

About Rackspace Technology

RackSpace is twenty-three years old American Cloud-computing company, providing multi-cloud solutions across applications, data, security, and infrastructure. The company headquarters is based in San Antonio, Texas, U.S., serving customers all around the world. The company has 7,200 employees working for it in its various offices established globally. Apart from its headquarters in Texas, the company has offices in countries like the U.K., Dubai, India, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, etc. RackSpace has also established its data centres in Virginia, the UK, Chicago, Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, and Kansas City. It is a publically traded company and trades on the NASDAQ market with ticker RXT. As of 2019, the company made annual revenues worth US$2+ billion.

Rackspace Technology
Image source: www.rackspace.com

The Back Story

The founding team of RackSpace included Richard Yoo, Dirk Elmendorf, Patrick Condon, Morris Miller and Graham Weston. When cloud technology was a new and emerging field, well-established companies got easily comfortable with it. But the small and mid-size firms found it difficult to adapt to cloud computing and were lagging behind. The main reason behind the issue was that the companies really don’t know about cloud computing or were unaware of how to use it for their businesses. This way, from starting a business of application development, the founders ended up thinking of building an outsourcing company for hosting and managing the cloud services for businesses.

Richard Yoo as its CEO, all five founders founded RackSpace Technology in October 1998. From the beginning of the company, it was entirely focused on better services and support for its customers. The company received its first capital investment through a round of funding in March 2000, Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital being the major investors.
The unique idea behind the company helped it grow really fast, but alongside the facilities and growth opportunities for the employees also won 32nd place for RackSpace in Fortune’s “Top 100 Best Companies to Work For 2008”. The company was listed in the same again in 2011 and 2013. In 2008, the company went public on New York Stock Exchange and raised $187.5 million in its first IPO.
RackSpace worked independently for 18 years, and in 2016, Apollo Global Management announced that it will be buying RackSpace for a sum of $4.3 billion. The acquisition was completed in November of the same year, and RackSpace stopped trading on NYSE. In 2020, the company went public again, this time on the NASDAQ market with the symbol RXT.
In its more than twenty years of journey, RackSpace made some acquisitions that helped in its rapid growth. The companies acquired by RackSpace include Webmail.us (2007), Jungle Disk (2008), SliceHost (2008), SharePoint911 (2012), TriCore Solutions (2017), Datapipe (2017), RelationEdge (2018), Onica (2019), etc.

The Founder/CEO

Kevin M. Jones is the current CEO at RackSpace Technology. He is one of the leading business people in the field and has over thirty years of experience in technology services. Kevin went to James Madison University and earned a BBA degree. He is also a Certified Management Accountant.
Before becoming the CEO at RackSpace, Kevin has handled many leadership roles at various leading technology companies. He has served as the Vice President of HP’s Enterprise Services (the Asia Pacific and Japan). He was also the Vice President at EDS and Chief Customer and Sales Officer at Dell. At DXC Technology (DXC), Kevin worked as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Americas region. He was also the CEO at MV Transportation. In April 2019, Kevin joined RackSpace as the Director and the CEO.