Your Tech Story

Tech Story

vmware

VMWARE, SUCCESS STORY OF A 21 YEARS OLD SOFTWARE COMPANY

Leave a Comment / Founder, Story, Tech Story / By

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

Leave a Comment / Founder, Story, Tech Story / By

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

Leave a Comment / Founder, Story, Tech Story / By

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

Leave a Comment / Founder, Story, Tech Story / By

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).

netflix

The Urban World of Netflix: Success Story of Netflix

Leave a Comment / Founder, Story, Tech Story / By

There are very few internet-users who haven’t heard of Netflix. The streaming giant has grown so exponentially that it no longer needs an introduction. But long before it had become a staple tool that eats up hours of our time, Netflix was a DVD rental service that was on the verge of collapsing. So what happened? How did such a large turn of events occur? Read on to understand the highs and lows of Netflix, and how it got to where it is now.

About the Founders

Marc Bernays Randolph who was the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix is an American entrepreneur with a flair for business, having invested in various companies throughout his career. Randolph was born in New York, to Stephen Randolph, who was a nuclear engineer, and Muriel Lipchik. On his father’s side, he is related to both the legendary psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Austrian politician Edward Bernays. Randolph was a very active child and spent his summers working for the National Outdoor Leadership School. After finishing school, he went on to pursue Geology from Hamilton College, and soon after graduating took up a job at Cherry Lane Music Company.

Over in Cherry Lane, Randolph handled the mail-order operation and taught himself the basics of marketing in the process. It was while working here Randolph’s fascination with user data was born, and this would later prove to be the inspiration behind Netflix’s recommendation interface. In 1984, he founded an American chapter for the MacUser magazine and also co-founded MacWarehouse and MicroWarehouse, firms that handled mail orders a couple of years later.

He later joined Borland International in 1988 as a marketer, but soon left to pick up odd jobs in Silicon Valley start-ups, such as Visioneer, and Integrity QA. Then, in 1996 Pure Atria which was a debugging company acquired Integrity QA, and that was when Randolph met Reed Hastings, who was the founder of Pure Atria. Meanwhile, Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. was born in Boston and attended the Buckingham School in Cambridge. Shortly afterwards, he joined the Marine and spent a summer at Marine Corps Base Quantico. He never completed his training, choosing instead to serve the Peace Corps.

After graduating, he joined the Peace Corps and taught in Swaziland for two years, and then returned soon after. In 1988, he graduated from Stanford University with a master’s in computer science and took up a job at Adaptive Technology. He left the company in 1991 and found his first venture Pure Software, which helped in troubleshooting other software. In 1996, the company merged with Atria Software, forming Pure Atria. It was while serving as the CEO there that he met his friend and colleague Randolph. In 1997, the company was acquired by Rational Software for a whopping $850 million.

Founding Netflix

In January 1997, when Pure Atria was on the verge of being acquired, founder Hastings planned on going back to school, while VP Randolph was looking for the next big launch. Well, as luck would have it, that next big idea turned out to be Netflix! The idea for the company was hatched on a 90-minute car ride that the duo took from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley. For six months, Randolph kept pitching ideas to Hastings, till finally one day, they hit on the idea of having a movie rental company that operated via mail. The first thing the duo did was head down to a music store, buy a CD and send it to each other.

When the pair received the CD without any damages, the pair knew that this idea could indeed work.
What followed was a mad scramble to find investors, and this was something the pair found difficult as they were rejected over a thousand times during this process. Then Blockbuster CEO John Antioco reportedly even laughed the idea off, but the duo refused to give up, and slowly Netflix grew.

The pair started the company in 1998 by using their savings and taking money from Randolph’s mother, and IntegrityQA founder, Steve Kahn. Analysis of user data helped the team build a successful subscription-based business model which still works for the company even now. They tested out an early recommendation algorithm named Cinematch, which was met with positive results. The company had only 30 employees initially and slowly grew, introducing a subscription in 1999.

By 2000, Netflix had over 300,000 subscribers but was losing money badly. This led to Blockbuster offering to buy the company for $50 million, but the duo turned down the offer. The economic crisis of 2001 would then force them to fire around one-third of their 120 people workforce, but the spring of 2002 brought good times for the company, and the business started to grow.

Streaming Giant

The company went public in 2002 and sold 5.5 million shares at US$15.00 per share. The company earned its first profit of US$6.5 million in 2003, and had by then over 35,000 films in stock, and was shipping over 1 million DVDs every day. Randolph gave up the position of CEO to Hastings in 1999 to focus more on product design and development and then left the company in 2003, a year after the company went public. Hastings proved his mettle and grew Netflix to the stage it is at now, wherein it has a market value now exceeding $130 billion.

By 2005, the company acquired movie rights and were about to go public, but decided instead to opt for a streaming channel, which went public in 2007. In 2007, Netflix delivered its billionth DVD and slowly started the move to a digital format via the internet.

2010, the company expanded further by starting a streaming media and also grew beyond America, going international and offering services in Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean. Since 2012, Netflix has started taking content production and generation seriously and has pushed out several award-winning series through its Netflix Original tag. By 2016, Netflix had expanded to over 190 countries and had already released more than 126 original series and films.

Netflix is as of now the world’s sixth-largest internet company bringing in over $15.7 billion every year, with revenue growing at 35%. From being a company that was barely surviving to the behemoth it is now, Netflix has indeed come a long way, and along with that way it has faced constant challenges. But it is in overcoming those challenges by constant evolution and adaption that the secret to Netflix’s success lies. Netflix went from being a novel and crazy-sounding idea to a movie rental company and then morphed into a streaming and production giant that churns out award-winning content month after month. With over 151 million subscribers around the world, it is safe to say that the future looks bright for Netflix.

fitbit

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

Leave a Comment / Product, Story, Tech Story / By

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.