Tech Story

Appian Corporation – Developer Of Cloud Computing As Well As Enterprise Software.

After the internet, cloud computing is one of the best technology that is most beneficial for every business. The very technology has reduced the hectic work of managing the storage for the businesses and just buying some subscriptions, the data is readily available for every user of the data through the cloud. Hence, the technology is now adopted by almost every company in the world that deals with data and the internet. To process the data on the cloud, some software is required. This software helps the companies manage, deploy and access the data on the cloud. Appian Corporation is one of the leading software development companies known for its enterprise cloud software development. Appian creates software that helps other organisations to build applications for mobiles, desktops, and even the cloud on their own. The company has been in the business for over twenty years and has become a prominent name in the cloud software industry.

About Appian Corporation

Appian Corporation is the developer of cloud computing as well as enterprise software. The company was founded in 1999, and the team of founders included Michael Beckley, Matt Calkins, Robert Kramer, and Marc Wilson. The company headquarters is based in McLean, Virginia, United States, and apart from that, the Appian Corporation has its offices in fifteen different locations globally. The company is home to over 1500 employees, and according to the 2021 FY report, it made annual revenues worth $369.3 Million. The company is known for its low-code automation platform and has developed multiple apps for its customers.

Founding Appian Corporation

Michael Beckley, Robert Kramer, Marc Wilson, and Matthew Calkin founded Appian in 1999. The idea behind the company was to gather talented people and use their knowledge and skills to get amazing results. This way, Appian was established to offer its employees the liberty to make their decisions to fulfill the company goals most innovatively. It was Calkin’s idea to build such a company, and other co-founders joined in later to found the company.

The company introduced its first product, a web-based enterprise information service for the US army, named Army Knowledge Online, in 2001. The very service was also regarded as “the world’s largest intranet” at that time.

The downturn of the economy during 2008 affected Appian too, but the leaders working for the success of the company had made a plan B for the company too. This time, Appian brainstormed over the concept of building software that would reduce most of the work for the organizations. So the company built a platform based on the “low-code technique”, which would allow the organizations to create their software on their own, without being a tech geek. The platform was a hit, as it was secure and could be used on any device, mobile, desktop as well as on the cloud.

The success of Appian’s new software platform brought it more success and investments. In 2014, New Enterprise Associates invested a sum of $37.5 million in Appian. In May 2017, the company went public on NASDAQ and started to trade with the ticker name APPN. With the release of Appian AI, the company introduced the integration of Artificial Intelligence to its platform in 2019. In the following years, Appian also made some acquisitions, including Novayre Solutions SL and Lana Labs.

Today, Appian offers its software services to industries like Automotive, Education, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Insurance, Life Sciences, Retail, Telecom, Transportation, etc. In fact, with the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, Appian launched apps that helped businesses with their work, like tracking the workforce’s health and safety, helping companies reopen their offices, and helping banks manage Paycheck Protection Programloan applications, etc. This way, those apps helped businesses to continue their work during the pandemic.

The CEO at Appian Corporation

Matt Calkins is one of the founders and the CEO of Appian. He is an Economics graduate from Dartmouth College. In fact, he was the topper of his class. In 1994, he joined MicroStrategy as the Director of Enterprise Product Group and left the company in 1999 to found Appian. Matt has been the CEO of Appian from the very beginning and has led the company to be the leading enterprise software developer. He is also known as the author of several award-winning board games.

Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

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OVHcloud – Journey Of Cloud Computing Started By A 24-Year Old Octave Klaba.

OVHcloud is a French cloud computing company that was founded in 1999. Octave Klaba is the founder and Chairman of OVH and the current CEO of the company is Michel Paulin. OVHcloud offers various cloud-based services like web hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, enterprise solutions, and public and private cloud. Being a French company, it initially expanded to other European countries but in recent years its main focus has been North America and the US. Unfortunately, in 2021 the company suffered huge losses due to a fire in its Strasbourg data center. The company reported estimated damage of approximately €105 million.

Early Days

Octave Klaba at the age of 24 decided to begin his entrepreneurial journey with OVHcloud. The idea of founding a cloud computing startup strikes his mind when he realized France is in sheer need of web hosting. He didn’t have any initial capital to invest so he took support from his close friends and family. He got support from his three family members and was able to borrow 25,000 francs with which he started the company.

Web hosting was the then-new concept in France so initially, no one believed in what he was doing. But it didn’t stop Klaba from renting ten servers from a provider in Paris and starting his project. The business started growing slowly as in 2000 the company had 20 active servers and it also received entitlements for .fr and .be domain names. The net profit OVH was making was fully reinvested in adding new servers. Eventually, Klaba’s brother, Miroslaw joined the venture to help him out.

Expansion

Entering a new decade, OVH was starting to land more and more customers. It also opened the company’s first data center in Paris but soon it outgrew the space. Also, for easy maintenance of the servers, OVH decided to make in-house casings. In 2002, the company opened a new data center in Paris and built its first sever called the Greenbox. Until 2003, OVH was doing all the operational work from leased data centers. But the company opened its first wholly-owned data center in 2003 and it was a 3,000 square meter building. The company didn’t only own a data center but became one of the first cloud-hosting companies to use water-based cooling technology in a data center. In 2004, the company expanded to Poland and Spain and the old servers in the company were retro-fitted with water cooling systems.

OVH expanded to the Roubaix Valley in 2005 and expanded to Germany in the next year. By the end of 2006, OVH has 12,000 active servers and also deployed advanced network infrastructure. OVH expanded to Italy, Portugal, and the UK in 2008 followed by opening five new subsidiaries in Ireland, Netherlands, Lithuania, Czech Republic, and Finland. By 2010, the company had more than 350 employees and it invested around €10 Million in R&D cloud. The company’s plan to enter the American market started in 2012 with the aim to build the world’s largest data center in Canada. After a funding round in 2016, the value of OVH surpassed the $1 billion mark. In 2017 it expanded to the US market after the acquisition of vCloud Air from VMware. OVH also became a publicly-traded company in 2021 and it is listed on the Paris Stock Exchange.

About the Founder

Octave Klaba is the founder and Chairman of the world’s one of the most successful cloud computing companies. He is originally from Poland but he moved to France when he was sixteen. Being passionate about computer science from an early age, he graduated from ICAM Lille with a computer science degree. After he graduated, his main focus was founding OVHcloud and he didn’t work for any other companies.

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

Vonage – 25 Years Old Company Specializes In Business Cloud Communications.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Yashica Vashishtha

The discovery of communication mediums, like the telephone, has revolutionized every industry. In fact, communication mediums are the best invention of all time. Starting from telegraphs to telephones, and from the simple button, mobile phones to today’s smartphones, all of these devices have been a matter of amaze. Today, we are able to communicate not only via smartphones but also through a mere internet connection. On the internet, too, cloud communication has become a really effective medium of communication. Vonage is one of those cloud communication service providers which provides its services to businesses. This American company started as a residential telecommunication service provider and today is one of the leading business cloud communications providers.

About Vonage

Vonage is a publically held American company founded in 1998. It specializes in business cloud communications, such that, provides services like Unified Communications, Contact Center, Communications APIs, Home VoIP Phone Service Provider, etc. The company is about 25 years old, but still, it retains its relevance, in fact, with time, it has adapted to the changing trends, making it stand strong among the competition. Jeff Pulver and Jeffrey A. Citron are the founders of Vonage, whereas its headquarters is based in Holmdel, New Jersey, United States. The company offers its services worldwide, and about 2500 people are working for it. As per the 2020 records, Vonage made revenues worth $1.25 billion, and its served over 1.1 million subscribers worldwide.

The Back Story

Jeff Pulver founded Vonage in 1998 as Min-X.com, a Voice over IP (VOIP) exchange. Later, Jeffrey A. Citron, the other co-founder, and Carlos Bhola, an investor in the company, joined Vonage. Both contributed $1 million from their private savings and became board members. In the coming years, Citron became the CEO, whereas Bhola was appointed as the President of the company, raising $11 million in additional funding. By this time, the company started to focus on being a VOIP service provider. In 2001, the company had its name changed to Vonage Holdings Corp., and the headquarters of the company was shifted to Holmdel, New Jersey.

Beginning in the USA, Vonage had expanded to countries like the UK and Canada in the coming years. In 2006, the company went public on New York Stock Exchange, and it offered its shares to its existing customers through the IPO.
Like every other company, Vonage started to expand its business through strategic acquisitions, starting in 2013. The names acquired by Vonage include Vocalocity, Telesphere, iCore Networks, SimpleSignal, gUnify, Nexmo, TokBox, NewVoiceMedia, Over.ai, etc.

Today, Vonage specializes in services including Business services (unified communications, cloud communications, middleware technology, etc.), Residential services (home phone plans using VoIP), Service requirements, telephone number availability, Emergency calls, Quality of service, and equipment compatibility, etc. As per an announcement by Ericsson done in November 2021, Ericson is going to acquire Vonage for a sum of 6.2 billion USD by the first half of 2022.

The CEO at Vonage

Rory P. Read is the current CEO of Vonage. He is a well-known business executive in America and possesses experience of more than 25 years. Read has got a bachelor’s degree in information systems from Hartwick College and has worked in big-name companies like IM, Lenovo, AMD as well as Dell in multiple executive positions. In fact, Read has spent about 23 years at IPB, where he handled the Asia Pacific region as the general manager, of Business Innovation Services. Before joining Vonage, Read served as the president and CEO of Virtustream, a subsidiary of Dell, and as the EVP chief operating executive of Dell. Read became the CEO of Vonage in July 2020.

Yashica Vashishtha

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Nutanix – A Leading IT Company Offering An Unparallel Enterprise Cloud Platform.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

With a goal to make IT management easier for the industrial sector, Nutanix Inc was founded in September 2009. The company’s founding team was three successful Indian entrepreneurs, Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron, and Ajeet Singh. Nutanix’s headquarters is based in San Jose, California, US. The main products of the company are Enterprise Cloud Platform, Business Software, and IoT. It offers various cloud-based solutions and services as well disaster recovery, cloud monitoring, and much more. There are more than 20,000 leading companies that are customers of Nutanix including Volkswagen, Vodafone, Nasdaq, Seattle Children’s, etc. Currently, the company is focusing on developing more products for entering into the hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem.

Founding Story

Nutanix is an IT company that mainly focuses on providing cloud-based enterprise software. It has also received several awards for innovation and best products and also as a startup. This startup was founded in 2009 and one of the co-founders, Dheeraj Pandey became the CEO of the company. Mohit Aron left the company in 2013 to found a computer data storage company, Cohesity. Nutanix was very lucky when it came to raising funds as, within four years of its establishment, it successfully hosted five funding rounds. By 2013, the company raised $312.2 million from funding and it also reached a $1 billion valuation in the same year and received unicorn status. In 2014, its valuation became $2 billion after the Series E funding where it raised $140 million. Some of the major investors involved were Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Blumberg Capital.

Nutanix became a public company in 2015 but unfortunately, it suffered a net loss of $126 million in the same year. The company also started acquisitions in 2016 and acquired two companies, namely, PernixData and Calm.io in the same year. In 2017, Nutanix established a partnership with IBM, and again in 2018 acquired three companies, Netsil, Minjar, and MainFrame2 Inc. After the pandemic, the company shifted from making hardware applications to SaaS products.

Awards & Accolades

Founded in 2009, Nutanix started receiving prestigious awards after a couple of years. In 2011, the company received the Best of VMworld 2011 – Gold Award for its products. The experts made Nutanix the winner based on innovation, usability, reliability, value, and performance. In 2012, Nutanix again received the “Best New Product of 2012” award by VMworld because they liked the SAN-free approach by Nutanix for enhancing virtualization performance. It received a series of awards in 2013 including VMworld vFlipcup 2013 Champions, announced one of the top 100 companies in North America by Red Herring, LinkedIn Top 10 InDemand Tech Startup, recognized as “Cool Vendor” by Gartner, and a few more.

In 2014, Nutanix was named a Tech Trailblazer which is a new concept in the startup ecosystem. This award was mainly given to young startups and after it was recognized as such, the companies received a lot of support for growing their business. In the same year, it also bagged a customer service award and received the Technology of the Year award by InfoWorld. Dheeraj Pandey, one of the co-founders was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015. In 2018, the company was featured by well-known magazines and companies like Forbes, Gartner, Deloitte, and GEC Media Group. Nutanix was also named one of the 18 great companies for millennials in the San Francisco area. Recently, it has received a few awards for being one of the top workplaces.

Rajiv Ramaswami – CEO of Nutanix

Rajib Ramaswami is the current CEO and President of Nutanix who joined the company late in 2020. Before he joined Nutanix, he worked in various positions at VMware. Ramaswami was the Executive Vice President and General Manager of VMware’s networking and security business and later he became the Chief Operating Officer of Products and Cloud Services. Ramaswami worked at various other companies including IBM, Cisco, Nortel, Tellabs, and Broadcom. He completed his bachelor’s degree in India and then went to the University of California, Berkeley.

Annasha

Basware – One Of The Best Providers Of Financial Technologies Across The Globe.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Basware was originally founded as Baltic Accounting Systems in 1985. Its headquarters is based in Espoo, Finland and it is one of the finest fintech companies in the country. The company offers worldwide services and it has started operations in more than 50 countries. Currently, Basware has established its market in six continents. Its major markets are the Nordic countries, Europe, Russia, and North America but apart from these regions, it has also expanded to the Asia-Pacific region. Basware sells enterprise software for various financial processes and recently it has also achieved Green Supply Chain Award for two years consecutively.

About Basware

The network of Basware is very vast and it connects more than 2 million active buyers and suppliers with the company. Basware is known for offering cloud-based e-invoicing and purchase-to-pay solutions to its worldwide customers. According to Klaus Andersen, CEO of Basware Corporation, one of the unique selling points of the company is the ability to cope with the complexity of a global business while operating smoothly. The main customers of Basware are mostly global large enterprises. Basware also has small industrial clients but it becomes difficult to work with them since their entire system is not digitized yet. The company is also focusing on its relationship with its partners. Hence it has launched the Partner Center of Excellence for better implementations.

History

When Basware was founded, it was a subsidiary of an American corporation that was established in Finland. But after five years, the Finnish management team decided to buy the company and thus it was spinned off from the American conglomerate. This Finnish team of Basware included Hannu Vaajoensuu, Ilkka Sihvo, Kirsi Eräkangas, Antti Pöllänen and Sakari Perttunen. After it became an independent company it started working to roll out its first commercial product. It was the company’s first Financial Management Software and it was released in 1992. The company launched its second product in 1997 which was their first Invoice Processing Software. This product became very famous especially because it had the feature of Scan & Capture Workflow for Invoices. This also helped Basware land its first international client from Sweden in 1999.

Basware decided to go public in 2000 and hence it got listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange. In the following years, the company introduced the first electronic invoicing, intelligent OCR, archiving, and much more. Eventually, it was able to land customers from Norway, Denmark, and other European countries. In the next two years, the company planned to expand into Australia, USA, UK, and Central Europe.

Acquisitions

Basware started acquiring companies in 2005 and started with Iocore, a Norway-based company. In the same year, it also acquired Finnish Trivet Software and in 2006 it acquired Finnish Analyste followed by Digital Vision Technologies Ltd in 2007. In 2008 the company acquired Contempus AS and in 2009 it acquired Itella’s Norwegian invoice automation solution business. In 2016, Company acquired a US-based company called Verian. It is a leading provider of cloud-based solutions for the financial sector.

Klaus Andersen – CEO of Basware

Kalus Andersen is a very experienced person in the executive position with more than 20 years of experience in the field. He joined Basware in 2018 as the Chief Technology Officer of the company and after a year he was appointed the CEO. Before joining the company, he worked at several companies. From 1996 to 2008, he worked at SimCorp where he was the Head of SimCorp Dimension, Research, and Development. He also served as the Senior Vice President, IMS Development. From 2008 to 2014, he served as the Managing Director of SimCorp UK Ltd. Prior to joining Basware, he was the Executive Vice President of Global Engineering at Itiviti AB.

Annasha

Epicor – The Makers Of Business Software For Its Peers With Over Fifty Years Of Experience.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Yashica Vashishtha

The retail and business industry is the one that needs most of the documentation, and the software industry has played a vital role to help out those businesses with these hectic documentation processes. Software today is for almost every work, like tracking the resources, and keeping the records of inventory as well as exports, thus making the work seem less and quicker than earlier. Epicor is one of such software developers who are behind those amazing business software that is reducing the work time for every business globally. The company, with its over fifty years of experience in the software industry, has made its different identity from its peers.

About Epicor

Epicor Software Corporation is an American software company. The company was founded fifty years ago in 1972 in Texas, Austin, and since then headquarters of the company has been in the same city. Epicor is known for its business software which mainly includes, ERP, CRM, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Human Capital Management (HCM), and Retail software. This software is responsible for documenting everything from manufacturing, distribution, retail, services, etc., and all the products are available in both on-premises deployment and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models. Epicor is a private company, and Steve Murphy is the current CEO at Epicor. The company is home to over 5000 employees globally.

The company is about fifty years old and is excelling in the field of software development. Today, the company has expanded to over 150 countries, with over 4000 employees working for it and 120,000 clients worldwide.

The Founding of Epicor

Epicor includes the story of two companies forming Epicor Software Corporation. In 1972 Triad Systems Corporation was established that became Activant in 2003, a contributing company to Epicor. On the other hand, Advanced Business Microsystems was a company that built accounting software for Ms-Dos in partnership with IBM. Later, ABM started to develop financial accounting software under the name Platinum and had its name changed from ABM to Platinum Software Corporation in 1992. With the new name, the company started to produce products for Microsoft Windows as well. After impacting acquisitions like Clientele and FocusSoft, the company merged its operations with DataWorks, and in 1999, was renamed Epicor Software Corporation. Activant, on the other hand, was acquired by Apax Partners, which ultimately merged the operations of Activant with Epicor Software Corporation.

Through Epicor’s Platinum for Windows software was very popular, the company sold it to Sage Group in 2001. Epicor introduced its web-based platform named Service Enterprises in 2003. Along with growing its products and their growth was contributed by some major acquisitions at the same time. The company acquired Intrepid (1995), Interactive Group (1997), CompuNet (2003), Scala (2004), CRS Retail (2005), NSB (2007), Spectrum Human Resource Systems Corporation (2010), Solarsoft Business Systems (2012), QuantiSense (2014), ShopVisible, LLC (2015), KKR (2016), 1 EDI Source (2019), etc.

The company also endorses the idea of sustainability and has released a program with the name ‘Fit for the Future.’

The CEO At Epicor

Steve Murphy is the current CEO of Epicor. He has over 25 years of experience in the field of technology. Murphy had joined the company in 2017. Before joining Epicor, he has worked in companies like OpenText, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Accenture, and Manugistics, in various executive roles. Academically, he has got a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California and has completed an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Yashica Vashishtha

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