Tech Story

An IT Company Born In Germany That Even Today Serves Only The German Market.

Datagroup is a leading IT expert offering customized solutions to a wide range of customers. CORBOX is the main product suite of the company which is more like an all-in-one solution for its customers. It has been more than thirty-five years that Max Schaber has built this huge empire along with Herbert Schwarzkopf. Today, Datagroup is one of the top twenty IT companies in Germany offering various services from outsourcing to SAP services.

Datagroup has a very strong market all over the country with more than 3,000 employees catering to the needs of customers on a daily basis. The company has not stepped into any of the international markets but instead supports the local companies and businesses in every way possible. Datagroup has also started several projects to enhance the social and sports culture in various regions of Germany.

About Datagroup SE

When speaking of Datagroup, CORBOX is the primary product that gets the spotlight. This product is more like a modular kit with multiple services to smoothen the operations of any company. Once a business is buying the CORBOX module it is then up to the team which services they want to use. The various services in the CORBOX module are managed & private cloud services, application management services, communication and collaboration services, security services, network services, etc. Due to the compatible modules and services offering a great amount of flexibility, Datagroup has been able to thrive in the IT market.

Apart from the CORBOX modular kit, the company also offers IT Consulting, Mobile & App Solutions, Robotic Process Automation, and Industry Solutions. Datagroup also offers its solutions to various educational institutes and one of them will be the famous Max Plank Society. Datagroup is a publicly-traded company and it claims that there are several reasons to invest in its shares for it has an average revenue increase of 20% and an EBITDA margin of 12.6%. It has a very impressive track record when it comes to acquisitions and most importantly it is a company born in Germany and even after more than three decades is focused only on the German market.

History of the Company

In 1983, Max Schaber founded Datagroup which was under the name of Datapec back then. After a few years, DATANET was founded which today is a part of Datagroup Stuttgart GmbH. In the early 1990s, several organizations of the structure of the company took place along with the move-in of the Datagroup corporate headquarters. Entering into the 21st century, the company eventually started making strategic acquisitions starting with tec2b AG in October 2003. After a couple of years, Datagroup IT Services Holding AG was founded which today is known as Datagroup SE. In 2006, Datagroup filed its IPO and entered into the stock market and later that year also acquired messerknecht Informationssysteme and ICP. Datagroup acquired several companies in 2007 and 2008 including EGT Informationssysteme, Hamann, and Feil, Corporate Express locations Rostock and Schwerin, Best-Computer Support, etc. In 2009, the company opened a new office in Berlin and in 2010 it was recognized as one of the top 15 German computer companies.

Recent Events

As Company started acquiring more and more companies, its IT-based solutions were strengthened. It acquired several IT service providers and SAP companies to offer better solutions to the customer. In 2016, Datagroup became one of the top three companies in Germany for customer satisfaction. Recently, the company has acquired a 68% stake in Portavis thus strengthening its presence in the financial sector. It has also invested in a few startups and companies that offer IT solutions in the public sector.

About the Founder

Max Schaber is the founder of Datapec, a data processing company that eventually became Datagroup GmbH. He is serving as the CEO of Datagroup SE since 2006. Schaber completed his education at the University of Stuttgart and became a mechanical engineer. Before founding Datapec, he was a system engineer at Friedrich und Co. Company.

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

Dubber Corporation – All Three Co-Founders Came Up With The Idea While Working In Call Center.

Dubber Corporation was founded in 2011 by three friends. It is a publicly-traded company with its headquarters based in Melbourne, Australia. Dubber offers cloud-based solutions mainly called recording software across various industries. Various types of products are developed by the company not only for various industries but also for the government.

It has a customized range of solutions for large as well as small and medium enterprises. Four main sectors where Dubber is a leading provider of recording software are healthcare, education, financial services, and legal department. The solutions provided by the company are also divided into four categories, namely, compliance intelligence, revenue intelligence, people intelligence, and customer intelligence.

About Dubber Corporation

The founders of Dubber Corporation are James Slaney, Steve McGovern, and Adrian Di Piantrantonio. Dubber predominantly sells its products to Telecommunications Service Providers and Enterprise customers. It is one of the world’s leading companies for unified call recording solutions and voice intelligence clouds. Dubber has a SaaS model for selling its cloud-based software and it is incorporated in many networks communication solutions globally. Dubber has formed only a decade ago and today more than 150 service providers are using its software for call recording and many other purposes.

The company has also crossed the mark of recording more than one billion minutes successfully. Some of the biggest clients of Dubber are Verizon, AT&T, Microsoft Teams, Cox, Zoom, Vodafone, etc. Dubber Corporation has five fundamental values to establish an open and inclusive culture and grow in a strong way. They are to
challenge the status quo, leading together to create more opportunities, a champion service provider for the customers, drive extraordinary performance, and grow as a curious group of people.

Idea Behind Dubber

Founded in 2011, the three co-founders came up with the idea of Dubber Corporation over a few glasses of wine. These three friends were already working in the telecommunication sector and hence had better knowledge than inexperienced entrepreneurs. Before co-founding Dubber, all three of them were working with an Australian Service Provider whose main job was to all the in-bound call center traffic for ACCC (an Australian regulator). This was when the trio realized that though it is very inexpensive to record conversations, it is equally a very laborious job to retrieve the data. So, to bridge this technology gap in the telecommunication sector and make it simpler, they grabbed the opportunity at the earliest and started developing a whole new platform. They made the entire platform cloud-native and scalable for the entire globe. This is how Dubber Corporation was formed. All three co-founders are still a very integrated part of the group. James Slaney is the COO, Steve McGovern is the CEO, and Adrian Di Piantrantonio is the EVP, Global Channels of Dubber.

Growth of the Company

Dubber successfully raised $6 million in angel investment in 2013. After a couple of years, it went public and got listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. In the same year, Dubber successfully made it through a series of interoperability tests with BroadSoft’s unified communications software. During this time, Dubber witnessed a very high growth of 141% in terms of the number of users for the first half of the year. In 2016, Dubber established a partnership with Cisco Broadsoft and in the following years’ established partnerships with many other tech giants. It has also made a few acquisitions including CallN, an Australian call recording company, and Speik, a UK-based company.

Steve McGovern – CEO of Dubber Corporation

Steve McGovern is the current CEO of the company and before that worked at the Hotkey Internet Services Pty Ltd as the General Manager and was the Director of Sales at Sky TV. He completed his education at the University of Sheffield. Currently, he is also a board member of Dubber Corporation and Linius Technologies Ltd. McGovern, after co-founding Dubber, served as the Chairman of Firestrike Resources Ltd but for a very short time.

Annasha

VSS Mani, Started A Business On “Wedding Planning” But Was Not Satisfied And Founded Justdial.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Justdial is an Indian start-up founded in 1996 for offering the public a huge database for conducting a local search. The website of Justdial contains information about any particular company or service from contact number, address, etc. to the details of service provided across the country. So, anyone can look up the website or mobile app of Justdial to find information about any local service that we usually don’t get on the internet. Justdial has more than 10,000 employees and has offices all over the country, like in New Delhi, Kolkata, Pune, Chennai, Chandigarh, etc. Its headquarters is based in Mumbai, India, and the majority of its stake is currently owned by Reliance Retail, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited.

About Justdial

VSS Mani is the founder and CEO of Justdial. The company offers local search as its primary service and apart from that it has two other services, “Justdial Social” and “Search Plus Service.” The former is a service that involves aggregating content from various social media websites, news sources, etc and the latter is responsible for managing online transactions through various apps. Justdial has also entered foreign markets and that includes opening international offices in UAE, UK, USA, and Canada. In India, the company has a total of fifteen offices.

Justdial can be accessed from both mobile and computers. Apart from the official website of the company, it has launched individual mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Blackberry. After Justdial was launched it focussed on every aspect of growth, from expanding to new overseas markets to strengthening the company’s SME relationships. Some of the major investors of the company are SAIF Partners, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, SAP Ventures, etc.

History

VSS Mani, before founding Justdial, had several other business ideas but none of them survived in the market for a long time. Mani agrees that he has learned from the mistakes of his past business endeavors and finally made Justdial a successful brand. When Mani had the idea to develop a website with a huge database, he was working for a yellow page company. This was during the late 1980s when he thought of replacing the yellow pages with a huge database. The users will have access to the database so that they can call any service provider and receive the necessary information. Today, Justdial has a database of more than 29 million listings and over 500,000 active paid campaigns.

Growth and Expansion

Though Justdial was officially launched in 1996, Mani started working on the idea in 1994 with an investment of 50,000 rupees. He rented a garage and some PCs, borrowed furniture to start the groundwork, and also hired 5-6 employees. Justdial became a popular website within a few years and just a decade later the company launched an internet and mobile version of the database, Justdial.com. In 2011, the company was able to raise $10 million followed by $57 million in the next year. All the fundings were judiciously invested to launch new products, develop the brand, and expand geographically.

Justdial decided to go public in 2013 and out of the total 17.3 million shares, 13.5 million were offered to the public. The rest of the shares were given to the previous investors of the company at a rate of 530 rupees per share. The share price of Justdial saw many ups and downs as it went as high as 1894 rupees in August 2014 and then the next year decreased to a triple-digit number. In July 2021, Reliance Retail acquired a 66.95% stake in the company for 3,497 crore rupees. After these acquisitions, Reliance got access to the 25-year old database of the company and VSS Mani withheld his position as the CEO and MD of Justdial.

About the Founder

VSS Mani was born in Jamshedpur and was raised in Calcutta (now Kolkata). He pursued commerce for higher studies and founded three organizations. Mani’s entrepreneurial journey started with “AskMe” but due to improper timing, the business failed shortly. He also started a business on “Wedding Planning” but was not satisfied with the business model or the profit margin. Later with proper business strategies and thorough research, he founded Justdial and made it a huge success.

Annasha

Convera Corporation – Result Of A Merger That Took Place Between Two Companies.

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

We are already familiar with the famous Google and Bing search engines, and we know how amazingly those search engines have changed our lives. From finding out a good institution for studies to finding a chocolate cake recipe in seconds, everything is so easy because of them. Apart from Google and Bing, there are many more that have been consumers’ favourites for a long time, whether it is Baidu, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. But there are some other search engines as well that have been designed to serve a particular purpose. There are companies like Convera Corporation, making such dedicated software products for their clients. Convera Corporation is mainly known for its flagship product, RetrievalWar, which is widely used by Microsoft even after its retirement in 2007.

About Convera Corporation

Convera is a twenty years old technology company, mainly known for its corporate search engine development. The company though is today a part of Firstlight ERA and operates as NTENT today, it has made its name solely through its flagship product RetrievalWare, which the company launched as Convera.
Convera was founded in 2000, with its headquarters established in Vienna, VA, United States. The company was already a result of the merger of Intel’s Interactive Services division and Excalibur Technologies Corporation, and later, it again merged with Firstlight ERA in 2010 to form NTENT. As Convera, the company’s annual revenue for FY2009 was estimated to be 1.3 million USD, and as NTENT, the company is doing equally well.

Founding the Company

Convera Corporation was the result of a merger that took place between Intel’s Interactive Services division and Excalibur Technologies Corporation in the year 2000. The latter has been in the search engine industry for a longer time, and this experience was put to good use for Convera Corporation. On the other hand, Intel’s Interactive division’s expertise was also a boon for the company. Convera bagged Intel’s contract with the National Baseball Association for the distribution of the NBA content in the first year of its inception.
In the year 2002, Convera acquired Semantix Inc. that specialized in cross-lingual processing as well as computational linguistics technology, helping the company add more features to its products. The company had started to offer SaasS vertical search services, and its RetrievalWare became the favourite of governments of the UK, the US, Canada, and a few more countries. In fact, Microsoft still uses the same software to date.
Also, Convera’s vertical search service had attracted customers like John Wiley & Sons., Centaur Media, Incisive Media, etc. In February 2010, Convera merged with Firstlight ERA and formed NTENT, a company that still offers the web-scale semantic search for vertical applications, as Convera Corporation did as an independent company. NTENT’s headquarters is based in New York City, New York, United States, and Pat Condo is the CEO of the company, who also led Excalibur Technologies (one of the merging companies to form Convera) and Convera as the CEO.

The CEO at Convera Corporation

Patrick C. Condo was the CEO and President of Convera Corporation. In the 80s, Condo served Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a company that distributed Excalibur Technologies’ products. Excalibur was one the companies that merged to form Convera. In the early 90s, Condo joined Excalibur, and in five years, he became the CEO and President of Excalibur. While developing a SaaS search platform in partnership with Intel, in 2000, Excalibur and Intel’s interactive media division had a merger and Condo became the CEO of the newly formed Convera Corporation. After ten years in the business, Convera then merged with NTENT, and Condo held the CEO position at NTENT as well.

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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Support.com – A 25-year old Tech Support Company Acquired By Greenidge Generation.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Support.com was established in 1997 as a technical support company and it was merged with Greenidge Generation, a bitcoin mining company in 2021. Currently, Lance Rosenzweig is operating as the CEO of the company and its headquarters is based in Wilmington, Delaware and its administrative office is based in California, USA. The company is mainly known for providing tech support and related services to various businesses and their consumers. It has also expanded its products and services to security software after acquiring SUPERAntiSpyware. During the pandemic, Support.com has focused more on providing remote tech support, especially for small businesses.

About Support.com

Mark Pincus is the main founder of Support.com who along with his partners, Scott Dale and Cadir Lee founded the company in 1997. It is a technical support company that also provides various software solutions for system security and interaction optimization. The products apart from the tech support are not the original solutions of Support.com. The company offers these solutions to customers through a few subsidiaries it has acquired over the years. A company like Support.com became a great asset especially during the pandemic because of the sudden shift to remote working.

Support.com mainly focuses on two types of customers, namely, small businesses and general customers. The company offers 24/7 technical support which also includes call center services and it is based in the US. It can basically provide tech support for anything from setting up a new device to troubleshooting. The tech support can provide services via voice calls, chats, and also offline calls at home. The company also offers monthly and yearly subscription plans to avail of any tech support around the clock.

History

When Mark Pincus established the company, it was officially launched as Replicase Inc in the Redwood City of California. Mark and his other partners launched Replicase as s software company and after a year it was renamed Tioga Systems and its headquarters were relocated to Palo Alto, California. In the initial days of the company, SoftBank became a major investor and supported the business with $2.5 million. Since the company was launched in the software industry, Tioga put its focus on designing self-healing software such that Windows applications can automatically encounter any problems and fix them by themselves. Again after a year, the company was renamed Support.com and its primary solutions shifted its self-healing focus to developing software for enterprises. In this year the headquarters were also shifted to Redwood City.

Journey of Support.com

Only after three years the company was launched in the market, it decided to go public in 2000. When Support.com went public, it was backed by the investment banking division of Credit Suisse Group. After a couple of years, the company changed its name to SupportSoft Inc but after the enterprise technology of SupportSoft was acquired by Consona Corporation, the company again was back to Support.com. The company also made a handful of acquisitions before its latest merger with the bitcoin mining company. Some of its acquisitions include Core Networks (2004), YourTechOnline (2008), Sammsoft (2009), SUPERAntiSpyware (2011), and RightHand IT (2012). Apart from the chain of acquisitions, it established a partnership with Target (one of America’s largest retailers) to provide tech support to MyTGTtech solutions.

Support.com became very active during the COVID-19 pandemic and people around the world needed online support for everything. So, to help and support the consumers get used to this new online work environment, Support.com provided a month of free tech support for those working and learning from home. It also hired additional employees during the onset of the pandemic while most of the companies were discussing layoffs.

About the Founder

Mark Pincus is an American entrepreneur who has founded several companies other than Support.com. He is mainly popular as the founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company. Some of his other endeavors are Freeloader Inc and Tribe Networks. Mark completed his education at the University of Pennsylvania followed by Harvard University.

Annasha

Mastek – An Indian Software Company That Was Founded By Three IIM Graduates.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Founded in 1982, Mastek is a publicly-traded Indian company based in Mumbai, India. It is a multinational software technology company that mainly specializes in digital transformation services and cloud consulting. Mastek has served more than 1,500 customers successfully across 40 countries. It offers services in five leading industries, namely, public sector & government, healthcare & life science, retail & customer, manufacturing & industrial, and financial sector. Mastek offers services to both public and private organizations across different nations in the US, Middle East, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the UK, apart from India. In 2021, Mastek was featured in Forbes Asia Best Under a Billion list.

About Mastek

The three IIM Ahmedabad graduates, Ashank Desai, Ketan Mehta, and R Sundar founded Mastek in 1982. These three co-founders were batchmates of 1979 and they were later joined by Sudhakar Ram who is a very influential Indian business leader. Mastek helps various enterprises by harnessing the power of data to give them a digital advantage and stay in the competition. Focussing more on unleashing the power of data in the 21st century, Mastek has established a partnership with Lytics for Customer Data Activation and Personalization by enabling D2X (Direct to Stakeholder) transformation. The company is also recognized as one of the UK’s fastest-growing Indian companies in terms of revenue growth year on year.

Management and Software Technology Private Limited

In 1982, three students of IIM Ahmedabad incorporated Management and Software Technology Private Limited and later brought Sudhakar Ram into the team. Sudhakar Ram also played his role as the CEO of the company until 2016. When the company was founded it aimed to design and deliver computer software to various types of businesses across diverse fields. In the same year of the establishment, the first project went lives which was a decision support system for Vicks Vaporub. The products were designed to generate production plans for the company in Indian in the most optimized way possible.

After a decade of incorporating the company, its name was changed to Mastek in 1992. In the same year, it acquired a UK IT company, Carter Cast Systems. This acquisition was made to enter the UK market in Theale. After changing its name the company decided to public in the same year and got listen in both Mumbai Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange in India. Soon it founded its UK subsidiary and it was named MajescoMastek. In 1995, Mastek bid for the London Congestion Charging Scheme which went live in February 2003. So the company got invited to join the consortium and Mastek became responsible for delivering several applications for the NHS Spine for a long time.

Growth and Expansion

In 2000, Mastek became the first IT solutions company in the entire world to be assessed at P-CMM Level 3. After a couple of years, the company established the Mastek Foundation which represented a corporate and social responsibility wing of both Mastek and Majesco. In 2003, as Mastek started working on SPINE projects, the company delivered over 130 such projects within the next ten years. Eventually, the company started making more acquisitions over the next years that include Entegram LLC, a Conneticut-based software company, and Vector Insurance Services, a tech company focusing insurance industry. Mastek acquired a few companies in the North American region like the Systems Task Group (STG) which also focused on the insurance industry.

In 2009 MastekMajesco entered the Canadian market. The demerger of MastekMajesco took place in 2014 and all the insurance businesses were consolidated under the brand name, Majesco. In 2015, after the demerger, Mastek acquired a UK-based consultancy firm, Indigo Blue. In the same year, Company launched a project called Deep Blue to encourage engineering students to solve various problems using coding skills. Mastek has recently acquired Evosys to fuel its digital transformation growth.

Hiral Chandrana – CEO of Mastek Group

Hiral Chandrana is the Global CEO of the Mastek Group. He has more than 25 years of experience in the IT sector and digital solutions for various industries. Working with Fortune 1000 global clients across various countries has made him a very experienced global leader. Mr. Chandrana is from an engineering background and later completed his MBA.

Annasha

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