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Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics – Founded By Professor From Standford University.

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The American company, Silicon Graphics was founded late in 1981 in Mountain View, California. SG was built as a manufacturer and producer of high computer hardware and software products. The brand of Silicon Graphics was renamed after it went bankrupt and Rackable Systems acquired it. The assets of the company were split and two new brand names emerged but none of them were able to acquire their original position in the market. Eventually, Silicon Graphics lost its existence in the market under its original name. Back when the company was founded, its initial product was 3G graphics computer workstations but eventually, priorities shifted with the evolution of the technology market. 

Establishment of Silicon Graphics

Jim Clark is the founder of Silicon Graphics and he was working at Standford University before founding the company. The foundation of the company started at the university as the early systems used by SG were based on the Geometry Machine developed by Clark and Marc Hannah. After developing this machine, Clark shortly left his position at the university as an electrical engineering associate professor. He started working on founding SG along with seven graduate students from the university and a few research staff. The main people who were involved in laying the foundation for the company are Kurt Akeley, David J. Brown, Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Marc Hannah, Herb Kuta, and Mark Grossman along with Abbey Silverstone and a few others.

So, from 1982 the company became operational and Ed McCracken served as the CEO of the company from 1884 to 1997. During these thirteen years, the annual revenue of SG grew from $5.4 million to $3.7 billion. Though the annual revenue of the company was rising, SG faced a decline in demand for its product line during the late 1990s. There were several challenges in the marketplace and the share price was also falling. Due to this McCracken was replaced by Richard Belluzzo and under his leadership, the company started accelerating again. During this time, the company was trying to shift its main product line which also led to the creation of a new logo (making SG to SGI). All these initiatives taken by the company didn’t help much in its net growth and in 2005 the company was delisted from NYSE. 

Silicon Graphics
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Ups and Downs

To cope with the immense financial and growth crisis, the company hired Alix Partners in 2005 to advise the company on how to return back to profitability. The best way to deal with the NYSE delisting was a reverse stock split. Next year, the company appointed Dennis McKenna as the new CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors. In the same year, the company also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the company itself and its US subsidiaries. It also decided to end the production of the MIPS/IRIX line and the IRIX operating system. By October 2006, the company emerged from bankruptcy protection and it was again listed on NYSE but under a new symbol. As the company eventually stabilized, it reentered the virtualization market in 2008. 

Unfortunately, in December 2008, the entire phase of delisting was repeated once again as the company share price declined under the minimum requirement. In 2009, the company decided to sell all its assets to Rackable Systems for $25 million. Ultimately, the deal was finalized for $42.5 million and Rackable Systems announced that they would adopt the “Silicon Graphics International” global name and brand. In 2016, Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired Silicon Graphics International. 

Jim Clark – Founder of Silicon Graphics

Jim Clark (full name James Henry Clark) is a famous computer scientist who founded several companies apart from Silicon Graphics. His other ventures include myCFO, Netscape, and Healtheon. Clark’s main contribution to the research field led to the development of high-performance computing systems for the fast rendering of 3D computer images. He went to the University of Utah and after completing his Ph.D., he started working at NYIT’s Computer Graphics Lab. 

IonQ

Christopher Monroe and Jungsang Kim, Two Masterminds Behind Developing The World’s Most Powerful Technologies.

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IonQ is the world’s most renowned quantum computing company that was founded by two professors. The company was established in 2015 and currently it is based in College Park, Maryland. IonQ’s most unique factor is the approach they are using to generate and carry out functionalities with quantum circuits. This approach is called ion trapping and with the help of this technology, the errors can be minimized with better calculations, something the world has never seen before. IonQ claims that accuracy is not the only factor why ion trapping is a better approach, it also improves scalability, coherence time, and predictability.

About IonQ

IonQ is developing quantum computing and taking it to a new level such that complex mathematical problems can be solved with a better approach. The true potential of a quantum computer is not yet unleashed but if one can develop a stable and powerful quantum computer, it can overdo the best supercomputers in the world. IonQ is using ion trapping technology to develop the best quantum computing.

In this technology, an atom is first converted into an ion followed by using a linear iron trap (specialized chip) to hold that ion in a 3D space. Electromagnetic force helps to hold the ion in place and is completely isolated from the environment. Linear chains are formed by holding several ions in the ion traps which helps in running the complex algorithms. IonQ has proved only in a few years that their concept is very powerful and offers the world the most powerful quantum computer. In March 2020, IonQ was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential Companies.

IonQ
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The Idea of Ion Trapping

Christopher Monroe, a professor at the University of Maryland, and Jungsang Kim, a professor from Duke University are the two masterminds behind developing one of the world’s most powerful technologies. They co-founded IonQ with the help of two partners at a venture firm, namely, Harry Weller and Andrew Schoen. IonQ was born as a result of rigorous research that these two professors carried out for 25 years. Their research field was quantum information science and today it has become a public company.

Monroe went into the quantum computing research field when he joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a Staff Researcher. During this time, Monroe worked with the famous Nobel-laureate physicist, David Wineland. Wineland’s team was working on the application of trapped ions to produce controllable qubits and controllable quantum logic gates. This was the initial stage for building a large-scale trapped-ion computer.

Founding IonQ

Monroe and Kim became acquaintances of each other through various research activities that were funded by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). They were collaborating formally and wrote a review paper together whose title was Scaling the Ion Trap Quantum Processor. Their collaboration for research purposes eventually led to the founding of IonQ, especially after New Enterprise Associates showed interest in investing in the technology mentioned in that review paper. So, the company received initial funding of $2 million to commercialize the technology.

Eventually, the team was expanding and the company hired David Moehring as the new CEO of the company in 2016. In 2017, the company received $20 million in Series B funding and it was led by Google Ventures and the existing investor. Peter Chapman joined the company in 2019 directly as its new CEO followed by which the company made a deal to make the quantum computer public through AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Peter Chapman – CEO of IonQ

Peter Chapman is the CEO and President of IonQ as well as a member of the board. Before joining IonQ, Chapman was leading a team for Amazon Prime where his main work was being responsible for Prime’s 2-Day delivery. His position was Director of Engineering at Amazon. Chapman is a remarkable software engineer with more than 40 years of experience including several managerial positions and writing software from scratch as well. He went to MIT and worked there at Artificial Intelligence Lab. Chapman has also served as the President and CEO of Media Arc and eMusic.

juniper networks

Juniper Network’s Founder Says India Is Its Largest Development Site

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India has always excelled when it comes down to the engineering sector. Technical engineers especially those working in the IT sector have mostly emerged from India. The telecommunication industry has developed in the past few decades rapidly. From selling networking products to software, many companies have made a future in this sector. American immigrant, Pradeep Sindhu is the founder of one such company excelling on the grounds of networking. The name of the company is Juniper Networks and Pradeep founded the company in February 1996. A twenty-four years old company founded by an ex-IITian has become a billion-dollar enterprise.

The company is currently based in Sunnyvale, California, United States. Juniper is a world-famous company in the sector of networking hardware. The main products of the company are routers, network management software and providing network security as well.

About the Founder

Pradeep Sindhu is an American businessman who was born in India. Apart from founding Juniper, he has also founded Fungible, a company based on data center technology.

Born into an Indian family, Pradeep pursued his undergraduate degree from India. He acquired his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur. Pradeep fled to Hawaii in 1976 and completed his master’s in the same from the University of Hawaii. Later, he completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Pradeep gained a very rich knowledge of telecommunication engineering and computer science before founding his companies. His professional world started growing from Xerox PARC where he worked for eleven years. He worked for designing many integrated circuits and multiprocessors. Pradeep is also well-known for making major contributions to designing high-tech microprocessors of Sun Microsystems.

After his years of studies and working in computer labs he decided to found his own company, Juniper Networks. So, in 1996, along with Dennis Ferguson and Bjorn Liencres, he established the company in California.

Early Story

Pradeep got the idea of founding his company while he was on a vacation in 1995. He wanted to switch the conventional circuit switching to packet switching. Pradeep, after his years of experience, thought that it would be better for transferring data. This is because after one fixed data packet is transmitted through a channel it will then be fully available for another one. Well, he might have got the idea from energy packets in quantum physics.

Success and Growth

Pradeep started the company with a seed funding of $2million. But, within the first year of its operation, the company raised another $12 million. In 1997, the company received $8 million in venture funding. This year the company received an additional $40 million in a funding round which witnessed the presence of companies like Nortel, 3Com, etc. Other investors of Juniper include Qwest and AT&T.

Within four years, the company’s annual revenue summed up to $3.8 million. M40 router was the only product of the company and only one product was sold to more than fifty telecommunication companies. The company also came into a joint partnership with Alcatel and Ericsson to expand itself in foreign markets.

The company gradually expanded in Asian countries like Japan, India, etc. This helped Juniper increase its market share from 6% in 1998 to more than 20% in 2000. Juniper filed its first IPO in April 1999 and by July 1999 its valuation became $7 billion. The growth of the company was jaw-dropping and it became the “latest darling of the Wall Street”.

The company’s sell decreased during the time of dot-com bust but again after 2004, it was back on track. In 2005, the company’s annual revenue surpassed $2 billion.

The Indian Market

Juniper has its development sites in Boston, Silicon Valley, Canada, and India. Among all these centers, Pradeep says the best R&D is carried out in India. India is a very crucial market for Juniper Networks but the most important scope for development as well. According to Pradeep Sindhu, the development site was founded in India to solve the level of complexity that cannot be done in the U.S.

When a company is handling a networking issue, it has different layers of complexity. And, the engineers in India can solve every layer from scratch. Pradeep also said that he loves hiring fresh talents from the Indian schools who are brimming with talent and enthusiasm. In 2018, the total employees of Juniper were 9,000 among which 2,600 belonged to Indian offices.

He is truly proud of the Indian market from both the aspect of market growth and solving critical missions. Pradeep wants to keep investing in the Indian market for the betterment of the company.