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Sybase inc

Sybase Inc – An Enterprise Software Company Acquired By SAP To Compete With Oracle.

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Sybase Inc was founded in 1984, 37 years from now. The company specialized in developing and delivering enterprise software. The company operated independently for 25 years after which it was acquired by SAP. SAP is a German multinational conglomerate based in the same sector of enterprise software. Being the largest non-American company by revenue, SAP gave a neck-to-neck competition to the other American companies. So, when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems to expand its business, SAP also made a move to acquire Sybase Inc. In 2010, the deal between Sybase and SAP was closed and since then the brand name of Sybase is not used.

About Sybase Inc

Four founders, namely, Robert Epstein, Mark Hoffman, Jane Doughty, and Tom Haggin founded Sybase Inc. The company was based in Berkeley, California until the acquisition. When the company was launched officially, Sybase was mainly known for selling database management systems (DBMS) and middleware products. Sybase Inc built the first enterprise DBMS for the Linux operating system. In the early 2000s, Sybase landed many huge clients like Airtel and Telstra which are telecommunication operators.

Sybase Before Acquisition By SAP

The founders set out to found Sybase in 1984 in Berkeley, California which was the hometown of Epstein. Initially, the name of the company was System Ware and they started their initial business from Epstein’s home. The main goal behind founding the company was to build an RDBMS that will organize all the information and will be available within a computer network. In the 1990s, the Japanese division of Sybase detected some inconsistency in profit, and turned out five executives of the same division inflated the profits. So, they were fired immediately. In the same year, John S. Chen became the new Chairman, President, and CEO of the company.

In 2007, Sybase started generating revenue in billions and it planned to expand its business by partnering with bigger companies. After two years, Sybase partnered with SAP to deliver the SAP Business Suite software to the users of iPhone, BlackBerry, etc. Sybase also partnered with Verizon to manage mobility services in enterprises on a global scale. This partnership used Verizon’s Managed Mobility Solutions and the device management platform of Sybase to provide mobility services to global customers. In 2010, SAP announced the acquisition of Sybase by the company for $5.8 billion (approx). Sybase became a wholly-owned subsidiary of SAP America in July 2010.

Sybase Inc
Image source: wikimedia.org

About SAP

SAP is one of the top three publicly traded software companies in terms of revenue. Being a German multinational conglomerate, it is the largest one in the country in terms of market capitalization. The founders of the company are Dietmar Hopp, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, Klaus Tschira, and Claus Wellenreuther. The company was founded back in 1972 when businesses had a huge demand for RDBMS. So, these founders who were formerly IBM employees created SAP to build real-time software for data processing. Soon, SAP will complete five decades of its business and embrace the journey and success it has achieved. Currently, there are more than 100,000 employees in SAP who are delivering quality services to more than 400,000 customers worldwide. One of the cofounders, Hasso Plattner is serving as the Chairman of the company and the recent CEO of SAP is Christian Klein.

Founders Of Sybase Inc

Robert Epstein is an engineer and entrepreneur who has co-founded several other companies than Sybase Inc. Some of the companies are New Resource Bank, Colorado Microdisplay, GetActive Software, etc. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. He has also built a strong community for entrepreneurs who believe in preserving the environment while growing economically. Mark Hoffman passed out from United States Military Academy with a BS degree followed by an MBA from the University of Arizona. He served as the CEO of Sybase for 11 years followed by CommerceOne and Everdream. Currently, he is serving as the Director of Dacadoo. Jane Doughty wasn’t attached to the company for a long time. She studies chemistry and Mathematics but her career record shows that she worked as a software developer in multiple companies. She worked at IBM for more than two decades followed by other renowned companies like JPMC, AT&T, Nielsen. Tom Haggin is an angel investor who has not only co-founded Sybase but also Tilden Park Software.

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems – A famous American IT Company Currently Operating Under Oracle Corporation.

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Sun Microsystems is an American IT company that was established in 1982 and is based in California, US. The company became very famous over a short time because it created Java (programming language) whose applications are very wide in today’s IT sector. The company mainly sold computer components, IT services, software but set itself apart by rolling out products like Java, ZFS, SPARC microprocessors, VirtualBox, etc. Sun Microsystems offers a wide range of software products like the Java platform, operating system, Office Suite, database management system, etc. It also offers storage as one of its primary products as well.

About Sun Microsystems

The founders of Sun Microsystems are Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Bill Joy. Sun Microsystems is a company that has always supported open systems like Unix and contributed to open-source software. In 2008, the company acquired MySQL for $1 billion. After a year, Oracle Corporation announced that it would acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. The company made plenty of acquisitions and expanded to Newark, Oregon, Scotland, Hillsboro, and many other places before it became a part of Oracle Corporation.

Sun Microsystems
Image source: zimbio.com

History Of The Company And The Dot-Com Bubble

The first Unix workstation of Sun Microsystem, Sun1 is the original idea of Andy Bechtolsheim. When he was a graduate student at Stanford University, he started working on the designs of the workstation for his communications project. He designed it using the Motorola 68000 processors and an advanced memory management unit. His first design was completely built out of what he got from his college’s computer science department and Silicon Valley supply houses. As the design of the workstation became a success, two other graduate students, Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla from the same university joined in and founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy worked at Berkeley Software Division and joined the company soon.

In the first year of its establishment, Sun Microsystems turned out to be profitable. After four years, the company filed its first IPO under the stock symbol SUNW. This symbol was changed to JAVA in 2007 as the company became more famous as the creator of the Java platform. Soon, the situation of the dot-com bubble made an impact on every Silicon Valley business. Sun Microsystem’s business rose dramatically and the share prices as well. The company started hiring more employees and building the company until the bubble burst in 2000. None of the companies were prepared for this and thus it was followed by layoffs and cost-cutting. Sun tried its best to get to the pre-cash scenario as early as possible but had to shut down their Newark, California facility.

Post-Crash Scenario

After the bubble burst, there were changes in the strategies of Sun Microsystems. The company started focusing more on processor optimization for multi-threading and multiprocessing. In 2004, the company collaborated with Fujitsu, a Japanese business, to use their processor chips and Sun servers. Eventually, Sun Microsystems stabilized itself and in 2005 gained a net profit of $19 million. The year before it was acquired by Oracle, the value of Sun Microsystems fell from 2007 to 2008 and its valuation came down to $3 billion.

Acquisitions

Sun Microsystems has a big list of acquisitions from the year 1987 to 2009, just before Oracle acquired it. In the 1980s it acquired Transept Systems, Sitka Corp, Centrum System West, and Folio Inc. The company acquired a lot of businesses in the late 1990s. Some of them are Lighthouse Design, Encore Computer, LongView Technologies, etc. Out of all the companies it acquired, MySQL was the biggest acquisition in the company’s history. Q-Layer was the last company that it acquired before Oracle bought it off.

About The Founders

Scott McNealy is an alumni of Harvard and Stanford University. Mostly famous as co-founding Sun Microsystems, he also founded Curriki which is a free e-learning service. He founded Wayin in 2011 and served as its CEO for quite some time. In 2018, he joined the Advisory Board of Redis Labs.

Vinod Khosla is an Indian American businessman who graduated from IIT Delhi. He also went to Carnegie Mellon University followed by Stanford. Apart from Sun Microsystems, he founded Khosla Ventures. Last year, he was featured on the Forbes 400 list.

Apart from being an investor and an entrepreneur, Andy’s career started as an electrical engineer. He was very talented as a student as he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with the help of the Fulbright Scholarship. Later, he went to Stanford to complete his Ph.D. He is also a Google investor. Before co-founding Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy worked at Fabry’s Computer Systems Research Group. He is an electrical engineer and also acquired a degree in computer science.

Twilio

Twilio – Another ‘Rags to Rich’ Success Story.

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Twilio is a renowned platform as a service, providing cloud communication services to its worldwide customers. The company is situated in San Francisco, California, U.S., and is mainly known for its web service APIs that allow web developers to add Twilio’s voice and communication service to their software.

Twilio makes use of the Amazon Web Services to run its communication system, such that establishes a connection between  HTTP and the public switched telephone network (PSTN) using its APIs. The company is one of the biggest promoters of the open-source community and has made a few open-source software for developers, including OpenVBX.

Jeff Lawson, along with Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis, founded Twilio in 2008. Jeff Lawson is the CEO and the main brains behind the founding of Twilio. He used to work at Amazon Web Services and founded his passion in cloud computing. His passion became the basis of Twilio, and today Twilio is not just an idea but a company worth $63 Billion market capital.

Twilio
Image source: vectorlogoseek.com

Back Story Of Twilio

Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis founded Twilio in 2008, keeping the customer experience in mind. While working at multiple software companies, the three founders had realized that they could achieve anything through coding and the customer experience has to be the basis of their company.

The founders went to multiple investors with the proposal to build the company that would develop APIs for communication, many liked the idea, but looking at the risk, they refused to pay the money. In the end, the three of them collected their savings and started the company. They did not even take their salaries for a few months. In fact, Lawson and his wife sold all their wedding gifts to raise the money for their startup.

The startup started from two locations initially, i.e. from  Seattle, Washington, and San Francisco, California. Twilio made its first software for rickrolling, an American prank platform. The software brought a lot of press attention to Twilio. Later, the company launched a cloud-based calling and messaging API, named Twilio Voice in November 2008. The API was the first of its kind. Later in 2010, the company also brought a text messaging API followed by the launch of SMS shortcodes ( in public beta) in July 2017.

In 2009, Company raised a sum of $250,000 in its seed funding, Mitch Kapor, The Founders Fund, and Dave McClure being a few of the major investors. In its first round of funding, the company raised $3.7 million, where Union Square led the funding. In its round B of Funding, Twilio managed to raise around $12 million, followed by $17 million in a Series C round in 2011. Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Fidelity, T Rowe Price, Altimeter Capital Management, Arrowpoint Partners have been some of the leading investors in Twilio.

The Growth

Twilio went public in 2016 on New York Stock Exchange, with a 92% increase on the first day of its trading. In September 2010, Twilio started the Fund to encourage startups and provide them seed money. In the last decade, the company has also made some major acquisitions, including Authy (2015), Tikal Technologies (2016), Beepsend (2017), Ytica (2018), SendGrid (2018), Core Network Dynamics GmbH (2018), Electric Imp (2020), Segment (2020), and Zipwhip (2021), etc.

The company today employs around 4,500 people worldwide. As per the 2020 records, Company made profits worth US$1.76 billion. The company started from voice API and today develops products including SMS, MMS, SIP Trunking, WebRTC, 2FA, Call Center, etc. SendGrid is one of its subsidiaries.

About the Founder

Jeff Lawson is a famous entrepreneur and software developer, well known for founding and leading Twilio. Apart from Twilio, he founded Nine Star Inc, Stubhub.com, and Versity.com Inc. Lawson joined the University of Michigan to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science but dropped out to concentrate on a business, which he started while studying at the university. Before founding Twilio, he also worked at Amazon (AWS) as the Technical Product Manager. Lawson has also written a book named Ask Your Developer.

The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk – A Jeff Green Founded Successful Start-Up in the Digital Marketing Space.

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Advertising in the digital era fuels the branding of each and every business. Jeff Green and Dave Pickles decided to found The Trade Desk when they detected a gap between marketers and the right information they needed to build an ad. If one doesn’t have plenty of accurate data to forecast and analyze the behavior of the target audience, it is not possible to create an ad that will resonate with their needs or pain points. Both Jeff and Dave realized that this unavailability of data is giving a hard time to the marketers as well as content creators to monetize their platforms. And, The Trade Desk was founded in 2009 as a solution to this problem, helping digital ad buyers around the world.

About The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk is a successful company in the digital advertising sector that focuses on data-driven advertising campaigns for digital ad buyers. TTD offers one-of-a-kind SaaS which is also the largest independent demand-side platform (DSP). The company is based in Ventura, California. TTD has three main products to offer advertisers at various companies and agencies. Let’s have a look at the services provided by TTD.

The Trade Desk
Image source: businesswire.com

Services of TTD

First, the demand-side platform is all about using data in the smartest possible way. The clients use data to derive accurate information that gives a better idea for strategizing ads. This helps the businesses plan in a way to reach more audiences before pouring heavy amounts of money into creating ads. The demand-side platform helps a client to build a complete planner only by providing information like goals and budgets. With the help of cross-device targeting, your ads reach the right kind of audience for your product or brand. The AI-driven technology of TTD also helps gain recommendations and insights based on the type of data you are looking for or your goals.

Second, the data management platform works with the existing data of a client and provides insights about who could be your potential customers. The data management platform of TTD helps a client to discover new people who they can approach to increase the customer base. There can be many new businesses, where the company hasn’t hired any in-house data researcher or analyst. So, TTD will help to surface the right type of data and create new relevant audience profiles for your company.

Lastly, TTD APIs is also a choice for the company’s clients if one is interested in building customized solutions. This will increase the efficiency of a company as one will create a personalized solution depending on more parameters of the company. It means a company will use more of its data to create a competitive advantage and hence will gain clearer insights about its customers and workflow.

Behind the Scenes

Before co-founding TTD, Jeff Green established an online auction advertising company called AdECN. Microsoft acquired the company in 2007 and Dave started working for the company right after that. This is how the two of them met and founded TTD, a new adventure in 2009. In 2010, the company successfully raised $2.5 million from investors like Founder Collective and IA Ventures. Jerry Neumann and Josh Stylman are two angel investors that backed TTD in the early days.

TTD was established in the sector of digital marketing where the opportunities for growth were unscalable especially in this digital age. The company succeeded very quickly and in 2015 TTD was featured in Forbes as one of the Top 10 America’s Most Promising Companies. The same year both the co-founders were named Ernst & Young Entrepreneurs of the Year. In 2018, the company launched two AI-based tools, namely, Koa (An AI forecast engine) and The Trade Desk Planner. With these two innovative products rolling out in the market, TTD acquired the second position in the list of 100 Best Medium Workplaces by Fortune.

About the Founders

Jeff Green studied marketing communications at the University of Southern California. He started his career in Microsoft and founded AdECN, a demand-side advertising platform in 2003. Two years after Microsoft acquired the company, Jeff built a new start-up focusing on the buy-side platform, which is none other than TTD.

Dave Pickles is the current CTO of TTD and also a board member. Dave studied Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He started working for AdECN after Microsoft acquired it. Before that, he was a senior engineer at CallWave, an internet telephony startup.

ifs ab

IFS AB – A Sweden-based Enterprise Software Company Also Aiming To Improve Lives Of Underprivileged Population.

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IFS AB also known as Industrial and Financial Systems was born in 1983 in Sweden. The company specializes in developing and delivering enterprise software. IFS AB focuses on project-centric industries where it uses a single code base and develops ERP. Some of the sectors where IFS AB delivers such products are aerospace, manufacturing, automotive, oil, and gas, etc. With 4,000 employees, the company offers its products and solutions on a global scale to more than 10,000 customers. IFS AB is one of the most recommended suppliers in its sector and is currently led by Darren Roos (CEO of IFS AB).

About IFS AB

Since its foundation, IFS AB has made a big impact both in terms of business and uplifting the lives of socio-economically backward people. In terms of its innovative products and solutions, the company became the winner of the European Digital Technology Award among 150,000 companies. It has also won the 2019 European Business Award. Last year, Darren Roos won the Best CEO of the Year award for leading the company to such great heights. IFS AB believes in serving people who are in need of better living conditions and proper education. So, the company founded the IFS Foundation that is currently focusing on helping poor people of rural Sri Lanka.

IFS AB
Image source: www.ifs.com

History of the Company

After founding the company in 1983, the company launched its first product in 1985. The name of the software product was IFS Maintenance which after five years was included in an entire product suite called IFS Applications. Being a European company, the company gradually expanded into the Scandinavian region. It opened offices in Norway, Denmark, and Finland. After the New Year, it also opened an office in Poland. In the early 1990s, IFS AB expanded to Asia and North America. In 1996, IFS got listed on the Swedish Stock Exchange. Eventually, the company opened up an R&D center in Colombo.

In less than ten years of its releasing the first graphical user interface, it gathered 500,000 active users. In 2008, the company again launched a new GUI and started acquiring companies from various fields. IFS AB was acquired by a private equity firm in 2015. To date, the main product of IFS is IFS Applications which is an integrated suite of enterprise applications for businesses. It includes software for asset and service management, project management, manufacturing, and supply chain.

Business Growth and Acquisitions

In 2015, IFS recorded more than 1 million users of its GUI. The company has expanded to many international grounds and its operational focus has been divided into four groups. The first two groups focus on European markets, and the other two groups are in charge of management in the America and Asia Pacific region. The company has made a series of acquisitions in various countries from the US to the UK in the past 1.5 decades. In 2009, the company acquired MultiPlus Solutions followed by 360 Scheduling, a UK-based scheduling engine in 2010. In 2017, it acquired three companies namely Field Service Management Limited, WorkWave LLC, and systems Limited. This year, to date, IFS acquired two US-based businesses which are Axios Systems and Customerville.

IFS as a Philanthropist

For years, IFS has focussed on education and the importance of STEM subjects and thus partnered with many schools for financial support and scholarship. The company is heavily inclined towards providing education to those who don’t have financial support and create a bright future for the younger generation. The company also currently focuses on serving the backward local communities of Sri Lanka for the past 20 years. The IFS Foundation is addressing healthcare, sanitation, education, etc in these areas.

Darren Roos – CEO of IFS AB

Hailing from South Africa, Darren Roos is a famous business executive who has worked in multiple companies before joining IFS. He served as the Executive Board Member of Software AG and also as the President of SARP ERP Cloud. He completed his education at the University of South Africa. He was directly appointed as the CEO of IFS in 2018 when he first joined the company.

Deloitte

Deloitte – A 176-years Old Multinational Conglomerate Successfully Running A Professional Services Network.

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William Welch Deloitte founded the company back in 1845 in London, England. The full name of the company is Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited. It is a private company that operates a network of professional services in over 150 countries. It is the largest company in the world in the sector of professional services in terms of revenue generated and employees working for the company. Currently, there are more than 334,000 professionals offering services like consulting, financial advisory, legal, etc. in the company. Sharon Thorne is the present Chairperson of Deloitte Global and Punit Renjen is the CEO of the same.

About Deloitte

Deloitte, originally established in London, expanded to the United States in the late 1800s. In 1989, the company merged with Touche Ross and after a few years, the company rebranded to Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. But, the company’s name was again abbreviated to Deloitte later. the company provides a wide range of professional services like financial advisory, tax, legal, audit, risk advisory, and consulting. The company is not just the largest brand in the professional service sector it is also the third-largest privately owned company in the US.

Deloitte
Image source: www.consultancy.eu

The Early History of the Company

Hiring professionals to solve complex business problems is the root idea behind the establishment of Company. The Great Western Railway (GWR) was a company in England that generated revenue by selling equity to the public. In 1849, William Welch Deloitte was given the responsibility to audit the company. When the boom in joint-stock companies took place, eventually the demand for people with professional skills surged. So, George A. Touche established an accounting company in 1898 to meet this demand and started expanding the territory of Touche, Niven & Company.

The stock market crash of 1929 brought before all the fact that some bankruptcies were prevented due to proper accounting. When this matter was brought before the US Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, hiring independent audits was made compulsory for public corporations. So, the demand for accountants increased once again and many women accountants found jobs. On the other hand, William by then opened several offices after his journey started with GWR. In 1972, the company merged with Haskins & Sells, and the new company became Deloitte Haskins & Sells. In 1989, the company again merged with Touche Ross but many important people disagreed with the merger and the lead kept changing constantly.

Company in the Modern Era

A lot of discrepancies took place regarding the name of Deloitte and Touche. So, in 1993, the company was given the name Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited. In 1995, Deloitte Consulting was formed, and eventually, the company started expanding, acquiring, and opening new services. At the beginning of the 2000s, the company acquired Eclipse, Beijing Pan-China CPA, and the North American Public Service of BearingPoint. the company opened a new branch called Deloitte Intelligence and started hiring ex-employees of the Central Intelligence Agency created a very strong team of professionals. The companies acquired by them were very diverse ranging from the real estate sector to mobile advertising agencies. This helped company expand its services and also generate more revenue.

One of the most successful units of the company is Deloitte Digital which acquired 11 digital marketing agencies in the span of 5 years. In 2016, Deloitte and Apple went into a joint partnership to increase the sales of Apple’s mobile phones and engagement of Deloitte consultants for Apple’s products and services. The services offered by the company as well as its geographical market keep on expanding. As of last year, the company generated annual revenue of more than $45 billion.

About William Welch Deloitte

William Welch Deloitte, born in 1818, started his professional career very early. Only at the age of 15, he started working as an assistant for the Official Assignee at the Bankruptcy Court in London. While working as an assistant, he learned about business and eventually became an accountant. When he was 25 he opened his own office but his life took a huge turn when he became the first even independent auditor appointed. Eventually, he started establishing multiple offices of Deloitte and when he retired from the company, it existed as Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co.