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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

New Relic

New Relic – A Cloud-Based Software Company Specializing In Application Performance Management.

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In the 21st century, cloud computing has become a real catch in the IT industry. With large data to store securely and transfer between different employees in a company, cloud storage has become quintessential. Many existing businesses have expanded their solution range to provide cloud storage as a service and startups exclusively providing cloud-based software have also been established. New Relic is one such startup that develops and delivers cloud-based software. Lew Cirne established New Relic in 2008 which is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, United States.

About The Company

New Relic is a cloud-based software company that develops a range of innovative software to help different companies help their performance. With the help of New Relic software, a company can track the performance of its service, website, and application. This helps the companies to understand the problem and fix it more efficiently to create a better user experience. Apart from the real-time monitoring of the web and application data, the software also provides support for custom-built plugins. New Relic appointed its new CEO this year, Bill Staples who replaced Lew Cirne, the founder and former CEO of the company.

New Relic
Image source: solutionsreview.com

Success In The Second Attempt

In 2008, Lew Cirne founded the software company New Relic and he named it so after an anagram of his name. Lew Cirne, from a very young age, had an entrepreneurship niche and wanted to start his company. While he was in high school, he planned and attempted to start a company to productize a game but unfortunately, it wasn’t successful. Later, when he went to college at Dartmouth, he successfully landed a job at Apple. But, the fever of entrepreneurship still bugged him and he left Apple after three years.

Lew thought it will be better for him to join a small company and learn about the length and breadth of an early-stage startup. So, he joined a company called Hummingbird which then was a team of 300 members. Being part of a small company allowed him to explore other divisions of the business apart from engineering. After a couple of years, Lew successfully founded Wily but it wasn’t a full stop. On the search for new technology, Cirne ended up starting another successful startup, New Relic.

History of New Relic

After founding New Relic in 2008, the company hosted its first round of funding five years after and raised $80 million. Some of the major investors included Benchmark Capital, Allen & Company, Insight Venture Partners, Trinity Venture, Tenaya Capital, etc. After this funding round, the valuation of New Relic became $750 million. After receiving this fund, the company invested in launching Android and iOS native mobile apps for its software analytics platform. Next year, New Relic landed another $100 million funding from BlackRock Inc, Passport Capital, and Wellington Management. In late 2014, New Relic became a public company.

Last year, the company hired Bill Staples as the new Chief Product Officer whose responsibility of leading the product management team, engineering, and driving the company’s platform strategy. After Bill Staples joined the New Relic team, restructuring of the costing model took place which resulted in some layoffs. Only after a year of joining the company, Bill Staples got promoted to CEO and took the place of Lew Cirne.

About The Founder

Lew Cirne is a Canadian-American technologist and entrepreneur who is famous for founding Wily Technologies and New Relic. He majored in Computer Science from Dartmouth College and joined Apple straight after graduating. Being in Silicon Valley, his dream to become an entrepreneur was triggered. He realized he can barely teach himself any entrepreneurial skills by being part of such a massive company. So, he joined a small company called Hummingbird Communications and after two years founded Wily. He is one of those entrepreneurs who broke the myth that startups are not for post-thirty people.

Bill Staples – CEO of New Relic

Before joining New Relic as the CPO in 2020, Bill Staples had working experience in Adobe and worked for 17 years at Microsoft. In both companies, Bill led teams of a huge number of employees to create transformative products and implement innovative strategies.

DATEV

DATEV – A Data Center That Emerged As A Successful German Registered Cooperative Society.

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DATEV is a German-based registered cooperative society. The primary role of DATEV is in the IT industry as it provides technical information services to the accountants, attorneys, and members of the tax department. Founded in February 1996, DATEV was originally a data center that is now famous in the IT industry. Currently, DATEV is known for developing and delivering software directly to end-users. The company is also known for providing consulting services for these occupations. Though DATEV is a leading technology provider in Germany, its main interest lies in the tax market.

About The Company

DATEV mainly provides software for accounting, tax computation, personnel management, business consulting, and company organization. It was founded in 1966 and currently has more than 400,000 customers. The headquarters of DATEV is based in Nuremberg and apart from that, it has 23 other subsidiaries in Germany. More than 8,000 people work for the company in their main office and subsidiaries.

DATEV is a very popular company in Germany such that around 2 million enterprises in the nation use their software to perform financial accounting. More than 11 million payslips are generated every month using the DATEV software. The company also has a data center that is used by both the members of the company and its clients. Data security is the prime focus of every employee of the company.

DATEV
image source: www.datev.com

History of DATEV

On 14th February 1966, 65 tax consultants from Nuremberg founded DATEV. It was founded as a cooperative self-help organization whose main focus was to facilitate bookkeeping tasks. The main five founding members of the company are Edmund Rudolph, Horst Preißner, Joachim Mattheus, Heinz Sebiger, and Klaus Hartmann. The company initially founded a data center where the accounting data of the members were processed. This was a step up from the primitive punch tape. The DATEV center was opened after the number of members in this organization started increasing rapidly and was finally inaugurated in 1969.

In 1974, Company introduced remote data transmission. First, the data was recorded on magnetic tapes, and then from the employee side, it was transmitted to the DATEV data center via the telephone lines. After a couple of years, the company established its first personal network for transmitting electronic data between tax consultant offices and the DATEV data center. But, the company dismantled the career network in 2002 because by then it was no more an economically viable choice.

Business Growth

In 1972, DATEV formed a joint allegiance with the Japanese company TKC and it was after ten years both the companies document the alliance. TKC is also a data processing service company and the joint partnership aimed to support more tax consultants with electronic data processing. Even today both the companies are tied up through business exchange programs. In the 1990s, Company started establishing its first Information Center starting in Dresden followed by Schwerin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, and Erfurt.

In 1996, one of the founders of DATEV, Dr. Heinz Sebiger retired from the company after 30 years of successfully monitoring the administration. By this time, the company started generated revenue in billions and employed more than 4,000 people. For the next two years, employers and clients in DATEV witnessed the transformation from the DOS system to 32 bit Windows OS.

The 21st century brought several opportunities for DATEV to explore and establish itself in the European market. The company established itself in the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Spain, Italy, and many more. In 2003, the company expanded to Poland as it started a joint venture with Poland-based software manufacturer Matrix. pl S.A. In 2011, the company expanded its data center and included new trending services like cloud computing and data security. In 2021, a new management team was formed at DATEV with Dr. Peter Krug as the new CMO and Prof. Dr. Christian Bär as the new CTO of the company. Dr. Robert Mayr is the present CEO of the company.

Robert Mayr – CEO of Company

Robert Mayr joined DATEV in 2011 as a member of the board of directors as well as head of finances, purchasing, production, and internal data processing. Robert Mayr became the CEO of the company in 2016. Before joining the company, he was the managing partner at Solidaris Revisions GmbH. He also has seven years of working experience at Deloitte, one of the Big Four companies.

Infor

Infor – A Private Software Company To Make Over Forty Acquisitions Until Now.

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Based in New York City, United States, Infor is one of the largest multinational software conglomerates in the nation. It is an enterprise software company that develops business applications that are further delivered via cloud computing. Infor was originally founded in 2002 as Agilsys. Some of the main business areas in the focus of the company are developing software for financial systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP). supply chain, and customer relationship management.

Since Infor delivers its application through cloud computing, the company uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) and many open-source platforms. Infor has made several acquisitions to date and many of them involved closing deals in billions. The company has expanded to 300 countries and territories where it has more than 90,000 corporate customers. Some of the clients include Ferrari, EBSCO, Legacy Health, Heineken, etc. Currently, Kevin Samuelson is the CEO of the company.

Foundation of Infor

In June 2002, Infor was launched as Agilsys in Malvern, Pennsylvania. In the beginning, it had around 1,300 customers for whom it developed enterprise software. The foundation of the company is based on a series of acquisitions which was led by Summit Partners and Golden Gate Capital. From the very beginning, Agilsys started acquiring multiple companies which today had resulted in a big organization. Starting in 2002, the company acquired Brain AG and Future Three. Soon, Agilsys also moved from Pennsylvania to Atlanta.

Agilsys acquired many companies in 2004 which includes a German-based company called Infor Business Solutions, Daly commerce, Lily Software Associates, and VISUAL ERP. The same year, Agilsys changed its name to Infor Global Solutions. In 2005, Infor acquired a company called MAPICS for $347 million. Next year, it acquired an Ontario-based company called GEAC ARP for $1 billion. In 2006, Infor was planning to buy SSA global but the deal was halted due to a lawsuit filed by some shareholders. Later, Infor merged with the company after a negotiation with the shareholders.

Started with only 1,300 customers, Company had increased the figure by thirteen times in 2006. In 2009, Infor acquired a line of entertainment and hotel business, SoftBrands which in turn acquired MAI Systems Corporation and The LodgingTouch Property Management System. Till 2009, the company acquired many companies in various business sectors, and now it was time for a new management team.

Infor
Image source: wikimedia.org

New Management Team

In 2010, the board of directors of Infor decided to form new management for the company. They brought in senior executives from Oracle Corporation. Charles Philips became the new CEO, Pam Murphy the new COO, Duncan Angove, and Stephen Scholl became co-presidents. As the new CEO of the company, Charles put out new strategies to gain the market share on Oracle and SAP. The company decided to make user-friendly applications and rewriting applications into new code. IN 2011, the company again made a big acquisition by buying Lawson Software for $2 billion. Next year, the company again relocated its headquarters to New York City.

Recent Acquisitions

After the formation of a new management team and relocating to New York City, Infor acquired more prominent companies. After acquiring Lawson Software, Company bought Approva and Enxsuite in the same year. It also bought SM-Plus, a company that provides service management tools. In 2012, it acquired EasyRMS, Group Laurier, and Orbis Global. In 2013, Infor acquired a US-based learning management software called CERTPOINT Systems Inc and next year acquired a talent management platform, PeopleAnswers.

Infor has acquired companies in consulting sectors, healthcare management, risk management, etc. In 2020, it acquired Intelligent Insites, a company that provides location-based healthcare services. Earlier last year, Koch Equity Developement LLC purchased full equity in Infor and the company is currently valued at $11 billion.

Kevin Samuelson – CEO of Infor

Kevin Samuelson became the CEO of Infor in 2019. He is attached to the company from the very beginning when it was founded as Agilsys. Kevin left the company in 2013 and went to work for big SaaS companies. He again rejoined the company in 2016 and served as the Chief Financial Officer until 2019. Kevin completed his education at the University of California at Berkeley.

Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies – A Software Company Whose Products Are Used For Counter-Terrorism Analytics.

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Based in America, Palantir Technologies is a software company which is specializing in big data analytics. Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp founded the company in 2003. Currently, the headquarters of the company is based in Denver, Colorado, and Alex Karp is the present CEO. Palantir is famous around the world for three main projects, namely, Palantir Gotham, Palantir Metropolis, and Palantir Foundry.

United States Intelligence Community and United States Department of Defense use Palantir Gotham for counter-terrorism analysis. These main three products of Palantir are used by many big clients such as Morgan Stanley, Airbus, Fiat Chrysler, etc. Palantir’s customer base has expanded to healthcare industries and it also works closely with the local and state government.

Early Years of Palantir Technologies

Peter Thiel originally founded the company in 2003 with a single mission to combat terrorism by developing suitable software. After a year, Peter bankrolled a prototype creation and built a team that included a PayPal engineer, two students from Stanford University, and one of his former colleagues from Stanford Law School. Peter made this former colleague (Alex Karp) CEO of the company.

When the company was founded it was headquartered in Palo Alto, California. In the initial days, the company struggled to land investors. Firms like Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins turned them down and demoralized them by saying it was going to be an epic fail. After trying for some time, they received an initial investment of $2 million from In-Q-Tel and then Thiel invested $30 million from his pocket. After receiving the funding, it took three years for Palantir to complete its product. Thiel realized that only artificial intelligence was not enough to build what he was aiming for so he hired analysts who can explore data from multiple sources.

Palantir Technologies
Image source: ctfassets.net

The Success of Palantir Technologies

The company made breakthroughs in 2009 and 2010 when Information Warfare Monitor used the technology of Palantir to uncover the GhostNet and the Shadow Network. Both of them were Chinese espionage that targeted the compromise of several computer networks across 103 countries including Dalai Lama’s office. The Shadow Network hacked into the Indian security system and defense apparatus.

In 2010, Palantir started a joint venture with Thompson Reuters to sell a quantitative analysis tool, QA Studio. The same year, Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board fought fraud by deploying Palantir software. After this success, Biden announced at the White House that further the company’s software will be incorporated in other government agencies including Medicare and Medicaid.

By 2013, several US government agencies used Palantir software for fraud detection and combating terrorism. Initially, the company which struggled to receive funding from private capital firms secured a funding of $196 million in 2013. In December 2014, the company hosted another round of funding from which it raised $450 million from the private funders. The company was gaining a lot of attraction and the number of customers increased rapidly, but Alex Karp decided to not file an IPO. He said that a company like Palantir would become difficult to manage if it goes public. At the end of 2013, the valuation of the company became $9 billion.

Present Days

In the upcoming years, the company gathered more funding and its valuation became $20 billion in 2015. The company also acquired two startups, Kimono Labs and Silk to collect information more efficiently. In 2020, many countries used Palantir technology to track and contain the spread of COVID-19. The company recently developed software called Tiberius that is used for vaccine allocation in the US.

Alex Karp – CEO of Palantir Technologies

Alex Karp is a famous American billionaire whose net worth is $2.1 billion. He went to Haverford College followed by Stanford University, and Goethe University. He studied neoclassical social theory in college. Apart from co-founding Palantir Technologies, Alex is also the co-founder of the money management firm, Caedmon Group.

InterSystems

InterSystems – A Software Company that Houses high-Performing DBMS and Application Development.

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In 1978, Philip Ragon founded InterSystems Corporation. It is a company established in the software sector and its headquarters is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. InterSystems is better represented as a privately held vendor which provides a range of software systems and technologies.

The main products of the company are high-performance DBMS (database management system), rapid application development, and also healthcare information systems. In 2019, the annual revenue of the company was $727 million. InterSystems have several product lines based on the services it offers. For example, the product called HealthShare is a platform for healthcare informatics systems to securely access sensitive records.

History of InterSystems Corporation

Philip Ragon, a famous American entrepreneur founded InterSystems in 1978 and currently serves as the CEO of the company. When the company was founded, it was one of the original vendors that supplied to M-Technology Systems with a product called ISM. M-Technology which is also known as MUMPS is a high-performance product for managing hospital laboratory information systems. InterSystems was a very old vendor to MUMPS and in the following years, the company started acquiring several MUMPS implementations.

The acquisitions included buying DTM from Data Tree in 1993 and DSM from DIgital in 1995. The first two acquisitions triggered the expansion of InterSystems while the third acquisition of Micronetics in 1998 made InterSystems a very powerful company for M technology. As the company acquired a series of M technology implementations, it was time for InterSystems to launch something of their own.

InterSystems
Image source: www.intersystems.com

New Products

After the acquisitions, InterSystems rolled out a product called OpenM. This product represented an integration of technologies from the series of products they acquired till 1998. The company consolidated all the technologies into a single product and named it Cache. It was released in the late 1990s. The company made a kick start will releasing all the M-based products under its brand name. But, after consolidating the technologies, the company halted any further development in the M-based product lines. They continued to support the customers but their focus shifted to a different technology.

In 2003, InterSystems released an integration platform called Ensemble which marked the companies expansion to other technology areas. Seeing the potential in the demand for high-performance and secure technologies in the healthcare sector, it developed a product called HealthShare. This product was launched in 2006 and it is a platform for scalable healthcare informatics systems which is still existing in the market. In 2007, Company acquired a vendor of TrakCare called TrakHealth. The company used the technology of InterSystems to develop a modular healthcare information system.

After making significant progress in healthcare technology, the company invested some time in developing efficient DBMS. In 2011, InterSystems launched a new product called Globals. The product was built using the same technology as Cache and it was released as a free database based on the technology of multidimensional array storage. The same year, Company made a huge acquisition from the company Siemens as it acquired its Health Services business unit. In 2017, the company rolled out another lucrative product line called InterSystems Iris Data Platform which combined the DBMS capabilities with analytics and interoperability.

Philip Ragon – Founder of InterSystems Corporation

Philip Ragon became famous after he founded InterSystems Corporation, a company that houses several high-tech solutions for multiple business sectors. Philip is also very famous as a philanthropist who along with his wife pledged to donate half of their money to doing good for those in need. He is a member of the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows as well a member of the MIT Corporation. Last year, Philip Ragon was featured in the Forbes 400 richest people in America list in which he ranked 378.

Micro Focus

Micro Focus – Story Of The First Software Company To Win Queen’s Award.

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Micro Focus International plc is a British multinational conglomerate that is based in the IT sector. The company was founded in 1976 and its headquarters is based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. As the main product of the company, Micro Focus provides enterprise application integration, management software, and IT consultancy. It is a public limited company listed on the London Stock Exchange and it is also an element of the FTSE 250 Index.

The company currently generates $3 billion in revenue annually. Micro Focus also claims to be the largest provider of enterprise software on a global scale with 40,000 worldwide customers. Micro Focus has 12,000 employees who work across 48 different countries. A majority of the Fortune 100 companies are customers of Micro Focus.

History of Micro Focus

In 1976, Micro Focus was established in England. The product of the Company that became a big hit in the software industry was CIS COBOL. It was a standard-compliant COBOL that was developed for its implementation in microcomputers. On the basis of developing this software product, Micro Focus became the first company to win the Queen’s Award for the industry. For a new company like Micro Focus, it was quite prestigious and helped acquire more investors and customers.

Micro Focus
Image source: www.irishtimes.com

Expansion and Acquisitions

The company eventually started acquired a lot of businesses to expand in the various domains of the IT sector. In 1998, Micro Focus acquired an application enablement business called Intersolv Inc for $534 million. After the acquisition, Company started a new business with Intersolv and renamed the company Merant. After the first acquisition, the company acquired XDB Systems in the same year. Acquiring this company gave Micro Focus access to XDB Enterprise Server RDBMS (Relational Database Management System). After two years, the merged business with Intersolv was split and again the company took its original name. The demerger of the Company was backed by Golden Gate Capital Partners.

In 2005, Company filed its first IPO and got listed on the London Stock Exchange. MicroFocus, in 2007, acquired the ACUCOBOL-GT product line of the company Acucorp Inc. It is a San Diego-based company that is known for developing modern COBOL development tools using advanced tech for the business growth of COBOL applications. In 2008, Company acquired an Israeli-based public company called NetManage for $73.3 million. It was a software company developed by an Israeli engineer. The growth curve of MicroFocus was moving upwards as it kept on acquiring more and more companies which gave it exposure to a larger customer base.

In 2008, Company acquired Liant Software Corporation for its RM/COBOL and PL/I product lines. It was a Texas-based company that owned assets of one of the main competitors of MicroFocus. In 2009, the company acquired two new businesses. First, it acquired the company that developed application lifecycle management tools, Borland followed by a business unit of another company. The second company it acquired was the Quality Solutions and TestPartner of Compuware.

Present-Day

In December 2013, the company acquired few product lines of Progress Software with include Orbix, Orbacus, and Artix. This line of software was originally developed by IONA Technologies and it had great demand in the market. In 2014, Company showed an interest in buying The Attachmate Group for $1.2 billion in shares. This would give Micro Focus access to a certain number of specific product lines. On the other hand, the owner of The Attachment Group which consisted of several investment partners would hold a 40 percent stake in Company after the deal was closed. The company acquired a few more enterprises after the deal which included Gwava Inc, ATAR Labs, Serena Software, etc.

Stephen Murdoch – CEO of Micro Focus

Stephen Murdoch joined Micro Focus in 2012 as the General Manager of the Product Group. Later, he became the Chief Marketing Officer and became the CEO of the company in 2018. Before joining Company, Stephen has working experience in Dell and also 17 years of experience at IBM.