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Capgemini

Capgemini: A Big Name in the IT Consulting Services in the Digital World

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The most innovative discovery that the world has witnessed in the past 60-70 years is the discovery of computers and the internet. These two technologies have changed the face of the world and have brought humongous opportunities for people in every nook and corner of the world. The internet has made it easy for people sitting in a backward area to work with a company based miles and miles away from their place.

The scope of the internet and computers is not limited to providing jobs to people, but these have also encouraged the startups to provide their B2C and B2B services in the most innovative ways to make the business even easier. Such a company that has taken full advantage of digital innovation is Capgemini, a renowned name in the world of technology and innovation.

About the Company

Capgemini is a French company having its headquarters based in Paris. Serge Kampf founded Capgemini in 1967 in Paris and now the company has expanded to various foreign countries having multiple offices in each. Capgemini is a technology company with expertise in different services, including consulting, technology, professional, and outsourcing services.

Capgemini
Image Source: capgemini.com

The Foundational Story of Capgemini

Kampf founded Capgemini as SOGETI (Société pour la Gestion de l’Entreprise et le Traitement de l’Information) on 1 october, 1967. In the beginning, it started to work as an enterprise management and data processing company. As SOGETI, Capgemini, in 1974, acquired a New York-based company named Gemini Computer Systems. The next year, the company went on to acquire another technology company, named CAP (Centre d’Analyse et de Programmation), leading to a name change of SOGETI (Due to an international dispute on a similar name as CAP of another company), to Cap Gemini Sogeti.

In the next five years, Cap Gemini Sogeti started its international business by launching its US operations in 1981 and opened 20 new branches in the US only. By this time, the company had employed about 500 people and also made another acquisition of a data conversion company, named DASD Corporation. The company cut the Sogeti from its name and changed it to Cap Gemini. It also redesigned the company logo for every branch in the world. This way, Sogeti became a separate subsidiary of Cap Gemini that solely works as information technology consulting company.

In the year 2000, by acquiring Ernst & Young Consulting, Capgemini entered into the consulting business and started its consulting business as Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. In 2017, the company had another rebranding of its name, and from Cap Gemini, it became Capgemini.

The Founder Serge Kampf

Serge Kampf is one of the leaders who are known for their management and leadership skills and are the role-models for many budding entrepreneurs. Kampf was born on 13 October 1934 in Grenoble, France. He was born to a soldier father. Since Kampf’s father was in the army, he spent his school days at a boarding. After completing his school, Kampf passed the entrance exam of the French Telecom administration. He then obtained a double honors degree in Law and Economics. After completing his education, his first job was for an underground telephone exchange as a Telecom Inspector.

While working for the exchange, Kampf realized that he does not like his work and wanted to try something else. While looking for opportunities, he got to know about the newly emerging technology, which was IT. Kampf became curious about IT and computers and immediately applied for jobs in two companies working in IT, Bull and IBM. Though he got offers from both companies, he went on to join Bull. He started as a commercial engineer, and later, with one after another promotion, he became the regional manager of Bull.

After working for seven years with Bull, Kampf got motivated to start his own business. He wanted to have the freedom of a boss and did not want to serve anyone else than himself. So in 1967, he resigned from Bull and started Sogeti on 1 October 1967, from a two-room office in Grenoble, with a team of six people. The company wasn’t one of its kind, but it was the first French IT services company.

Kampf served Capgemini as its CEO till 2002, and in 2012, he resigned as the Chairman of the company too. He served the Board of Directors as the vice-president till 2016, when he died at the age of 81 in Grenoble.

Capgemini Today

Capgemini is dominating the IT consulting services in the world. It has multiple branches in different countries in the world, and as of 2020, more than 370,000 employees are working for the company across the globe. Currently, Aiman Ezzat is the serving CEO at Capgemini, and Paul Hermelin is the chairman of the Board of the company.

TE Connectivity

TE Connectivity: The ‘Not So’ Popular Global Industrial Leader in the World of Connectivity

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Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are the names that are well known to us and have become an inseparable part of our lives. We all use their products and know well about them. But there are a few companies that are continuously providing us with their services, but still, we don’t know much or anything about them. These companies are not very popular but are touching our lives, and in some cases, we can’t even manage without their products. One such company is TE Connectivity, which has been there for more than a decade providing its services to us without caring about if its customers know about it or not.

About the Company TE Connectivity

TE Connectivity is an IT and electronics company that manufactures sensors and connectivity equipment that are capable of working in a harsh environment. From the internet to the cloud structure, from drones to space rockets, and from the vehicles on the roads to aeroplanes in the sky, TE Connectivity has its part in every other field that exists in the world.

The company works in three main fields, i.e. Communications Solutions, Transportation Solutions, and Industrial Solutions. So as the names suggest, TE connectivity provides its connectivity solutions in the field of communication, transportation, and in various industries.

The communication solutions include the manufacturing of electronic equipment that is used in home appliances like dishwashers, washing machines, refrigerators, air conditions, etc. The transport solutions by TE Connectivity are focused on automotive, industrial, and commercial transportation, and these products are used in high-speed metros, light rail vehicles, locomotives, etc.

This segment of the company also works on building sensors for various industries like medical, aerospace, commercial transportation, and defense, etc. With the Industrial solutions, TE Connectivity manufactures equipment that provides connectivity, power, and signal to automate the operations in various fields, including transportation, industries, medical, defense, and others.

The Foundational Story of TE Connectivity

TE Connectivity is a spin-off of Tyco International Ltd., a company with a history that dates back to 1960. Arthur J. Rosenberg founded Tyco International in Ireland with its operational headquarter in Princeton, New Jersey. It was a security system company and was mainly focused on semiconductor manufacturing for the government and did research work for the military.

TE Connectivity
Image Source: commons.wikimedia.org

In 1964, the company went public, and in 1970, it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. By the year 1980, Tyco International had acquired companies like Simplex Technology, Grinnell Fire Protection Systems, Armin Plastics and was spreading its services. The company then divided its operations into three categories, i.e., fire protection, electronics, and packaging. Tyco continued to work in the three fields until 2007, when the current CEO of Tyco International, Ed Breen, spun off the company into three companies. TE Connectivity was one of the three resultant companies.

The CEO of the Company

Terrence Curtin is the current CEO at TE Connectivity. He was born and brought up in Mount Penn, a city in Pennsylvania, USA. According to one of the interviews of Curtin, he wasn’t good at academics but was one of the star players of the gridiron and the baseball team of his school. He wanted to do better at academics, so he used his talent of gridiron and baseball to get into a good college to get an environment where he could improve at his studies. Eventually, he got admission into the Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. He graduated with a degree in accounts in 1990 and immediately joined one of the biggest accounts firms of that time, Arthur Andersen.

After working for a few years with Arthur Andersen, Curtin joined TE Connectivity as its Chief Financial Officer and later, held the position of the corporate controller of the company. In a few years, he was appointed as the president of the company. In 2016, he got elected to the Board of Directors of the company. After a year, in March 2017, Curtin was appointed as the CEO of TE Connectivity.

TE Connectivity Today

TE Connectivity is one of the biggest technology companies that are into connectivity and sensor products manufacturing. The company has got 150 branches in 40 countries, and over 7000 engineers working for TE are connecting to its customers every day to solve their problems. Other than that, the employee count for the company as of 2020 is 80000, and the total revenue for the same year was recorded to be USD 12 billion.

Workday

Workday: Helping Tech Giants Solve Big Problems with Innovative Solutions

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Cloud computing, because of its versatility and various features, has opened many doors for new businesses. From Microsoft to Amazon, every big company has launched its cloud-based services, and names like Workday Inc. are making big in this field with their innovative ideas on problem-solving for their clients. Workday Inc. is an American on-demand cloud-based service provider that is listed among the top five cloud-based service providers in the world.  

About the Company Workday Inc.

Workday Inc. is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, U.S., and was founded in 2005 by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. Currently, Duffield is working as the chairman of the company, and Bhusri is serving Workday as the co-Ceo. Workday Inc. is an online software service provider and offers subscription-based services to its clients, according to their interests and requirements. These services include financial management, spend management, analytics, reporting and benchmarking, human capital management, enterprise planning, payroll, and workforce management, etc. The company doesn’t sell its software but services.

Workday Inc. believes in adapting to the changes, so it has always walked together with every new innovation and developed solutions for its clients incorporating the latest technologies. The company’s software includes technologies like machine learning to provide its clients with the best solutions and help them grow with the new technologies. The company always keeps on updating its services according to new technologies arriving and release major updates for its software every six months.

In fifteen years journey of Workday, the company has come up with 34 different products, Amazon Web Services being its major cloud computing infrastructure provider. The company has its various data centers situated in different cities in the world, including Virginia, Dublin, Ireland, Netherlands, and Amsterdam, etc.

The Foundational Story of Workday Inc.

Dave Duffield, the co-founder of Workday Inc., had already founded another company named PeopleSoft and was one of the famous entrepreneurs among his peers. He met Aneel Bhusri when both were working for PeopleSoft. After selling off PeopleSoft, one day, Duffield had a meeting with Bhusri at Jax Truckee Diner, in Lake Tahoe of California. During the meeting, the two decided to start a new SaaS (software as a service) company that would develop and offer cloud-based HR and Finance applications. The idea was to revolutionize the enterprise software market and help companies manage their finances and hr functions through their online services.

Workday
Image Source: workday.com

So in March 2005, the two launched Workday Inc. in Walnut Creek, California, with an initial investment by Duffield and Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm. Later in 2008, the company headquarters was shifted to Pleasanton, California. Workday partnered with Flextronics in the same year to incorporate human capital management software services into its operations. To enhance its services, Workday also partnered with names like Fairchild Semiconductor, Thomson Reuters, Aviva and Time Warner, etc.

By the mid of the next year, Workday had raised around $75 million through a round of investment led by New Enterprise Associates. By 2011, the company had raised a total of $250 million since its inception, Jeff Bezos (CEO Amazon) being one of the major investors. The company had its first IPO in the New York Stock Exchange in October 2012, raising $637 million by selling 22.75 million Class A shares.    

The Founder of the Company

Dave Duffield is a renowned entrepreneur who is also the founder of the technology company PeopleSoft. The Workday co-founder Aneel Bhusri is also known for his leadership and was associated with PeopleSoft. He was the vice-president of the company.

Dave Duffield has got an electrical engineering degree and has done an MBA from Cornell University. After graduating, he joined IBM as the marketing representative, and later, worked as the systems engineer in the same company. Duffield also worked with Integral Systems and held different positions at the company, including the post of CEO, chairman, and chief product architect. Apart from PeopleSoft and Workday, he is also one of the co-founders of Information Associates. He has won various awards, including the Golden Plate Award (1998), EY Entrepreneur of the Year (2013), and Cornell Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award (2018).

The other co-founder of Workday Inc., Aneel Bhusri, is a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Brown University and has done an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He started his career at Morgan Stanley as a corporate finance analyst. In 1993 he joined PeopleSoft as the director of planning. After a decade of working for PeopleSoft, he ended up being the vice-chairman of the company. During the same time, he also partnered with the capital venture firm Greylock Partners. He is a recipient of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year (2013) and the Great Place to Work CEO For All Leadership Award (2020).

The Company Today

In fifteen years of its journey, Workday Inc. has become one of the top tech companies in the world. It has also made a few acquisitions to enhance its services. In 2017, the company opened its platform for developers and third-party software to step into the Platform as a Service market. The company has featured among the Fortune magazine’s top 100 companies, that too in the top five companies in 2020. Currently, over 12,500 are working in Workday Inc. at its different branches around the globe.

Unisys

Unisys: A Journey from the Typewriters Makers to the Biggest IT Service Providers

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Unisys is an American global IT company founded in 1986, having a history with firearms, typewriters, and calculation machines. The company deals in IT consulting, software, and outsourcing services. Unisys headquarter is based in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. As an IT company, Unisys specializes in system integration, high-end server technology, cloud management software, maintenance, and support as well as cybersecurity. Unisys is a result of the merger of three different companies, E.Remington, Sperry Gyroscope Company, and the American Airthmometer Company, all three specializing in distinct domains.

The Long Back History of Unisys

The history of Unisys dates back to 1816 when a company named E. Remington was founded by Eliphalet Remington. The company was a manufacturer of firearms. But later, when Remington’s three sons joined the company, they thought of expanding its operations. In 1873, the company tried their hands-on building typewriters and introduced the first commercially viable typewriter, named the Remington Model 1, having the QWERTY layout. Later the company built a new typewriter model in which the typist could use the Shift key to make a letter capital.

During the same time, the American Airthmometer Company (Later renamed to Burroughs Adding Machine) had also got the patent for an adding machine that would only record the final result of a calculation. On the other hand, the Sperry Gyroscope Company was in the business of manufacturing navigation equipment for ships and aircraft.

Unisys
Image Source: unisys.co.in

By 1925 Burroughs had introduced a calculating machine that can also subtract and a billing machine that could perform direct multiplication. The Remington’s, on the other hand, had already introduced a noise-less typewriter as well as America’s first electrical typewriter.

In 1927, the Remington Typewriter Company partnered with the Rand Kardex Corporation, and the merger resulted in the Remington Rand company. This partnership led to the acquisition of many other companies, including the Dalton Adding Machine Company, the Powers Accounting Machine Company, the Baker-Vawter Company, etc., making their way into the computation world. With the acquisition of Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, and the founding of the Engineering Research Associates (ERA), the journey of Remington Rand started as one of the biggest computer manufacturers in the US. In June 1951, Remington Rand manufactured its first computer named Univac I (Universal Automatic Computer), first used by the US census bureau.

In 1955, the Remington Rand and Sperry Gyroscope had a merger, forming the company Sperry Rand. The company in a decade delivered over 100 computers to the military and for commercial use. Some of these computers were also used for weather forecasting by the US government. The Remington Rand in 1955 also introduced the Univac 1103, which was the first computer to use RAM. Finally, in 1986, Burroughs also merged with Sperry Rand, and hence Unisys was formed.

Journey as Unisys

Unisys was a result of a $4.8 billion worth acquisition of the Sperry Rand by Burroughs, one of the largest of its time. The name, Unisys, was selected through a competition with 31000 entries. Unisys is a combination of words united, information and systems. With this merger, the company became the second-biggest computer manufacturing company, having over 120000 employees working for it.

Though the company continued to deliver products to the US government, it saw a steep decline in the number of its customer base for commercial computers. The company was facing a lot of competition and had to cut its employees count too. In fact, the company had replaced three CEOs in seven years.

From Manufacturing to Service Providers

Later, the company decided to shift the business from manufacturing computers to providing IT services and high-end servers. Along with that, the company also started dealing with outsourcing its services, systems integration, and consulting services, etc. In the year 2000, Unisys introduced the UNISYS ES7000 servers.

Along with computers, Unisys was also holding ownership of a medical and healthcare insurance wing, i.e., a company named Medicare. Unisys sold the company in 2010, for a sum of $135 million.

Unisys has always been a big player in the field of IT, and its clients include the various departments of the US government and major names like Dell, Lloyd Banks, Nextel, Swift, and Telefonica, etc. Currently, Peter Altabef is serving Unisys as the CEO as well as the President. Around 22,000 employees are working for the company, and as of 2018, Unisys has $2.83 billion in total annual revenue.

Touch Surgery

Touch Surgery: Digital Innovation Empowering Medical Sciences

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Edtech is one of the booming industries today, and would you believe it if we tell you that you can also learn the complete procedure of a surgery simulated in an operating room on your smartphones? Believable enough, but most of us would have not thought of it yet, right? Medical studies are the most expensive of all and getting to see and learn the procedure for all types of surgeries is not even possible for those studying medical sciences. The same thought came into the minds of two medical residents at the Imperial College London, Jean Nehme, and Andre Chow, and they end up developing Touch Surgery.

Touch Surgery

Touch Surgery has played a vital role in transforming the medical world with the help of digital technology. It is a training app for medical students that simulate surgical procedures, validated by 19 independent peer-reviewed publications. The company Digital Surgery LTD is the parent company of Touch Surgery, having its headquarters in three major cities, i.e. London, New York City, Auckland, and Sydney. In the beginning, the company name was Kinosis and later was changed to Digital Surgery, to reflect the border scope and mission of the company.

Digital Surgery is a healthcare technology company that is using digital technology to help in making all the surgeries even safer. The app includes a near to reality simulator and AI-powered surgical video management platform, offering accurate surgical content for the doctors to enhance their skills and for the medical students to practice in the operating room.

The interactive simulator of Touch Surgery helps the medical trainees to learn the step-by-step surgical procedure and test their knowledge and skills related to medical operations, through the simulator. Most importantly, it helps in enhancing their skills of decision-making in a real-time environment. The app has also proved to be useful for patients who are about to go under surgery. They use this app to know more about their surgical procedure.

Digital Surgery tied up with Microsoft in 2018 to use Microsoft’s under development Microsoft Hololens (mixed reality smartglasses for surgery) to accomplish the company’s mission of safe surgery for all. The app includes around two hundred surgery training in seventeen different specialties and is used by many medical institutions to provide the ‘to-be doctors’ with a great learning experience. Currently, the app has got over 2 million users registered to it. The Dublin-based Irish company Medtronic, a Medtech conglomerate, acquired Touch Surgery for an amount of $500 million in 2020.

The Idea Behind Touch Surgery

Jean Nehme and Andre Chow the co-founders of Touch Surgery was still working as medical residents at the Imperial College London when they thought of the idea. Since the two were residents, they did not have the access to the resources that could help them enhance their skills as a surgeon. They realized that most of the medical students do not get to try their hands on all types of surgical procedures lacking additional experience. The only source to help them to enhance their skills was surgical simulators, but these too were too expensive to get.

This led the two to think of a cheaper and more accessible simulator for all, i.e. Touch Surgery. They discussed the idea of Touch Surgery in 2010 and founded the app in 2012. The idea was innovative and useful so, they easily got connected to many investors for their research and development work too. Today, Touch Surgery has partnered with numerous surgeons, combining their expertise and digital technology to empower the surgical community.

The Founders Touch Surgery

Jean Nehme has got an MBBS BSc MRCS MSc (Hons) and specializes in plastic surgery. Nehme is an awardee of multiple awards for his research work in innovation and his contribution to digitizing medical education. He has been named as one of the most influential 500 people in the UK by Debrett. On the other hand, Andre Chow is a general surgeon.

Touch Surgery Founders
Touch Surgery Founders: Andre Chow and Jean Nehme
Image Source: balderton.com

Both the co-founders graduated from the Imperial College School of Medicine in London. During the time, the two thought of developing Touch Surgery, Chow was pursuing a Ph.D. in Stem Cells and Biotechnology. Currently, Jean Nehme is working as the CEO, and Andre Chow is working as the COO of Touch Surgery.

BenevolentAI

BenevolentAI: Bringing Innovation in the Field of Bioscience

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Artificial Intelligence is a wonder that people would have laughed about two decades ago, but today, this technology is attracting almost every other type of field. In the past, futuristic sci-fi movies did give us a glimpse of AI in the form of flying cars and automated homes, etc. But we did not know that this technology will be here so soon, making a mark in every category in the world. After bringing a revolution in the field of technology, automobile, and more, medicine and pharmaceutical companies are also up for investing in AI and machine learning to make their research and drug discovery even better and faster. One such drug discovery startup is BenevolentAI.

BenevolentAI

BenevolentAI is a London-based drug discovery startup, that has adopted Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to speed up medicinal research and reduce the overall cost to half. The company was founded by Ken Mulvany on 13 November 2013, in London with co-founders Michael Brennan and Ivan Griffin. It uses AI technology such as pattern recognition to find a match for existing genetic, metabolic, and clinical information in order to develop new drugs. According to the founder, the drug discovery industry has a vast amount of information, that is impossible to handle by humans alone, so using AI, this information can not only stored but also be used to target different diseases.

Most of the clinical trials are focused on hypotheses for a particular disease, but with the AI technology at BenevolentAI, the existing research is used for finding a new disease to target and for which the existing hypothesis fits the best. This way there is no waste of time in discovering a new compound from scratch, but the drugmakers can jump straight to the clinical trials to find new drug candidates from existing information. The company uses AI combined with the expertise of qualified scientists to make sure that the end result is effective.

Ken Mulvany founded the company with a target to find a cure for ALS and Alzheimer’s using AI, and in 2021, the company will also be starting clinical trials for excessive daytime sleepiness in Parkinson’s disease in the US. The company currently has got 90 people working for it in the UK and US. In September 2016, only after four years of its founding, it raised $1.4 billion, becoming a unicorn. In 2018, the company raised another $115 million and valued at $2 billion. Benevolent AI has also acquired the UK operations of Proximagen for an undisclosed sum.

Idea Behind BenevolentAI

BenevolentAI is a machine intelligence company with an aim to develop drugs for every existing disease in the world with the help of artificial intelligence. The company is focusing on using AI to mine and analyze the already existing biochemical information to develop new drugs for the diseases. According to Jackie Hunter, the Board director at BenevolentAI, every 30 seconds a research paper is published, and 95% of them fail. There is vast information about discovery and research for drugs that are going in vain. It takes about ten years and over $2.5 billion to develop, test, and get ‘the drug’ for a particular disease, but with AI and machine learning the time and the cost of producing a drug can be reduced by 30% to 50%.

BenevolentAI collects the already existing drug research data that was for a particular condition but could not yield the desired results. Though the research might have failed for a certain disease, BenevolentAI uses the same research and clinical trials data to test for other diseases, such that the deep research will not go waste, and the existing information is used to find new drug candidate for other diseases.

The Founder

Ken Mulvany has got more than 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and investor. Currently, he sits as the Chairman of BenevolentAI. Before Benevolent AI, Mulvany also founded another biotech company named Proximagen and served as the CEO of the company. Proximagen was into developing the drugs for central nervous system disorders.  Mulvany sold Proximagen in 2012 to Upsher-Smith Laboratories for $553million.

BenevolentAI Founder
Image Source: miro.medium.com

Today, Mulvany is a member of various advisory boards of different organizations, including the UK Government on Artificial Intelligence and the Oxford Sciences Innovations advisory boards. Apart from that, he chaired the Trustees of the Cure Parkinson’s Trust and is also a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence.