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Appian Corporation

Appian Corporation – Developer Of Cloud Computing As Well As Enterprise Software.

After the internet, cloud computing is one of the best technology that is most beneficial for every business. The very technology has reduced the hectic work of managing the storage for the businesses and just buying some subscriptions, the data is readily available for every user of the data through the cloud. Hence, the technology is now adopted by almost every company in the world that deals with data and the internet. To process the data on the cloud, some software is required. This software helps the companies manage, deploy and access the data on the cloud. Appian Corporation is one of the leading software development companies known for its enterprise cloud software development. Appian creates software that helps other organisations to build applications for mobiles, desktops, and even the cloud on their own. The company has been in the business for over twenty years and has become a prominent name in the cloud software industry.

About Appian Corporation

Appian Corporation is the developer of cloud computing as well as enterprise software. The company was founded in 1999, and the team of founders included Michael Beckley, Matt Calkins, Robert Kramer, and Marc Wilson. The company headquarters is based in McLean, Virginia, United States, and apart from that, the Appian Corporation has its offices in fifteen different locations globally. The company is home to over 1500 employees, and according to the 2021 FY report, it made annual revenues worth $369.3 Million. The company is known for its low-code automation platform and has developed multiple apps for its customers.

Appian Corporation
Image source: www.healthcareitnews.com

Founding Appian Corporation

Michael Beckley, Robert Kramer, Marc Wilson, and Matthew Calkin founded Appian in 1999. The idea behind the company was to gather talented people and use their knowledge and skills to get amazing results. This way, Appian was established to offer its employees the liberty to make their decisions to fulfill the company goals most innovatively. It was Calkin’s idea to build such a company, and other co-founders joined in later to found the company. 

The company introduced its first product, a web-based enterprise information service for the US army, named Army Knowledge Online, in 2001. The very service was also regarded as “the world’s largest intranet” at that time. 

The downturn of the economy during 2008 affected Appian too, but the leaders working for the success of the company had made a plan B for the company too. This time, Appian brainstormed over the concept of building software that would reduce most of the work for the organizations. So the company built a platform based on the “low-code technique”, which would allow the organizations to create their software on their own, without being a tech geek. The platform was a hit, as it was secure and could be used on any device, mobile, desktop as well as on the cloud.

The success of Appian’s new software platform brought it more success and investments. In 2014, New Enterprise Associates invested a sum of $37.5 million in Appian. In May 2017, the company went public on NASDAQ and started to trade with the ticker name APPN. With the release of Appian AI, the company introduced the integration of Artificial Intelligence to its platform in 2019. In the following years, Appian also made some acquisitions, including Novayre Solutions SL and Lana Labs.

Today, Appian offers its software services to industries like Automotive, Education, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Insurance, Life Sciences, Retail, Telecom, Transportation, etc. In fact, with the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, Appian launched apps that helped businesses with their work, like tracking the workforce’s health and safety, helping companies reopen their offices, and helping banks manage Paycheck Protection Programloan applications, etc. This way, those apps helped businesses to continue their work during the pandemic.

The CEO at Appian Corporation

Matt Calkins is one of the founders and the CEO of Appian. He is an Economics graduate from Dartmouth College. In fact, he was the topper of his class. In 1994, he joined MicroStrategy as the Director of Enterprise Product Group and left the company in 1999 to found Appian. Matt has been the CEO of Appian from the very beginning and has led the company to be the leading enterprise software developer. He is also known as the author of several award-winning board games.

nutanix

Nutanix – A Leading IT Company Offering An Unparallel Enterprise Cloud Platform. 

With a goal to make IT management easier for the industrial sector, Nutanix Inc was founded in September 2009. The company’s founding team was three successful Indian entrepreneurs, Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron, and Ajeet Singh. Nutanix’s headquarters is based in San Jose, California, US. The main products of the company are Enterprise Cloud Platform, Business Software, and IoT. It offers various cloud-based solutions and services as well disaster recovery, cloud monitoring, and much more. There are more than 20,000 leading companies that are customers of Nutanix including Volkswagen, Vodafone, Nasdaq, Seattle Children’s, etc. Currently, the company is focusing on developing more products for entering into the hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem. 

Founding Story

Nutanix is an IT company that mainly focuses on providing cloud-based enterprise software. It has also received several awards for innovation and best products and also as a startup. This startup was founded in 2009 and one of the co-founders, Dheeraj Pandey became the CEO of the company. Mohit Aron left the company in 2013 to found a computer data storage company, Cohesity. Nutanix was very lucky when it came to raising funds as, within four years of its establishment, it successfully hosted five funding rounds. By 2013, the company raised $312.2 million from funding and it also reached a $1 billion valuation in the same year and received unicorn status. In 2014, its valuation became $2 billion after the Series E funding where it raised $140 million. Some of the major investors involved were Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Blumberg Capital. 

Nutanix became a public company in 2015 but unfortunately, it suffered a net loss of $126 million in the same year. The company also started acquisitions in 2016 and acquired two companies, namely, PernixData and Calm.io in the same year. In 2017, Nutanix established a partnership with IBM, and again in 2018 acquired three companies, Netsil, Minjar, and MainFrame2 Inc. After the pandemic, the company shifted from making hardware applications to SaaS products. 

nutanix
Image source: itpro.co.uk

Awards & Accolades

Founded in 2009, Nutanix started receiving prestigious awards after a couple of years. In 2011, the company received the Best of VMworld 2011 – Gold Award for its products. The experts made Nutanix the winner based on innovation, usability, reliability, value, and performance. In 2012, Nutanix again received the “Best New Product of 2012” award by VMworld because they liked the SAN-free approach by Nutanix for enhancing virtualization performance. It received a series of awards in 2013 including VMworld vFlipcup 2013 Champions, announced one of the top 100 companies in North America by Red Herring, LinkedIn Top 10 InDemand Tech Startup, recognized as “Cool Vendor” by Gartner, and a few more. 

In 2014, Nutanix was named a Tech Trailblazer which is a new concept in the startup ecosystem. This award was mainly given to young startups and after it was recognized as such, the companies received a lot of support for growing their business. In the same year, it also bagged a customer service award and received the Technology of the Year award by InfoWorld. Dheeraj Pandey, one of the co-founders was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015. In 2018, the company was featured by well-known magazines and companies like Forbes, Gartner, Deloitte, and GEC Media Group. Nutanix was also named one of the 18 great companies for millennials in the San Francisco area. Recently, it has received a few awards for being one of the top workplaces. 

Rajiv Ramaswami – CEO of Nutanix

Rajib Ramaswami is the current CEO and President of Nutanix who joined the company late in 2020. Before he joined Nutanix, he worked in various positions at VMware. Ramaswami was the Executive Vice President and General Manager of VMware’s networking and security business and later he became the Chief Operating Officer of Products and Cloud Services. Ramaswami worked at various other companies including IBM, Cisco, Nortel, Tellabs, and Broadcom. He completed his bachelor’s degree in India and then went to the University of California, Berkeley.

New Relic

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

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.

NetSuite

NetSuite – The Leading Cloud-based Business Management Software Providers.

The past thirty to forty years have been the years of growth for the IT industry. With time, the size of the computer started to decrease, whereas the storage capacity of these computers started to increase. Slowly computers reached almost every person’s home, and all the industries were using them. This led to the increase in demand for storage, and cloud technology came to the rescue. Many companies tried their hands on this new technology, and now, they are a few of the famous ones. NetSuite is one such company that has been there for about thirty years, providing cloud computing services to its clients. NetSuite is an American cloud computing company that became part of Oracle in 2016.

About the Company

Evan Goldberg founded NetSuite as NetLedger in 1998 in California, US. Currently, it operates as the subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, having its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. The company started as a business consultancy firm and provided services, like business finances, operations, and customer relations, etc., small and medium-sized enterprises being its target customers. Later, the company grew to become one of the leading Cloud-based business management platform providers.
The product range of NetSuite includes accounting software, applicant tracking system, customer relationship management, e-commerce enterprise resource planning, human resource management system, etc.

NetSuite
Image source: erpsoftwareblog.com

Founding of NetSuite

Evan Goldberg founded NetSuite in 1998 in California as NetLedger in a small office above a hair salon next to a liquor store. In the very beginning, the company was providing web-hosted accounting software, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison being one of the major investors in the company. Ellison had put all his money into the venture.
The very next year of the founding of the Company, it started to work on Cloud-computing, technically making Company the first cloud computing software company. After successfully running as a leading cloud-computing company, it went public in December 2007 on NYSE.
In the next few years, Company expanded its operations overseas, establishing offices in countries like Denver, Chicago, New York, Boston, Toronto, the Philippines, etc. In November 2016, Oracle acquired Company for a sum of US$9.3 billion, transforming the company into Oracle NetSuite Business Unit. After the acquisition, the founder and CEO Evan Goldberg became the President of the Oracle NetSuite Business Unit.
The Company’s expansion included some major acquisitions. Some of the NetSuite’s acquired companies include OpenAir (2008), QuickArrow (2009), Retail Anywhere (2013), TribeHR (2013), LightCMS (2013), Venda (2014), eBizNET Solutions (2014), Bronto Software (2015), and Monexa (2015), etc.
NetSuite is known for custom development of software for its clients on basis of their needs. The products by NetSuite are able to manage management reporting, human resources management, accounting, billing, payroll accounting, sales tools, etc. The cloud support for all the software extends the scope of the NetSuite software.

The Founder

Evan Goldberg is the founder of NetSuite Inc. He is a Harvard graduate having a degree in Computer Science. Goldberg started his career at Oracle as a member of the database team at the company. He met the future investor for NetSuite, Larry Ellison at Oracle, as he was one of the interviewers for Goldberg. After switching to various roles in Oracle, he became the vice president role at Oracle for the launch of mBed Software.
While working at Oracle, Goldberg had already developed the idea of NetSuite. He left his job at Oracle in 1995 to found a website development company. Though the company failed to make any mark, it helped Goldberg grow as an entrepreneur. NetSuite was his next venture, and Larry Ellison also showed his interest in the same. He invested $2000 in the company, and they founded NetSuite as NetLedger in 1998.
Goldberg served NetSuite as the CEO from the beginning, and in 2016, after Oracle acquired the company, he became the President of the newly formed Oracle NetSuite Business Unit.

Snowflake Inc

Snowflake Inc – An Eight Years Old Cloud Computing Company to top the Forbes Cloud 100 List

Cloud Computing in today’s era is a very promising field to both launch a business and get employed. Data storage based on cloud computing has escalated first and it makes access centralized for big enterprises as well as for individuals. Snowflake Inc is a very successful company in the sector of cloud computing-based data warehousing. Benoit Dageville along with Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski formed the company in July 2012. The company, however, was in stealth mode for two years and was officially launched in 2014. Currently, the company provides cloud-based data storage services and runs on Google Cloud Platform since 2019.

About Snowflake Inc

Benoit along with the other co-founders worked from scratch to build a data platform that will harness the power of cloud storage. The company claims that its platform leverages the two most important elements of the general cloud platform,i.e., elasticity and performance to develop a more flexible product. Snowflake makes sure that the customers can share data both in and out of their organization with the utmost security and without actually copying or moving the data.

Snowflake Inc
Image Source: siliconangle.com

The platform of Snowflake is used by many renowned companies including Adobe, Overstock, Capital One, etc. Over the years, the company has expanded on international grounds and currently, it has more than 1300 partners helping to strengthen the presence of Snowflake Inc. According to the statistics of last year, it had 3,400 active customers in 2020.

The Beginning of Snowflake Inc

Benoit and Thierry knew each other before co-founding Snowflake as they were colleagues while working for Oracle. Back in 2012, Benoit and Thierry discussed how the development of Hadoop will bring change in scenarios for processing large datasets. It was most likely to make the work of Benoit and Thierry obsolete that they were doing in Oracle. So, these led both the co-founders of Snowflake to think about the future and how big data was gradually taking over the data storage service sector. Benoit also realized that even Hadoop is having a few shortcomings like missing key features and overall less efficient. This led to the idea of building a new platform that would overcome both the shortcomings of Hadoop and data warehouses back then.

So, Benoit, Thierry, and Marcin started working on this new data platform from zero and were finally successful in developing it. The system that they created ran ten times faster as compared to any other data storage platform back then for the same cost. After they created the product, they gradually moved forward to the next step and founded Snowflake Inc. The company was named Snowflake because all the co-founders have a love for winter sports. Though the product was successfully developed in 2012, it was two years later that the company was launched publicly by Bob Muglia. In 2015, the product was eventually available and 80 organizations used it back then.

Success of Snowflake

Snowflake has always been one of the top companies in the data storage sector to continuously evolve their product. They are well known for their work culture and innovation that has kept them in business with a strong ground. When the product was developed in 2012, the co-founders started looking for investors and it was a bit difficult to convince people how a data storage platform will evolve in the future and why their system was superior. But, both Benoit and Thierry had a professional background which strengthened their game of networking. So, in August 2012 the company was successful in raising $5 million in Series A funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures.

After it came out of stealth mode in 2014, the company raised another $26 million followed by $45 million in 2015. The next two years were followed by raising a huge amount of money and in 2018 the company’s net valuation became $1.5 billion. Snowflake reached unparalleled heights as it gained unicorn status only after four years of the official launch. Last year, the company became public via an IPO and raised $3.4 billion.

Due to its innovative products, Snowflake has been the recipient of multiple awards and honors including “Cool Vendor” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, acquired the first position at the 2015 Strata + Hadoop World startup competition, ranked No. 1 on LinkedIn’s 2019 U.S, etc.

The Founders

Snowflake Inc Founders
Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Żukowski
Image Source: twitter.com, qconsf.com, and cwi.nl

Benoit Dageville is a French computer scientist who started his career at Bull Information Systems. Before co-founding Snowflake Inc, he worked at Oracle for more than fifteen years. Thierry Cruanes is also a computer scientist who worked at two leading companies, IBM and Oracle before developing Snowflake. Marcin Zukowski also has a very impressive professional career which includes working in multiple companies like Microsoft, Google, CWI, Actian Corporation, etc. Apart from co-founding Snowflake, he also founded Vectorwise.

Arista Networks

Arista Networks – An American company Pioneering in Cloud Networking Solutions since 2004

Arista Networks is famous for providing cognitive cloud networking solutions for large data centers, high-performance computing centers, and high-frequency trading environments. The company is based in Santa Clara, California and it offers a wide range of products and solutions from cloud networking to telemetry and analytics. Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, and Kenneth Duda co-founded Arista Networks in 2004. The founders came from a background with rich experience in semiconductor and hardware design.

Introduction to Arista Networks

Arista Networks provides a highly efficient networking solution to big data centers as the products include an array of Ethernet speeds from 10 to 400 gigabits per second. The platform of Arista is also made highly secure with CloudVision and Arista EOS (Linux-based network operating system) which is installed in all Arista products. Apart from the highly experienced co-founders of Arista, the current President and CEO of the company is Jayshree Ullal who also has a luminous career history. Arista is very famous around the world for picking up a team of intellectuals who have a rich professional history thus operated by a team of visionaries. The company went public in 2014 and is listed as ANET in NYSE.

Arista Networks
Image Source: fortune.com

Founding History of Arista Networks

As mentioned earlier, all the founders are from an industrial background as they were associated with large enterprises before co-founding Arista Networks. Andy Bechtolsheim co-founded Sun Microsystems back in 1982 and he served as the chief hardware designer of the company. Andy, along with David, co-founded a new company called Granite Systems in 1995 where they started developing Gigabit Ethernet products. After a year, the company was acquired by Cisco Systems. After a few years, Andy and David again opened up a new start-up called Kealia but again it was acquired by Sun Microsystems.

After this acquisition, David and Andy worked at Cisco in executive positions and along with Kennetth Duda. Kennetth Duda was the first employee of Granite Systems and that’s how he met the other two co-founders. They successfully developed a product line for the Cisco company called Catalyst and decided to establish their own company in 2004 which is currently known as Arista Networks. Jayshree Ullal, the current CEO of the company is also an ex-employee of Cisco who worked there for fifteen years. From 2014, there have been several differences followed by filing lawsuits between Cisco and Arista and the latter agreed to $400 million as a part of the settlement.

Customers and Acquisitions

Arista’s customers mainly include big enterprises around the globe that require highly efficient and fast networking platforms. Currently, Arista has many big customers who are in the list of Fortune 500 companies. Arista delivers its products across the data centers and campus with routing and software solutions in order to monitor and be responsive globally. There are around 7,000 customers worldwide served by Arista Networks on a daily basis.

Arista Networks
Image Source: arista.com

Arista Networks have acquired quite a few companies in the last few years. It’s latest acquisition is Awake Security which is a network detection and response platform that uses AI to prevent both internal and external threats. Along with Awake Security, the company also acquired Big Switch Networks last year. This acquisition led to the availability of DANZ Monitoring Fabric, a network observability software across all switching networks of Arista. In 2018, the company acquired Mojo Networks which provides Arista with Wifi solutions for networks across campus and enterprise. Arista also acquired Metamako in 2018 which augments Arista’s low latency platforms.

The Founders of Arista Networks

Andy Bechtolsheim is currently serving as the Chairman and the Chief Development Officer of Arista Networks. Previously, he worked at Sun Microsystems where he was in charge of next generation server, storage, and network architectures. Andy is a computer engineer who went to Carnegie Mellon University and received his doctorate from Stanford University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

After co-founding Arista Networks, David Cheriton co-founded a couple of more companies like Apstra Inc and BrainofT Inc. He received his bachelor’s degree from University of British Columbia and his masters and doctorate from the University of Waterloo. Currently, he is a computer science professor at Stanford University.

Kenneth Duda is the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Software Engineering at Arista Networks. He also worked as the CTO of There.com where he built a real-time 3D distributed system. Kenneth went to MIT where he graduated in three different engineering courses.