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Inspur

Inspur – The Third Largest Server Providers In The World.

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There have been times when many things were considered impossible, like having a personal computer in every household or people walking and talking on the phone at the same time. And, looking at the past twenty years, these have been the most amazing years for the IT industry, as in those two decades we have moved from PCs to laptops, from landlines to smartphones, and multiple people are able to work on the same project on the cloud without being at the same place. Cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence are the current hot topics, and companies working on them are doing the most innovative work of all. Inspur Group Co. Ltd. is one such company that is using its innovative ideas to improve the cloud and server technologies to achieve excellence.

About the Company

Inspur or the Inspur Group is the cloud computing and big data IT conglomerate that has been in the industry for the past 77 years. It was founded as Langchao but had a name change in 2006 with the name Inspur. The company belongs to the IT industry working on computer hardware, software, and servers. The major products by the company include cloud computing, servers, storage, artificial intelligence, etc. Venezolana de Industria Tecnológica, C.A. is one of the subsidiaries of company, and its various working divisions are Inspur Information, Inspur Software, Inspur International and Huaguang Optoelectronics. The company is a publically traded company and trades on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. As per the 2015 records, the company made revenues worth 63.2 billion yuan for FY2015.

Inspur
Image source: wikimedia.org

The Founding

Inspur Group was founded in 1945 in Shandong, China, and has its headquarters based in the same city. The company has four wings, i.e., Inspur Information, Inspur Software, Inspur International, and Inspur Huaguang, which works on technologies like cloud data centre, cloud services & big data, smart city, and smart enterprises. Though the company is 77 years old, it started its technology journey 40 years ago.

Inspur built China’s first PC in 1983. It also started to make servers in the early 90s, where it released a series of computers for China and the international market. In 1993, the company built China’s first micro-server. Later, in 2005, the company received investments from Microsoft as well as signed a contract with VMware to work on the emerging cloud computing technology. In the same year, the company also won the top prize in the “Information Industry Major Technological Invention Award”. The company also acquired Qimonda AG’s research division in 2009 for a sum of around US$4 million.

Inspur introduced China’s first 32-socket high-end fault-tolerant computer in 2011 and became the world’s fifth company to make such computers independently. In 2015, the company recorded annual revenues worth 63.2 billion yuan. It also joined multiple open computing organizations as a member, including SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (2014), OpenStack (2014), OCP Open Compute Project ( and 2017), ODCC (Open Data Center Committee), etc. The major clients of the company include big-name enterprises and many governments belonging to more than 100 countries and regions.

The CEO at Inspur

Sun Pishu is the current CEO of Inspur. He is a native of Shandog Province and was born in 1962. Sun Pishu has been working with Inspur since the time it was called Langchao. In 1996, he became the General Manager and the next year, the Deputy Routine President of Langchao Group. Sun Pishu also served the company as the Vice President for a long time. It is Sun Pishu’s leadership that the company has become the number one server provider in China and number third in the world.

lumen technologies

Lumen Technologies – Story of a Fortune 500 Company Which is a Leading Brand in the Telecommunication Sector.

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Lumen Technologies is a famous American telecommunication company with headquarters in Monroe, Louisiana, US. The history of the company dates back to 1930 when Oak Ridge Telephone Company was founded. In due course of time and change in ownerships and several mergers, Lumen Technologies today is one of the Fortune 500 companies. It is also a member of the S & P 500 index. The main services provided by the company are cloud security, multi-cloud management, SaaS app, big data as a service, network, and many more. Lumen serves both national and international clients from North and Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East.

Oak Ridge Telephone Company

Tracing back the history of Lumen Technologies leads us to its predecessor Oak Ridge Telephone Company. In 1930, the owner of the company, F. E. Hogan sold the company to William Clarke and Marie Williams. The acquisition was closed for $500. In 1946, the ownership of the company was passed down to Clarke McRae Williams as a wedding gift. After one year, Clarke William purchased the Marion Telephone Company and it became the foundation of the company followed by several other acquisitions. As the ownership was passed on to William’s son, it remained a family-operated business until 1968.

As the company started expanding, in 1967 Oak Ridge provided 10,000 access lines in 3 states. In the same year, the company was incorporated as Central Telephone and Electronics to which Clarke M. Williams became the President. In the early 1970s, the company eventually moved its headquarters to Monroe. A lot of changes took place in the next two decades including renaming the company Century Telephone Enterprises Inc. In 1978, the company started trading publicly under the symbol CTL. During the early recession in the 1980s, the company suffered losses and the stock value declined to half. It recovered again in early 1985 and eventually started making a profit. In 1999, the company again changed its name to CenturyTel Inc.

lumen technologies
Image source: channelpro.co

Lumen Technologies in the 21st century

CenturyTel started acquiring a series of companies in 2000. Some of them include GTE lines in Arkansas and Missouri by partnering with Spectra Communications. It also acquired several lines from Verizon and partnered with Telephone USA of Wisconsin. The company acquired CSW Net in 2001, Digital Teleport, and SkyComm International (acquired half of the company) in 2003. CenturyTel also established several partnerships with leading companies in the communication sector like EchoStar Communications Corporation and Cingular Wireless.

With acquisitions of several lines and operating in 23 states, CenturyTel acquired Embarq in 2008 which made it the third-largest landline provider in Pennsylvania. The deal was closed for $6 billion. Embarq, when acquired, already operated in 18 states including Ohio, Nevada, Florida, and North Carolina. The newly merged company was named Century Link and the CEO of CenturyTel retained the position in the new company till 2018. In 2010, CenturyLink became a part of another big merger as it acquired Qwest in a stock-for-stock transaction. After acquiring Qwest, CenturyLink became the third largest telecommunication company in the US.

Acquisitions

After the two big mergers, respectively with Embarq and Qwest, the company also acquired many other businesses in the past few years. In 2011, it acquired Savvis which is an IT company and a global provider of cloud infrastructure. After this acquisition, CenturyLink rolled out an integrated cloud services suite called Savvisdirect. In 2012, the company acquired the ITO division of Ciber followed by AppFog, a Platform as a Service in 2013. CenturyLink also acquired a company called Tier 3 that mainly provided infrastructure as a service. Some of the other companies acquired by CenturyLink are DataGardens, Cognilytics, netAura, Edison, Streamroot, etc. Last year, the company announced that it is once again rebranding its name and this time it was Lumen Technologies.

Jeff Storey – CEO of Lumen Technologies

Jeff Storey has rich career experience in the telecommunication sector. He studied at Northeastern State University followed by Southern Methodist University where he got his master’s in the telecommunication system. He started working at Cox Communications followed by serving as the President and CEO of WilTel Communications. Jeff became the CEO of Lumen Technologies in 2018.