Your Tech Story

Cloud Computing Company

Appian Corporation

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

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

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.

OVHcloud

OVHcloud – Journey Of Cloud Computing Started By A 24-Year Old Octave Klaba.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

OVHcloud is a French cloud computing company that was founded in 1999. Octave Klaba is the founder and Chairman of OVH and the current CEO of the company is Michel Paulin. OVHcloud offers various cloud-based services like web hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, enterprise solutions, and public and private cloud. Being a French company, it initially expanded to other European countries but in recent years its main focus has been North America and the US. Unfortunately, in 2021 the company suffered huge losses due to a fire in its Strasbourg data center. The company reported estimated damage of approximately €105 million.

Early Days

Octave Klaba at the age of 24 decided to begin his entrepreneurial journey with OVHcloud. The idea of founding a cloud computing startup strikes his mind when he realized France is in sheer need of web hosting. He didn’t have any initial capital to invest so he took support from his close friends and family. He got support from his three family members and was able to borrow 25,000 francs with which he started the company.

Web hosting was the then-new concept in France so initially, no one believed in what he was doing. But it didn’t stop Klaba from renting ten servers from a provider in Paris and starting his project. The business started growing slowly as in 2000 the company had 20 active servers and it also received entitlements for .fr and .be domain names. The net profit OVH was making was fully reinvested in adding new servers. Eventually, Klaba’s brother, Miroslaw joined the venture to help him out.

OVHcloud
Image source: www.iteuropa.com

Expansion

Entering a new decade, OVH was starting to land more and more customers. It also opened the company’s first data center in Paris but soon it outgrew the space. Also, for easy maintenance of the servers, OVH decided to make in-house casings. In 2002, the company opened a new data center in Paris and built its first sever called the Greenbox. Until 2003, OVH was doing all the operational work from leased data centers. But the company opened its first wholly-owned data center in 2003 and it was a 3,000 square meter building. The company didn’t only own a data center but became one of the first cloud-hosting companies to use water-based cooling technology in a data center. In 2004, the company expanded to Poland and Spain and the old servers in the company were retro-fitted with water cooling systems.

OVH expanded to the Roubaix Valley in 2005 and expanded to Germany in the next year. By the end of 2006, OVH has 12,000 active servers and also deployed advanced network infrastructure. OVH expanded to Italy, Portugal, and the UK in 2008 followed by opening five new subsidiaries in Ireland, Netherlands, Lithuania, Czech Republic, and Finland. By 2010, the company had more than 350 employees and it invested around €10 Million in R&D cloud. The company’s plan to enter the American market started in 2012 with the aim to build the world’s largest data center in Canada. After a funding round in 2016, the value of OVH surpassed the $1 billion mark. In 2017 it expanded to the US market after the acquisition of vCloud Air from VMware. OVH also became a publicly-traded company in 2021 and it is listed on the Paris Stock Exchange.

About the Founder

Octave Klaba is the founder and Chairman of the world’s one of the most successful cloud computing companies. He is originally from Poland but he moved to France when he was sixteen. Being passionate about computer science from an early age, he graduated from ICAM Lille with a computer science degree. After he graduated, his main focus was founding OVHcloud and he didn’t work for any other companies.

Rackspace Technology

Rackspace Technology – Helping Business Grow By Managing Cloud For Them.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Cloud computing is the field that has contributed a lot to the IT industry. In fact, the very technology is the basis of many leading companies and their success. Though cloud computing has been there for a while now, and many have adopted it for their businesses. But there are still many struggling to adapt to the rapidly changing environment and requirements for cloud computing. To solve these issues for businesses, Rackspace Technology came with its cloud computing platforms and management tools. For the past more than twenty years, the company has not only grown itself but has helped its client grow as well.
Rackspace is mainly known for its private cloud environment named OpenStack. OpenStack is a reliable cloud environment based on Red Hat, which has been built to provide affordable deployment, updating, and support for cloud solutions to companies.

About Rackspace Technology

RackSpace is twenty-three years old American Cloud-computing company, providing multi-cloud solutions across applications, data, security, and infrastructure. The company headquarters is based in San Antonio, Texas, U.S., serving customers all around the world. The company has 7,200 employees working for it in its various offices established globally. Apart from its headquarters in Texas, the company has offices in countries like the U.K., Dubai, India, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, etc. RackSpace has also established its data centres in Virginia, the UK, Chicago, Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, and Kansas City. It is a publically traded company and trades on the NASDAQ market with ticker RXT. As of 2019, the company made annual revenues worth US$2+ billion.

Rackspace Technology
Image source: www.rackspace.com

The Back Story

The founding team of RackSpace included Richard Yoo, Dirk Elmendorf, Patrick Condon, Morris Miller and Graham Weston. When cloud technology was a new and emerging field, well-established companies got easily comfortable with it. But the small and mid-size firms found it difficult to adapt to cloud computing and were lagging behind. The main reason behind the issue was that the companies really don’t know about cloud computing or were unaware of how to use it for their businesses. This way, from starting a business of application development, the founders ended up thinking of building an outsourcing company for hosting and managing the cloud services for businesses.

Richard Yoo as its CEO, all five founders founded RackSpace Technology in October 1998. From the beginning of the company, it was entirely focused on better services and support for its customers. The company received its first capital investment through a round of funding in March 2000, Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital being the major investors.
The unique idea behind the company helped it grow really fast, but alongside the facilities and growth opportunities for the employees also won 32nd place for RackSpace in Fortune’s “Top 100 Best Companies to Work For 2008”. The company was listed in the same again in 2011 and 2013. In 2008, the company went public on New York Stock Exchange and raised $187.5 million in its first IPO.
RackSpace worked independently for 18 years, and in 2016, Apollo Global Management announced that it will be buying RackSpace for a sum of $4.3 billion. The acquisition was completed in November of the same year, and RackSpace stopped trading on NYSE. In 2020, the company went public again, this time on the NASDAQ market with the symbol RXT.
In its more than twenty years of journey, RackSpace made some acquisitions that helped in its rapid growth. The companies acquired by RackSpace include Webmail.us (2007), Jungle Disk (2008), SliceHost (2008), SharePoint911 (2012), TriCore Solutions (2017), Datapipe (2017), RelationEdge (2018), Onica (2019), etc.

The Founder/CEO

Kevin M. Jones is the current CEO at RackSpace Technology. He is one of the leading business people in the field and has over thirty years of experience in technology services. Kevin went to James Madison University and earned a BBA degree. He is also a Certified Management Accountant.
Before becoming the CEO at RackSpace, Kevin has handled many leadership roles at various leading technology companies. He has served as the Vice President of HP’s Enterprise Services (the Asia Pacific and Japan). He was also the Vice President at EDS and Chief Customer and Sales Officer at Dell. At DXC Technology (DXC), Kevin worked as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Americas region. He was also the CEO at MV Transportation. In April 2019, Kevin joined RackSpace as the Director and the CEO.

NetSuite

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

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

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.