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J2 Global

J2 Global – A Renowned Digital Media And Cloud Computing Company In The US.

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Digital media has shown unbound opportunities in the 21st century especially now that every nation wants to go digital. And, in recent years, the potential of cloud platforms and their demand has increased rapidly. J2 Global is a company that has established itself in the digital media and cloud computing industry. The company has over 4,000 employees and its total assets sum up to nearly $3.5 billion. J2 Global is based in Los Angeles, California and it mainly provides internet services through Business Cloud Services and Digital Media.

About J2 Global

J2 Global is a publicly traded tech company that was founded in December 1995. Jaye Muller and Jack Reiley co-founded J2 Globals. The company has two business divisions, namely, Business Cloud Services and Digital Media Division (Ziff Davis). There are several firms under the business cloud division of the company. Some of them are eVoice, UnityFax, Excel Micro, VIPRE, etc. And, the digital media division of the company includes brands like PC Magazine, Everyday Health, IGN.com, and Mashable. J2 Global has also been the recipient of many prestigious awards. In 2012, the company was recognized in the InformationWeek 500 list of technology companies. Next year, J2 Global was featured in the Forbes list (rank 40) of America’s Best Small Companies.

J2 Global
Image source: media.bizj.us

The Idea Behind J2 Global

The idea of founding J2 Global came from Jaye Muller who was an established musician hailing from East Berlin. He also studied electronics which was another interest of his apart from music. As a musician, Muller traveled a lot and he needed to change hotels almost every day. This created an inconvenience for Muller as he received the fax and voice mails one or two days late and his privacy was compromised as the hotel staff read or listened to his confidential messages. So, when he started researching for any commercial service or product that would help him receive his day-to-day voice mails and faxes on a personal device, he found none. This is when he along with Reiley decided to open a business and fill the void.

Initially, Muller started creating a rough plan for an email-based retrieval system for receiving and sending voice mail and faxes. He was working with a telecommunication company based in Australia to develop the prototype. In 1995 Jaye Muller and Jack Reiley founded the company J2 Global which back then was known as JFax.com. In 2000, the company’s name was changed to J2 Global Communications and again in December 2011, it was changed to J2 Global.

Major Events Of The Company

With the advent of the 21st century, J2 decided to expand the company through some acquisitions. So, in 2000, J2 acquired SureTalk.com, a California-based company that offered online messaging services. It also acquired common stocks for TimeShift which is a web-based technology company. The same year, J2 acquired one of its biggest market rivals, eFax, a company that provided free internet faxing service. Initially, when the company was launched it operated only with the business cloud division and in 2012 the digital media division was launched. This new division was created after the acquisition of a digital publisher called Zeff Davis Inc. Recently, it has acquired many companies that include IGN Entertainment, MetroFax, Backup Connect BV, Business Critical Software, SaferVPN, etc. J2 currently has a global network across more than 50 countries.

About The Founders

Jaye Muller is a famous German musician and a successful entrepreneur who co-founded J2 Global with Jack Reiley. In 1995, he established J2 Global to eradicate the problem of receiving delayed faxes and voice mails. He remained an active part of the company till 2004 and a shareholder till 2016. Before coming into the internet business, he released two solo albums but put his music career on hold for some time as he exclusively focused on J2.

Jack Reiley also comes from a musical background as he was a songwriter, record producer, and disc jockey. Apart from co-writing songs, Reiley also released a solo album called Western Justice. He passed away in April 2015.

RingCentral

RingCentral – The Leading Cloud-based Communications Solutions Provider.

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An uninterrupted communication system is a basic requirement for the success of a business. And when you have to deal with international clients, it becomes really necessary to set up a communication system which allows you to have a smooth conversation with the client without making any extra efforts. The American company RingCentral is one of the best business communication services providers which is one of the leaders of the field. When it comes to seamless communication lines for their business, RingCentral is the first choice of most businesses.

About The Company

RingCentral is an American company providing cloud-based communication SAAS services to businesses. The company was founded in 1999, and its headquarters is based in Belmont, California, U.S. It is a publicly traded company and trades as an RNG on New York Stock Exchange. The company had its first IPO in 2013. The company specializes in cloud computing-based business phone systems, and RingCentral Office, RingCentral Mobile, RingCentral Fax are some of its popular products. The company has also launched RingCentral Professional offering services like universal telephone numbers, voice mail, web conferencing, etc., through a dedicated app for both iOS and Android.
Apart from the US, the company has established offices in countries like Denver, Toronto, London, Paris, Singapore, Manila, etc. As of 2019, the company had employed 2,363 people and made annual revenues worth $902.8 million.

Founding RingCentral

Vlad Shmunis and Vlad Vendrow founded RingCentral in 1999 when they sold their previous business RingZero Systems to Motorola. Vlad Shmunis was the founder, and the CEO of RingZero, whereas, Vlad Vendrow worked as the Director of Engineering at RingZero. The company provided communication services to businesses that worked on Microsoft Windows. After they sold the company to Motorola they founded the company in 1999, this time, providing similar services as of RingZero, but using the emerging cloud technology. As the way of doing business was changing with the birth of new technologies, the two founders thought of using those new technologies for the benefit of the business.
RingCentral launched its first cloud phone system in 2003. Though the company was founded in 1999 but received its first capital investment in 2006 through a round of funding, Sequoia and Khosla Ventures being the major investors. In 2009, the company established its services in the UK, and in 2012, the company partnered with AT&T. The next year, RingCentral went public on NYSE, raising $39.8 million in the IPO. The company also partnered with UK’s BT in 2014.
In 2015, Company acquired Glip, and in 2018, it took over the operations of Dimelo, followed by the acquisition of Connect First. The company, in partnership with Avaya, launched the Avaya Cloud Office application in 2020. The same year it also introduced RingCentral Video, a video conferencing product for businesses, and acquired DeepAffects. The next year, Company acquired Kindite.
As per the records, RingCentral is providing its services to 350,000 businesses globally. The company is also one of the fastest-growing cloud-based communication services providers. In fact, Synergy Research ranked RingCentral number one cloud communications solutions in 2017.

RingCentral
Image source: businesswire.com

The Founders Of RingCentral

Vlad Shmunis, along with Vlad Vendrow, founded RingCentral in 1999. Shmunis is also serving the company as the CEO. He went to San Francisco State University, where he earned a bachelor’s as well as a master’s degree in computer science. Shmunis has been in the software industry for more than thirty years. Before founding RingCentral, he has handled prominent positions in companies like Ampex Corporation and had founded another communication system company named RingZero Systems.
On the other hand, Vlad Vendrow is serving the company as the CTO. He has got a master’s degree in computer science and applied mathematics from Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University in Russia. Before founding the company, he worked as the Director of Engineering at RingZero. Vendrow has been granted over 40 patents in the field of unified communications and cloud services. He is also credited for the success of the RingCentral cloud phone solution.

BMC Software

BMC Software – An American Software Company Founded By Former Shell Oil Employees.

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BMC Software is an American company and it is one of the leading developers and providers of independent system software. The company’s headquarters is based in Houston, Texas, and has several offices both in the state and overseas. BMC Software operates worldwide and some major markets include Tel Aviv, Israel, Germany, France, Indian, and Singapore.

The company mainly offers Software as a Service (SaaS) and on-premise software and services. It has a great impact on today’s cloud computing and IT management and automation sector. BMC Software is a privately held company and it generates annual revenue of more than $2 billion. It has around 6,000 employees and made many significant acquisitions between 1994 and 2000.

The Founding Story of BMC Software

The three founders of BMC Software are Scott Boulette, John Moores, and Dan Cloer. All three co-founders were former employees of Shell Oil when they started working on this new project. They kept the name of the company after the initials of their surname. Moore got the idea of developing a new software when he worked as a programmer with Shell Oil. During those days, the software that dominated the market and business was mainly written for IBM mainframes. Moores wanted to develop a more efficient version of this software that would compress data streams and speed up the compression process.

He was successful in building the software and he named it 3270 Optimizer. This was the first product of BMC Software and to make this a huge success, Moores hired the best software developers and paid them generous packages. But this is also one of the reasons why profit margin was very low for the company. But, Moores brought in a very powerful team and within few years with innovative marketing methods, it started catching the interest of many venture capitalists.

BMC Software
Image source: wikimedia.org

Growth and Expansion

In 1982, a venture capitalist called Jacqueline Morby took interest in the company and gave Moores some direction on how to increase the profit. After four years, BMC started making 20 percent profit of the annual revenue and 30 percent of its total customers were international clients. In 1988, BMC Software announced its IPO and it was listed on NASDAQ. The business became very profitable and by the next year, the sale jumped from $93 million to $139.5 million.

During this time, BMC Software hopped into an acquiring spree and started with Trimar Software Systems Ltd and Trimar Software International Ltd. In 1991, the company acquired Integrity Solutions followed by Patrol Software in 1994. In 1996, it acquired two companies, namely, HawkNet and PEER Networks but the price was not revealed. In 1997, it acquired Data tools and in 1998 bought Boole & Babbage and BGS Systems. It acquired New Dimension Software in 1999 and Optisystems in 2000.

Privatization

In 2013, BMC Software announced that it was selling the company to a group of major private equity investments groups. The deal was closed at $6.9 billion. In September 2013, the process was finally complete and BMC became a privately held company. In 2018, BMC was acquired by a global investment firm, KKR & Co Inc.

John Moores – The Mastermind Behind BMC Software

John Moores is a famous American entrepreneur and philanthropist who is well-known as the founder of BMC Software. He went to Texas A&M University but dropped out and became a programmer at IBM. Later he went to the University of Houston and completed his bachelor’s degree in economics. Apart from co-founding BMC Software, he was also the lead venture capital financier for Peregrine Systems. After Moores founded BMC Software in 1980 he was the CEO of the company till 1987.

Ayman Sayed – CEO

In 2019, Ayman Sayed became the new president and CEO of the company. Before joining BMC Software, Ayman served as the president and CPO at a Fortune 500 company called CA Technologies. He also has prior work experience at Cisco Systems where he was given the position of senior vice president.

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.

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.

NetSuite

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

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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.