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Google Drops Plans to Build Cloud-Computing Service for China

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China has been facing a lot of criticism in recent months for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several countries have openly called out the country for its relaxed stand, which led to the pandemic’s spread around the world. Certain countries are also now working on moving their manufacturing out of China. India too has decided to ban several Chinese apps due to border skirmishes between the two near the Nepal border. However, the most recent tech company to pull out of a Chinese partnership is none other than Google. Here’s a look at why the tech giant has abandoned plans to launch a cloud-computing platform for China.

Also Read: SnapLogic : One of the “Coolest” Cloud Platform Companies

Google Pulls Out

As per a report by Bloomberg, this will be the second project that Google scrapped with ties to China. In 2018, Google announced plans to build a search product name Dragonfly for China. However, amidst wide-spread criticism, the company dropped the high-profile project in December 2018. The new project, which goes by the codename Isolated Region, was to help countries with strict data laws, host cloud-computing services. The application would help such countries control the data flow within their borders. Therefore, the project was not a part of Google’s central cloud infrastructure but a different network. The plan was to help China oversee the flow of data across its borders while maintaining absolute privacy. 

Second Time Unlucky

The product was Google’s second attempt at establishing a high-profile partnership with China. Sources are unsure of whether the completed project would have served as a replacement to G Suite. However, rumors regarding such a product first came out in 2018. As per Bloomberg, conversations began as China needed a cloud service that would help them maintain and ensure privacy standards for the flow of data within and outside the country. When tensions between the US and China rose in January 2019, the company momentarily paused the project’s development. Existing privacy concerns and Trump’s trade war plans with China halted the project for a few months, and Google moved its focus to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. 

Pulling the Plug

After the brief halt, Google pulled the plug on the project in May of this year. The reason for the same was partly due to the worsening of ties between the US and China, among other things. As per the company’s statement, the decision came as a result of input from stakeholders in Europe, and from around the world. Google also said that Isolated Region was one of the approaches they took to addressing the world’s cloud technology needs. Talks with other countries proved to them that their paths would be better-suited, leading to the scrapping of the initial plan. The company also stated that they do not offer cloud services within China, and had no plans to offer them in the near future. 

Project Isolated Region

Project Isolated Region was not just to help countries with censoring laws, but to serve ones with strict privacy laws. Google also seems to have eyes on the European Union, which is known for its strong privacy policies. By providing insight over the flow and storage of data to government authorities, Google plans on establishing a service in an EU nation. The project would help solve issues regarding the 2018 American law, Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act. This law makes it harder for companies to deny government data reports when storing large volumes of data offshore. Since the cloud-computing project involved hundreds of employees from around the world, the plan to scrap it is a major shift in policy.

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NetApp – Surviving The Dot-Com Burst And Becoming One Of The Biggest Data Management Companies

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The cloud computing services have majorly developed in the past few years. Many Indian start-ups have also been emerging. But, more importantly, Indians are acquiring powerful positions in many top tech companies around the world. One of the most established Indian, George Kurian is the current CEO of the company, NetApp.

NetApp is a California based company founded in 1992. The company’s main products are cloud computing, cloud storage, and data management. David Hitz, James Lau, and Michael Malcolm founded the company twenty-eight years ago. In 2015, George Kurian became the CEO of the company.

About the Founders

David went to Annandale High School but he dropped out. Becoming a Silicon Valley icon or establishing a billion-dollar company, none was present in the bucket list of David. But, somehow he became the founder of one of the best companies in the industry of cloud computing.

After graduating from Princeton University, David started working at MIPS Technologies. David’s main role in the companies was as a Software Engineer. In April 1992, he co-founded NetApp and became the Executive VP of Engineering. In 2000, David became the Chairman of the Hitz Foundation.

James went to City College of San Francisco and Heald College- San Francisco. He worked at HP Enterprise Services for more than thirteen years. Currently, he is the System Engineer of NetApp.

Early History

In 1992, when the company was founded it was named Network Appliance, Inc. After a couple of years, the company received venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital. Within three years of its establishment, that is, in 1995 the company filed its first IPO. The company started growing rapidly from the very beginning.

Unexpected Success

In 1997, the company acquired Internet Middleware for $10.5 million. The company stood strong during the time of dot-cot burst and emerged out of it even stronger. A lot of companies suffered huge losses during this boom and a few were even dissolved. But, from 1999 through 2001, NetApp’s annual revenue turned up to $1 billion.

The Key to Success

With the evolution of the start-up culture throughout the world and especially India, criticism arises simultaneously. The most important question is whether a founder should step down and give control to the young entrepreneurs of today.

David, in one of his interviews, said that it is not about the 90s founders or current generation. When a company is built from scratch there might be times when the founders only focus on the remaining products. They don’t consider expanding harms the future of the company. We all know evolution is the key to survival. And, that’s the reason NetApp is still on track.

When the vision of a founder is limited they are expected to step down. But, it doesn’t necessarily mean all the founders will have limited vision.

Struggling Moments

David said there were two moments where they needed to hold their breath and be patient. First, when the first CEO of the company stepped down. David said he has the best management styles in the company. But, once the company started expanding with a lot of managers reporting to each other, he didn’t enjoy it anymore. Eventually, he moved to another company.

Well, the company might have survived the dot-com burst but it suffered major losses. During 2000, the price of the company’s stock fell from $150 to $10. And, that’s when he realized he should expand its territory in terms of products.

Success and Acquisitions

In 2004, NetApp acquired Spinnaker Networks for $300 million. The next year, NetApp acquired Alacritus for $11 million. In this year, the company also acquired Decru for security storage systems. The following years witnessed the acquisition of Topio, Onaro, Bycast, Akkori, Engenio and many more.

NetApp under George Kurian

George after joining the company has focused mainly on the new trends and products. He, in an interview, said that the product revenue has been increasing rapidly especially for the new products. The Asian market has also grown well in the last couple of years. Though the company is having a relatively small market share in Asia, it is capable of replacing some bigger companies.

The three biggest markets of NetApp are the UK, France, and Germany. NetApp’s latest acquisition was Cognigo.

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Fastly: How This Company with The Right Values is Growing at The Speed of Light

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Data is everywhere now thanks to the Internet Age. According to studies, the amount of total data collected doubles, every two years. Everything from our Internet history to our calendar schedule forms a part of digital data that is important. Research shows that by 2020, we will be producing 1.7 MB worth of data every second! So where does all this data go? Due to Hardware constraints, all computers and mobile phones come with a stipulated storage limit. Also, external hard drives we purchase also have stringent limits on how much space they have. So how do we store the massive amounts of data we create?

Why We Need Cloud Computing

We all want to retain those videos from our first college performance, and also need quick access to our work documents. How can we come up with a system that is secure and at the same time, large enough to store everything? Well, cloud computing has helped most people deal with their storage woes by providing huge amounts of space! Not only do you get to keep your precious memories, but you also get to do so without cluttering up your home.

All your information is locked away in a vault in the sky, so you can loop up baby pictures, and schedule appointments on the go. This time around, we are going to look at one of the fastest-growing cloud computing service providers in the world!

What is Fastly Inc

Fastly Inc.’s highly efficient edge cloud platform allows users access to an extremely fast content delivery network that helps them keep all their memories. Furthermore, the company also provides security services, video streaming, and load balancing. Headquartered at San Francisco, this American juggernaut has offices in New York, London, Portland, Tokyo, and Denver.

Founding Fastly

Artur Bergman founded Fastly in 2011 because he felt the need for a fast and efficient cloud computing service. Prior to founding Fastly, Bergman worked as the VTO of Wikia. Three years into its founding, Google paired up with them to offer users CDN services. This served as a huge boost to the company, which then grew at unprecedented rates.

Image Source – Twitter

So much so, that in 2017, the company launched its own edge cloud platform that supported a ton of new features. The same year, they acquired a Texas-based content delivery network named CDN Sumo. The company helps users extend and expand their existing cloud infrastructure using their network. Furthermore, the service also includes several features such as load balancing, image optimization, and video streaming.

Software Structure

The company’s software works on Varnish, which is an open-source HTTP accelerator. Since they use an open-source product, Bergman has also made it a point to give back to the open-source community. The company supports several non-profit projects such as Hackage, Drupal and DonorsChoose.org. Varnish became the platform for Fastly because it allowed them to reverse proxy and is highly customizable. The software designers always kept performance in mind and then scaled their applications using Varnish. The particular version of Varnish used by them is optimized for large applications, due to the presence of caches.

Giving Back to The Community

Bergman attributes his desire to give back to his raising in a feminist environment such as Sweden. Due to their smaller power distance culture; being inclusive was a way of life rather than a magnanimity. Bergman also believes that diverse teams improve the workspace environment leading to higher productivity. The more diverse the leadership, the easier it becomes to find and encourage diverse talents. This, in turn, makes it possible to create and design diverse products that change the world.

Company Values

Furthermore, Fastly takes both employee and customer satisfaction quite seriously. Since the company works on projects that help people, employees feel great about their work. More people are happy, meaning they genuinely want to look after their users, which makes for great customer engagement and satisfaction. Over 90 employees at Fastly, which constitutes 25% of their workforce, have been there for more than four years.

This proves without a doubt, how important the company views its internal policies and values. The company’s executive team has an almost equal number of men and women. Furthermore, more than 50 percent of their engineers fall into trans, people of color and LGBTQ communities.

Resounding Success

Fastly recently added another $75 million via Series D funding, making the total money hit $130 million! After the financing round, the company named ex-VP of Netsuite, Dan Miller, their CFO. Furthermore, the company recruited ex- Apple privacy strategist, and Mozilla’s security chief to their already impressive employee roster. The company is growing at over 300% year after years, with a team that has grown to over 450 employees now. While the company pushed 40 TB a day in 2012, the data limit per day now stands at 5 PT!

The company already has several high-profile customers such as Twitter, The Guardian, Pinterest, and Wayfair. The company also helped Stripe improve their checkout time by 80%, leading to even more popularity and goodwill within the industry. The company keeps growing from strength to strength having made $144 million in 2018, with revenue growing at 37.8%! Around the world, over 3 billion people see content that served via Fastly, and this is 75% of the world’s internet users. Sure enough, there might come a day, wherein every internet user receives content through a Fastly platform!

snaplogic

SnapLogic : One of the “Coolest” Cloud Platform Companies

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Another software company in the marketplace to deal with data integration is excelling in the field and satisfying millions of customers worldwide. The company provides clients with better and many efficient tools to connect applications and transfer data in a hassle-free way. Gaurav Dhillon’s company, SnapLogic was founded in 2006 and is majorly known for web data integration. After the internet has bathed the world with a new aura of possibilities, companies like SnapLogic had reached cloud eleven. The never-ending demand of cloud data sources, SaaS applications and most importantly, efficient data transfer gives a pictorial representation of the success of SnapLogic.

The Founder

SnapLogic was fully functional and became public from 2006. Before Dhillon created SnapLogic, he was already a founder of 2 more start-ups, including Informatica Corp and jaman.com.

Dhillon created Informatica, a software company in 1993 based in California, the United States with $75,000 provided to him by the National Institute of Health. He didn’t have many facilities then, so with this little amount of capital, he started the company in his garage. Informatica was quite a success, and it was acquired in 2015 for $5.3billion.

Snaplogic founder
Image Source: cbronline.com

Dhillon’s next start-up was Jaman.com, which was founded in 2005 in California as well. The website ceased all its operations in 2017. Jaman was a site that provided movie discovery sites and thus, let users download videos on demand.

SnapLogic

EAI stands for enterprise application integration, and this is what Dhillon’s interest lied upon. After Informatica emerged as one of the most successful start-ups in the world of EAI, Dhillon’s passion triggered to create more in this area. According to him, a lot of areas was unexplored in this field, and he buckled up to roll the stones.

So SnapLogic was created in 2006 after Dhillon himself invested in this business, and in 2009, he became the CEO of the company. The main focus of Dhillon was to reduce the problems the users faced with cloud computing. The company is based in San Mateo, California and serves throughout the world.

Success of SnapLogic

The first big news of SnapLogic was raising $2.3million in Series A funding in 2009. The prime investors were Andreessen Horowitz, Maples Investments, Brian McClendon (Google Engineering Vice President), Naval Ravikant and a few more. After the closing of this funding round, Dhillon was declared the CEO of the company, and he announced that the money will be invested in improving the DataFlow platform. The data integrating solution of SnapLogic turned out to be very useful for SaaS applications and websites, like SalesForce, Twitter, and SugarCRM, etc.

In 8th December 2010, Dhillon announced that the company has raised $10million in Series B funding, and new technologies have been incorporated in the products of SnapLogic, which is both time and cost-efficient. After this funding round, Dhillon planned to expand the business in the European market. One of the biggest success of SnapLogic was that it became the world’s first company to integrate data that existed both on-premise and in the cloud. This was followed by the launch of elastic integration in June 2013, which made application integration in the clouds even simpler. By the end of 2013, SnapLogic provided the users with 150 various data connectors for applications like SAP and Oracle.

On 10th December 2015, SnapLogic raised $37.5 million in the funding round led by Microsoft, Silver Lake Waterman, Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, and Triangle Peak Partners. At the end of this year, the net worth of SnapLogic turned out to be $96.3million. By this time, machine learning and artificial intelligence already started spreading like a wildfire in the tech market. Taking a note, the company made a very smart move by introducing the SnapLogic Integration Assistant, an AI-powered product of the company in May 2017. In this year, the company also raised $136.3 million from the existing investors.

SnapLogic Today

The latest and one of the biggest successes in the history of SnapLogic is Gartner naming the company (SnapLogic) as a leader in the Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) Magic Quadrant for four consecutive years. The fascinating performance of SnapLogic in data integration has driven the world crazy with more time-efficient and better ways to connect applications and integrate data.

Docker

Solomon Hykes : The Founder of Enterprise Container Platform, ‘Docker’

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Open-source is one technology that has helped developers to improve their software and lead it to the next level with the help of other developers, without even knowing them. This technology not only helps the main developer but also the other developers to grow their skills. WordPress being one of the biggest examples of such successful startup that has emerged mostly because it is open source and the community behind it. Soloman Hykes, also known as a French founder in Silicon Valley, is another startup owner, who made use of the open-source technology and established one of the biggest open-source development and deployment container providers, Docker.

Solomon Hykes was born to an American father and a French-Canadian mother in New York. But his family flew to France when he was four years old. He was introduced to computers when he was seven and instantly, became interested in coding. Hykes joined the Epitech School in 2001, where he started learning to programme. Alongside his studies, he got a job at a nearby cyber cafe, where he practised coding and ran the cafe’s servers. During this time, he also spent six months at the University of California, San Diego, and even, worked for a French movie company in Los Angeles.

In 2006, he graduated as a computer engineer and bagged a job at a computer security company. But there was something else he wanted to do. Only two years after starting his first job, in 2008, Hykes resigned to start a company of his own, along with Sébastien Pahl, a fellow student from Epitech. The two named the company as dotCloud, with which the two started working on a software that would offer a platform for developers to code on Amazon’s cloud.

Solomon Hykes Docker
Image Source: techcrunch.com

The two co-founders took the startup to Y Combinator in summer 2010 but got rejected. They again applied for the startup program in the winter session of the same year. But yet again were not selected. But at the very last moment, Paul Graham from Y Combinator changed his mind and selected dotCloud on a condition. The condition was to make all the Y Combinator peers to signup for dotCloud’s software.

At the startup program, Hykes presented the idea of a common container for software development and deployment. He wanted to create a container that could be accessed from anywhere, such that many computers interconnected into a cluster. With the very idea, dotCloud raised a decent amount of seed funding and started developing the software.

In 2011, Hykes shifted the company to the Silicon Valley, and the company raised an $11 million in Series A in April in the same year, from names like Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital. At that time, the company was the only PaaS provider, and even, AWS was providing better support for the software. The company started to grow rapidly, and in 2013, the company dotCloud became Docker.

Though the company was going through a good time, there was still something that it was lacking. During the same time, Hykes got a decent offer for selling the company, but he decided not to and was tinkering around to make things right for the company.

So in the same year, Hykes made the company’s software an open-source platform, and RedHat was the one big company to step in to use the very software for its PaaS platform, OpenShift. In 2014, Microsoft announced that it will be integrating the Docker products into its Windows Server version in 2016. The same year, Google, Amazon and IBM also came in a partnership with the company. In 2014, the company raised a $40 million in the Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company also acquired another startup named startup Orchard.

In 2015, the company became a unicorn company, after it valued $1 billion through a $95 million Series D fundraising led by Insight Venture Partners. By the end of the same year, the company again raised an $18 million in the Series D round. In the latest round of funding in 2018, the company has raised a $92 million.

In the beginning, Docker started with a single project, but now, it hosts projects like containers, LinuxKit, SwarmKit, and the Moby, etc, based on the Docker technology.

On 28 March 2018, Solomon Hykes stepped down as the CEO of the company, remaining on the board of the company valued $ 1.3 billion.

digitalocean

Digitalocean : The Success Story of One of the Largest Hosting Web Providers in the World

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Being one of the top companies in the world should be the result of decades of experience and hard work. But would you believe if you are told that a startup is holding the position of world’s third-largest web hosting company? Quite surprising, right? But it is not surprising for the founders of Digitalocean, the very company holding the mentioned title, Ben Uretsky and Moisey Uretsky, as it is their unique ideas and approaches they used to build their company so big.

Digitalocean is a New York-based company that the two brothers, Ben Uretsky and Moisey Uretsky, founded in 2011.

Early Life and Career

Ben and Moisey moved to the U.S. from Russia, when Ben was only 5, with their family. They started living at Brighton Beach and completed their high school education from Stuyvesant High School.

Digitalocean Founders
Image Source: soundcloud.com

Ben is a Pace University pass out and holds a bachelor’s degree in information technology. He had the experience of 20 years in systems and network engineering in the infrastructure space at the time he started Digitalocean with his brother. He even started another company named, ServerStack, a managed hosting business, before he launched Digitalocean. He drove the inspiration to start the ServerStack from his previous company that got bankrupt due to its bad planning of product development.

Being the CTO of the company, he had gained enough knowledge and experience so that he could start a similar company and established ServerStack.

Moisey on the other hand, despite having an interest in computers went on to get a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from NYU. He also experimented with various startups and gained some expertise in the business incubation and venture investing activities, etc. His first startup was a big data company named CorreGroup.

Both, Ben and Moisey, ran ServerStack successfully for eight long years, and the annual revenue they generated always fluctuated between 3 to 7 million. But, with the rising competition, there was nothing new or unique that they were offering to their customers. So other similar companies, Rackspace being their biggest rival, were also getting their hold on the market.

During the same time, cloud computing started becoming a thing, and Amazon launched AWS. The rise of cloud and the success of AWS made the two brothers think for a new business, and they looked for an opportunity in the cloud.

Founding Digitalocean

As everyone, including Google and Microsoft, was running after the cloud, the two brothers thought of bringing something better and unique. They thought of building a cloud infrastructure that would help developers deploy and scale applications. So they founded Digitalocean in 2011.

To bring their plans into action, they hired Jeff Carr, who is also the co-founder of Digitalocean, for the engineering work. Carr built the entire backend for their company product singlehandedly himself. Later in 2012, Mitch Wainer and Alec Hartman also joined the founding team. Since the Uretsky brothers ran their previous business all by themselves, they did not know any of the venture capitalists. But for their new startup, they wanted a bigger scale and more investments. So in the same year, the co-founders participated in TechStars, the startup accelerator to raise seed funding for the company.

The Success

By August 2012, the company earned 400 customers and launched around 10,000 cloud server instances through the accelerator program. The next year, the company was offering SSD-based virtual machines and became one of the first cloud-hosting companies to do so. The company also established its first European data centre in Amsterdam, leading to becoming one of the fastest-growing companies. The company raised a US$3.2 million in July 2013, in its seed funding led by IA Ventures. In the series A funding, the company raised US$37.2 million in the next year.

In 2015, Digitalocean became the second largest hosting provider in the world, and it raised US$123.21 million in a round of funding. And by 2017, the company had opened twelve data centres in different parts of the world, including Singapore, Canada, London and India.

Digitalocean also hosts a forum for the developer-to-developer forums and tutorials on open source and sysadmin topics. Today, DigitalOcean has got 500 people working for it and records over $200 million in revenue annually.