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Zscaler – A Cloud Security Company Founded By An Indian-American Billionaire.

Zscaler is an American company established in the network security sector. The company was named one of the best places to work in America for two consecutive years. Zscaler is a publicly-traded company that was founded in 2007. Its headquarters is based in San Jose, California. CRN has also named Zscaler as one of the twenty coolest could security companies of the year. The main goal of the company is to anticipate and secure the whole experience of connectivity and sharing information. It started acquiring other companies more than after a decade the company was established. In 2021, the company started powering its global data centers and offices with renewable energy.

About Zscaler

Jay Chaudhry is the founder of the Zscaler who established it in 2007 along with K. Kailash. Chaudhry’s passion for making innovations in cybersecurity led to the foundation of the company which is one of the five startups he established in his journey. Zscaler is a leading cloud security company and it is also a leader in the zero-trust security model. The products offered by Zscaler ensure that a company can safely transfer data among its employers especially when working from a remote environment. The two main compromises that network security company deals with today are data loss and cyberattacks. Zscaler’s platform ensures its customer protection from these threats.

The company has a very lucrative list of clients and investors and its products are used in more than 185 countries today. Apart from the multinational companies, the government agencies also use the Company platform to prevent cyberattacks and data loss. The company has security as a service revenue model and some of its biggest clients are General Electric, VMware, Nestle, Barclays, the State of North Carolina, etc. The National Health Services of the UK is one of the largest government bodies to use Zscaler. The main products of the company include Zero Trust Exchange, Zscaler Internet Access, Zscaler Cloud Protection, Zscaler Private Access, and Zscaler Digital Experience.

History of the Company

Zscaler started its venture in 2007 and from 2008 the products (cloud security services) of the company were made available. Within two years, the company became very famous and was featured in the list of top 10 startups to watch in 2009 by Network World. Gartner Magic Quadrant named the company as a “Visionary” for Secure Web Gateways in 2010. For many subsequent years, Company was also positioned as a “Leader” in the Leaders Quadrant for Secure Web Gateways.

Zscaler also started acquiring new investors in the early 2010s. In 2012, Zscaler was able to raise $38 million from multiple investors including Lightspeed Ventures. In 2015, another round of funding took place which was led by TPG and the company secured $100 million. The company went public in March 2018 in which it raised $192 million in the initial public offering. It was by the end of 2021 that the Zscaler stock was added to the Nasdaq 100. The company also started making several acquisitions in 2018. The first company acquired was TrustPath, an AI-based company for cybersecurity. In 2019, acquired Appsulate, a cloud browser isolation company followed by Cloudneeti, a company that offered cloud security posture management (CSPM) technology. In 2021, it acquired two companies namely, Trustdome and Smokescreen.

Awards and Accolades

Zscaler has been recognized for its innovative technology and work culture over the years. In 2017, the company was awarded the Morgan Stanley CTO Award for Innovation, Most Innovative Tech Company of the Year in 2019, Cybersecurity Impact Awards Honoree in 2020, Infosec Publisher’s Choice Award in 2020, and many more. For the last two years, it has consecutive won the award of Glassdoor Best Place to Work.

Jay Chaudhry – Founder and CEO

Jay Chaudhry is an Indian-American entrepreneur who has started several ventures apart from Zscaler. His other successful endeavors are AirDefense, CipherTrust, CoreHarbor, and SecureIT. Jay has more than 25 years of experience in network security, sales, marketing, and management. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he worked at companies like IBM and Unisys. He is an alumnus of IIT BHU and later went to Harvard Business School.

Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

Qualys, Company offering cloud security services to companies for many years.

With the rise of personal computers, and then of the internet, there has also originated the need for security for the data and the stuff one puts on the web. Though there are many companies out there, providing antivirus and anti-data-theft services and applications, some companies are there from the very start. These companies were the first ones to bring new products to fight malware and provide protection from any external threat to data online and offline. Qualys is one such company that has been delivering vulnerability management solutions to the IT industry from the very start. Starting from building applications, today, Qualys Inc. is offering cloud security through its web applications using the SaaS model.

About the Company

Qualys is a more than twenty years old company, founded in 1999. Philippe Langlois and Gilles Samoun are the founders of the company, whereas Sumedh Thakar is the current President and CEO of Qualys. The company trades publically at Nasdaq with ticker QLYS. Qualys is known for its cloud security services, including Certificate Inventory, Certificate Assessment, Vulnerability Management, Threat Protection, Web Application Scanning, Web Application Firewall, and Security Configuration Assessment, etc. The company headquarters is based in Foster City, California, the U.S., and around 2000 people work for it. As of 2020, the company made annual revenues worth $363 million. Big names like BT, IBM, Verizon, NTT, Wipro, etc. are some of the permanent clients of Qualys.

Founding Qualys

Philippe Langlois and Gilles Samoun founded Qualys in 1999. Philippe Courtot was the angel investor in the company who also became the first CEO of Qualys. In 2000, the company brought its first product, QualysGuard to the market, which was also the first type of vulnerability management application. The idea behind the company was to build cloud-based products so to scan any network globally. Based on the same idea, in 2002, Qualys launched QualysGuard Intranet Scanner, an application that could scan an entire LAN. In the next few years, the company launched products like FreeMap (2003), QualysGuard product line (2005), QualysGuard Policy Compliance (2008), and QualysGuard Malware Detection Service (2010).
With the launch of new and innovative products, Qualys managed to get ranked among 5000 fastest-growing private companies in the USA in 2010 in the first decade of its launch. It was also named one of the largest private companies in Silicon Valley in 2012. Later in September 2012, Qualys went public on NASDAQ and raised $87.5 million in its first IPO. In 2014, Qualys won the “Best Security Company” by SC Magazine. The next year, the company launched Cloud Agent Platform as well as a free asset management service named Qualys AssetView. In the following year, the company came with ThreatPROTECT, a cloud-based platform for vulnerability detection. The same year, it partnered with Microsoft Azure Security Center to integrate its services to the latter.
The company also made some major acquisitions like the network analysis assets from Nevis Networks (2017), NetWatcher (2017), 1Mobility (2018), Asset Inventory (2018), etc. The company won the Global Vulnerability Management Market Leadership Award (2017), Cyber Security Leader (2017), Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice Award for Vulnerability Assessment (2019), and Best Vulnerability Management Solution (2020). Today, Qualys is operational in over 130 countries and serves over 10,300 customers globally.

The CEO at Qualys

Sumedh Thakar is the President and CEO of Qualys. He was born and brought up in India. Thakar has an engineering degree in Computer Science from Savitribai Phule Pune University. He started his engineering career at Patni Computers as soon he graduated from college in 1997. In 2001, Thakar joined Intacct. Corp as a software engineer and then started working at Northwest Airlines. In 2003, Sumedh became the Vice President of engineering at Qualys, and then in 2014, was promoted as the Chief Product Officer of the company. In November 2019, he was appointed the full-time President and Chief Product Officer. he became the CEO of the company in February 2021.

Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

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

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Yashica Vashishtha

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.

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.

Yashica Vashishtha

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

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

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 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.