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Genesys – Company Started With The $150,000 Loan As Initial Money.

Genesys is a market leader in contact centre solutions and cloud customer experiences. The company has a presence in over 100 countries. Employees at Company collaborate to provide the best possible client experiences. Genesys connects every user moment across marketing, sales, and service on any channel while also enhancing employee experiences with the help of cloud and AI.

About the Company

Founded in 1990, Genesys is an American software corporation that sells customer experience (CX) and call centre technologies to mid-sized and big companies. It offers software that is both cloud-based and hybrid. In 2012, It was acquired by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) and Permira Funds. The company is headquartered in California, USA, and it also has offices in the Middle East, Latin America, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. The company is the main sponsor of IndyCar Series racer James Hinchcliffe’s in the #29 Andretti Autosport Honda. Additionally, the business sponsors the Genesys 300 and Genesys 600 races at Texas Motor Speedway. Genesys established “Experience as a Service” to enable companies of all sizes to communicate with customers sensitively, deliver simple personalization at scale, and cultivate their trust and loyalty.

History

Gregory Shenkman and Alec Miloslavsky started Genesys in October 1990. The families of the founders loaned the company $150,000 as initial money. In 1997, the business successfully launched its (IPO) and went public, traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker GCTI. Alcatel-Lucent (formerly Alcatel) purchased Genesys for $1.5 billion in late 1999. In 2012, It was acquired by Permira and TCV from Alcatel-Lucent for $1.5 billion. In 2016, majority shareholders, Technology Crossover Ventures and Permira sold a $900 million share to private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, valued at $3.8 billion. Genesys creates call centre software for corporations. The software is offered as on-premises or cloud-based software. Its popular products include Genesys Cloud CX, Genesys Multicloud CX and Genesys DX.

Acquisitions

Genesys has expanded throughout the years by making a number of acquisitions. Its popular acquisitions include Forte Software, Plato Software Corporation, Next Age Technologies, IBM’s CallPath, Telera, VoiceGenie Technologies, Informiam, Solariat, Conseros, OVM Solutions, Interactive Intelligence, Silver Lining, AltoCloud, nGUVU. In 2021, it acquired Bold360, a digital engagement suite, from LogMeIn.

CEO – Tony Bates

Business executive Tony Bates was appointed CEO of Genesys in 2019. He is a British native. He formerly held a number of technology-related leadership positions in business, including those of former CEO of Skype, former executive vice president of Microsoft, and former president of GoPro. Bates started his job in network services and internet infrastructure after dropping out of college. He has previously held positions on the boards of GoPro, SiriusXM, LoveFilm, TokBox, YouTube, and BubbleMotion. He has been a member of the boards of VMware and eBay. Bates holds several patents under his name.

Founders – Gregory Shenkman, Alec Miloslavsky

Gregory Shenkman and Alec Miloslavsky founded Genesys in 1990. Russian émigrés Alec Miloslavsky and Gregory Shenkman first met in San Francisco when Shenkman was selling telecoms equipment and Miloslavsky was employed by Pixar Studios. Each took out a loan from their parents at $75,000 to start the firm Genesys. Together, they started creating software that enables businesses to learn more about their phone costs and cut down on hold times. Most of the company’s employees were Russian programmers, which first led the FBI to believe the business had connections to mafias in Russia. It went public in 1997, and Alcatel purchased the company for $1.5 billion three years later. The duo later also formed another company named Exigen Services.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

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

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.

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.

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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

Vonage – 25 Years Old Company Specializes In Business Cloud Communications.

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

The discovery of communication mediums, like the telephone, has revolutionized every industry. In fact, communication mediums are the best invention of all time. Starting from telegraphs to telephones, and from the simple button, mobile phones to today’s smartphones, all of these devices have been a matter of amaze. Today, we are able to communicate not only via smartphones but also through a mere internet connection. On the internet, too, cloud communication has become a really effective medium of communication. Vonage is one of those cloud communication service providers which provides its services to businesses. This American company started as a residential telecommunication service provider and today is one of the leading business cloud communications providers.

About Vonage

Vonage is a publically held American company founded in 1998. It specializes in business cloud communications, such that, provides services like Unified Communications, Contact Center, Communications APIs, Home VoIP Phone Service Provider, etc. The company is about 25 years old, but still, it retains its relevance, in fact, with time, it has adapted to the changing trends, making it stand strong among the competition. Jeff Pulver and Jeffrey A. Citron are the founders of Vonage, whereas its headquarters is based in Holmdel, New Jersey, United States. The company offers its services worldwide, and about 2500 people are working for it. As per the 2020 records, Vonage made revenues worth $1.25 billion, and its served over 1.1 million subscribers worldwide.

The Back Story

Jeff Pulver founded Vonage in 1998 as Min-X.com, a Voice over IP (VOIP) exchange. Later, Jeffrey A. Citron, the other co-founder, and Carlos Bhola, an investor in the company, joined Vonage. Both contributed $1 million from their private savings and became board members. In the coming years, Citron became the CEO, whereas Bhola was appointed as the President of the company, raising $11 million in additional funding. By this time, the company started to focus on being a VOIP service provider. In 2001, the company had its name changed to Vonage Holdings Corp., and the headquarters of the company was shifted to Holmdel, New Jersey.

Beginning in the USA, Vonage had expanded to countries like the UK and Canada in the coming years. In 2006, the company went public on New York Stock Exchange, and it offered its shares to its existing customers through the IPO.
Like every other company, Vonage started to expand its business through strategic acquisitions, starting in 2013. The names acquired by Vonage include Vocalocity, Telesphere, iCore Networks, SimpleSignal, gUnify, Nexmo, TokBox, NewVoiceMedia, Over.ai, etc.

Today, Vonage specializes in services including Business services (unified communications, cloud communications, middleware technology, etc.), Residential services (home phone plans using VoIP), Service requirements, telephone number availability, Emergency calls, Quality of service, and equipment compatibility, etc. As per an announcement by Ericsson done in November 2021, Ericson is going to acquire Vonage for a sum of 6.2 billion USD by the first half of 2022.

The CEO at Vonage

Rory P. Read is the current CEO of Vonage. He is a well-known business executive in America and possesses experience of more than 25 years. Read has got a bachelor’s degree in information systems from Hartwick College and has worked in big-name companies like IM, Lenovo, AMD as well as Dell in multiple executive positions. In fact, Read has spent about 23 years at IPB, where he handled the Asia Pacific region as the general manager, of Business Innovation Services. Before joining Vonage, Read served as the president and CEO of Virtustream, a subsidiary of Dell, and as the EVP chief operating executive of Dell. Read became the CEO of Vonage in July 2020.

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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Descartes Systems – A Company That Survived The dot-com Burst And Became One Of The Most Successful Canadian Tech Brands.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Descartes Systems is a famous logistics and supply chain management platform based in Ontario, Canada. It is a 40-year old company that is making remarkable innovations to offer cloud-based logistics solutions. Apart from its SaaS products, the company also has Descartes Global Logistics Network. Currently, its annual revenue is more than $400 million and it has also expanded to various international markets including Europe, America, the Middle East, the Asia Pacific region, and Africa. Descartes Systems has more than 24,000 customers worldwide who are managed by 1,800+ employees.

Early History

Descartes Systems was founded in 1981 but it became famous for making a remarkable turnaround after the collapse of the dot-com bubble. The company went public in 1998 and was listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange where its common shares were traded under the symbol DSG. One year after getting listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, it also made it to the NASDAQ Stock Market and started trading under the symbol of DSGX. Entering the 21st century, as expected, Descartes’s share price peaked during the dot-com bubble and then crashed subsequently. Descartes, like every other company that was affected by the market crash, plotted strategies to survive. So, in 2001 Descartes decided to change its business model from offering full-featured enterprise software licenses to subscription-based products. Thus it became one of the first companies in the logistic sector to offer SaaS products.

Surviving the Market Collapse

The next few years were followed by huge losses and the company came close to bankruptcy in 2004. In the need of restructuring the company immediately, it decided to lay off 35% of the workforce and wanted to bring a transformation in the corporate culture of the company. So, in 2005 Descartes Systems appointed Arthur Mesher as its new CEO. As the new CEO of the company, Arthur worked wonderfully because after years of losses in 2005 the company was again back to profitability. Under the leadership of Mesher, Descartes Systems was awarded the Best Canadian Corporation by the Canadian Business Magazine and Best Business Turnaround in 2006 by International Business Awards.

By 2015, Descartes became a very successful business as it was offering logistic services to more than 10,000 logistic-centric companies. It expanded its customer base as well as included ground transportation, airlines, retailers, distributors, and many more. Some of the major customers of the company are Air Canada, British Airways, Volvo, Del Monte, DHL, and American Airlines.

Acquisitions

After the company returned to profitability, it also started acquiring several companies. In 2006, Descartes acquired three companies, namely, ViaSafe, Flagship Customs Services, and Cube Route. All these companies focus on various customer management and supply chain purposes like filing software, logistics management software, etc. It again acquired a series of three companies in 2007 which are Ocean Tariff Bureau and Blue Pacific Services, Global Freight Exchange, and RouteView Technologies. Not all companies that Descartes was acquiring were based in Canada as some were based in the USA and Europe. In 2008, it acquired two USA-based companies namely, Pacific Coast Tariff Bureau and Mobitrac Fleet Management Business. Descartes has also acquired several Belgium-based companies like Dexx, Porthus, and Routing International. Some of the companies it has acquired in the last few years are STEPcom, Peoplevox, ShipTrack, GreenMile, NetCHB, etc.

Edward Ryan – CEO of Descartes Systems

Edward J. Ryan became the CEO of Descartes Systems in 2013 and he was also made a member of the Board of Directors in 2014. Ryan joined the company in 2000 after the company completed the acquisition of E-Transport Incorporated. Between 2000 to 2013, Ryan has occupied various management positions including General Manager of Global Logistics Network, Executive Vice President of Global Field Operations, and Chief Commercial Officer. He completed his education at Franklin & Marshall College.

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Mitchell Hashimoto And Armon Dadgar Came Up With The Idea While Working On Project At University.

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

Cloud technology has helped companies simplify their business infrastructure. The cloud is not only easy to access, but it is also secure to put data on the cloud and keep working as one used to do in the pre-cloud era. Cloud computing has not only eased out the working for the businesses but also provides new opportunities as well as chances to experiment for the software geniuses. HashiCorp is also a result of some experimentation by its founders Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, who found their interest in emerging cloud technology and built a million dollars empire for them. HashiCorp is one of the leading software companies that develop open-source tools and commercial products to work with cloud-computing infrastructure for developers.

About HashiCorp

HashiCorp is a ten-year-old software company, with its headquarters based in San Francisco, California. The company works on the freemium business model and is known for the development of open-source tools and products that help the developers to run and connect with the cloud-computing infrastructure with the most ease and security. Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar are the founders of the company, whereas, David McJannet leads the company as the CEO.
HashiCorp is a publically traded company and trades on Nasdaq as HCP. The product list from HashiCorp includes both open-source and proprietary products, such as Vagrant, Packer, Serf, Consul, Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Sentinel, Boundary, Waypoint, etc. Apart from San Fransisco, the company has established offices in various parts of the US, India, Europe, Canada, and Australia, etc. As per the 2022 data, over 1500 people are working at HashiCorp.

Founding HashiCorp

The beginning of the HashiCorp includes the same university student story. Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, the two co-founders of HashiCorp, were the students at University of Washington and met each other at the same university in 2008. The two worked together on the same cloud technology-based project. While working on the project, both had become aware of the potential of cloud computing. After graduating from the university, they moved to San Fransisco, where Mitchell founded HashiCorp in December 2012. Armon joined the company as the co-founder in July 2013.

The co-founders started the company with the idea to provide businesses with tools that would help them deploy and connect their applications to the cloud (or multiple connected clouds), seamlessly and securely. By January 2014, the company started to grow in terms of manpower. In December of the same year, the company held a rounding of Series A funding and raised $10.2 million in the capital.

The next year in September, HashiCorp held its first HashiConf in Portland. In September 2016, the company had another Series B round of funding, where it raised $24 million in capital. By June 2017, the number of employees for the company had reached 100 people. The company went international when it opened its first overseas office in Europe in 2017. The same year, the company hosted another round of funding raising $40 million. HashiCorp established one of its subsidiaries named KK in Japan, which was the first HashiCorp office in Asia.
In the Series D round of funding held in 2018, the company raised $100 in the capital, and by the mid of next year, the employee count of the company expanded to 500 people. With the Series E round of funding in 2020, the company raised $175 million and added 500 more employees working for it worldwide. Alongside the employee count, the customer count was also reaching 1000 people by the same year.
In November 2021, HashiCorp had its first IPO, and it went public on NASDAQ, valued at $13 billion.

The CEO at HashiCorp

David McJannet is the current CEO at HashiCorp. He has got over twenty years of experience working in the software industry, including cloud technology. Before joining HashiCorp in 2016, he has been an important part of companies like GitHub, Hortonworks, VMware, Microsoft, etc. David joined HashiCorp when there were only 30 people in the team, and today, under his leadership, the team has grown to be 1500 people.

Yashica Vashishtha

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Mimecast, the cloud-based email management to protect our sensitive information.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Mimecast is a publicly-traded company in the IT sector specializing in cybersecurity, information security, and email and file archiving. Peter Bauer and Neil Murray founded the company in 2003 and currently, Peteris is serving as the CEO of the company while Neil is in the position of CTO. The headquarters of the company is based in London, England. Though Mimecast offers a wide range of products to its customers, it mainly specializes in cloud-based email management for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Email 365. Mimecast became a public company in November 2015.

About Mimecast

The main goal of Mimecast is to eradicate the risks that we face daily on your email system. It also helps in reducing the cost that is required to protect our sensitive information by moving the workload to the cloud. In a single subscription-based model, Mimecast provides comprehensive email security along with archiving and service continuity.

Currently, Mimecast has 12 offices in several continents. It has more than 40,600 customers on a worldwide basis and approximately 1,700 employees to make better products and offer consistent service. The major investors of the company are Index Ventures, Dawn Capital, and Insight Venture Partners. Recently, the company has hired a new Public Sector and Channel Director to strengthen its operation in South Africa.

History of the Company

Both Peter Bauer and Neil Murray came from an experienced and entrepreneurial background. They previously founded FAB Technology and Pro-Solutions respectively. Before founding Mimecast, Peter was trained as a Microsoft systems engineer and gained experience working with corporate messaging systems. The company designed the MIME protocol for formatting multimedia e-mail. Nathaniel Borenstein was the chief scientist behind the design of this protocol. After the company was founded in 2003, it expanded overseas establishing offices in London, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Munich, Israel, and many more.

The idea behind founding Mimecast was quite simple as the product was developed to make it easy for users to embrace email. In October 2015, the company filed for its IPO and the next month it started trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. In the past few years, Mimecast has acquired several companies starting with Ataata, a startup specializing in cybersecurity. In 2018, the company acquired another cybersecurity firm called Solebit. It acquired a company called DMARC Analyzer in 2019 and last year it acquired Segasec.

Business Strategies

In an interview, Peter Bauer said that the M&A strategies of the company are mainly focused on advanced technologies and new talents. They mainly target buying start-ups that can provide the company with new opportunities and capabilities. It is more like harnessing the power of any new technology and giving it a proper shape using the funds of Mimecast. The company didn’t acquire any businesses for the first fourteen years, instead, they chose to build an organic platform with strong architecture. Mimecast plans for months before acquiring so that they understand the workflow of the organization well and if their technology can bring new capabilities for its customers.

Peter Bauer – Co-Founder and CEO

The CEO and co-founder of Mimecast, Peter Bauer is also a Board Member of the company. He has significant contributions to Mimecast’s SaaS strategy. He along with Neil Murray has developed the pure cloud delivery mechanism for an easy and secured user experience. Peter originally belongs from South Africa and during the 1990s he was trained as a Microsoft system engineer. He moved to the UK from South Africa where he founded Mimecast.

In 2011, he moved to Boston to help in expanding the operations of Mimecast to South Africa. In an interview, he mentioned that though their potential plans got delayed due to the crisis of COVID-19, the employees improved their communications significantly during work from home. And, it helped in uplifting the working environment of the company.

Annasha

cloud service

About Mimecast

History of the Company

Business Strategies

Peter Bauer – Co-Founder and CEO

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