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Anaplan

Anaplan – A San Francisco-based Software Company Mainly Famous For Its Enterprise Management Products.

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Based in San Francisco, California, Anaplan is a software company that sells subscription-based products for enterprise management helps in decision making. The software developed by the company are cloud-based products that mainly focus on business planning and it also provides data for business analytics. The founders of the company are Guy Haddleton, Sue Haddleton, and Michael Gould. Anaplan was founded in 2006 and currently, it has established markets in 13 different countries and employs nearly 2,000 people. Anaplan has customers from very diverse industrial sectors like healthcare, telecom, retail, banking, etc. Some of the big customers of the company are DocuSign, Tata Steel, and Zillow.

History Of Anaplan

Anaplan was originally founded in Yorkshire England by the Haddletons and Gould. The company made significant expansion, acquisition, and growth in the last century. In 2010, four years after officially founding the company, it sold its first product. The same year it received its first capital funding and within the next two years, Anaplan was able to host another funding round. In 2012, Anaplam raised $11.2 million in its Series B funding round. The main investors were Granite Ventures and Shasta Ventures. Anaplan also hired Frederic Laluyaux as the new CEO of the company in the same year, but he resigned from the company in 2016.

The company eventually started its acquisition and in 2013 bought Vue Analytics, one of its resellers based in the UK. The monetary terms were not disclosed to the public. In 2013, the company again had another round of funding (Series C) in which it raised $33 million. Apart from Shasta and Granite Ventures, some other significant investors were Meritech and Salesforce.com. A year from its Series C funding, the company announced that it hosted Series D funding from which it raised $100 million and it made the total amount of investment to $150 million.

Anaplan
Image source: ggpht.com

Growth And Success

By 2014, the company was able to raise a handsome amount of money from the investor. So, the same year Anaplan rolled out its marketplace Anaplan Hub whose main goal was to assist customers to find pre-designed planning models. The platform also has an option such that it can allow customers to share their planning models as well. By the end of 2014, the company opened 11 offices in 7 different companies and it was still expanding to other international marketplaces.

In 2016, Anaplam conducted another round of funding and it received $90 million from it. After this funding round, the valuation of the company reached the $1 billion mark and it obtained unicorn status. The then CEO of the company, Frederic Laluyaux announced that it was the last private funding round of the company and an IPO was around the corner. Before going public, Anaplan hired James Budge as the new Chief Financial Officer of the company and after a year appointed Frank A. Calderoni as the new CEO.

With Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriters, Anaplam went public in 2018 and got listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The position of Simon Tucker changed from Chief Customer Officer to Chief Planning Officer and he was given the responsibility to reshape the company’s core business. Recently, Anaplan has acquired an Israeli company called Mintigo which specializes in sales analytics. Anaplan also appeared on the list of Deloitte Technology First 500.

Frank Calderoni – CEO Of Anaplan

Frank Calderoni is not only the CEO of the company but also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Anaplan. Frank has experience in industry leadership for more than 30 years and he served in many other companies before joining Anaplan. Prior to joining Anaplan, Frank was the Executive Vice President, Operations, and CFO of Red Hat Inc, for two years. He also worked at Cisco Systems for 7 years and other companies like Adobe and SanDisk. In an interview, Frank said that Anaplan is full of opportunities and that is one of the main reasons he decided to join the company.

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.

Rackspace Technology

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

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

About Rackspace Technology

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

Rackspace Technology
Image source: www.rackspace.com

The Back Story

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

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

The Founder/CEO

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

DocuSign

DocuSign – An US-based Software Company Famous For Its e-Signature Service.

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DocuSign is a famous American company that is based in San Francisco, California. The company provides DocuSign Agreement Cloud that allows various organizations to manage electronic agreements. And, as a part of its cloud service, DocuSign also offers e-Signature so that the users can sign electronically on different devices. The company was founded in 2003 by three founders, Court Lorenzini, Tom Gonser, and Eric Ranft.

About DocuSign

DocuSign provides worldwide services and its products are used in more than 180 countries by 1 million customers approximately. US ESIGN Act and the European Union’s eIDAS regulation both approves the digital signature produced by DocuSign. The CEO of the company is Daniel Springer. DocuSign became a public traded company in 2018 when it filed its first IPO. Former CEO Keith Krach was the largest individual shareholder of the company at the time of IPO. Other major shareholders are Sigma Partners, Ignition Partners, and Frazier Technology Ventures.

Founding Story

In 2003, Tom Gonser came up with the idea of DocuSign when he was working for NetUpdate. Tom founded NetUpdate in 1998 and he served as the CEO of the company back then. Throughout the journey of NetUpdate, the company has acquired several companies and among these companies, DocuTouch was a start-up. This company was a Seattle-based start-up that provided e-Signature services.

DocuTouch received $4 million in funds from Timberline Venture Partners, Bill Kallman, and Jeff Tung. When NetUpdate acquired DocuTouch, Timberline invested another $1 million in the company. The company also held various patents for web-based digital signatures and collaboration. Tom Gonser wanted to establish the e-Signature start-up as a different company and hence with the support of Court Lorenzini, they purchased the assets of DocuTouch from NetUpdate and started DocuSign. After establishing the company, Gonser left NetUpdate to focus full-time on his new start-up.

DocuSign
Image source: cloudinary.com

History of Company

After buying out DocuSign from NetUpdate, the company began its sale in 2005. zipLogix was one of the first customers of the company as it integrated the DocuSign e-Signature to its real estate virtual forms. The e-Signature of DocuSign became a very convenient service especially for court-based events like mock trials and encrypted audit logs. When the company was founded, Court Lorenzini became the CEO of the company but he stepped down in 2007 both as CEO and Chairman of the Board. He took his role as Executive Vice President of Business Development.

Matthew Schiltz replaced Lorenzini in early 2007 and he served as the CEO of the company until 2010. Till this time, the headquarters of the company was based in Seattle but when Steven King became the new CEO of the company it was shifted to San Francisco. In June 2010, DocuSign expanded its services to phone-based authentication including for both iPhone and iPad. It named the e-Signature service as e-Signature Transaction Management. The growth of the company truly escalated during this period as DocuSign alone was responsible for 73 percent of the total SaaS-based e-Signature market.

Recent Years

The massive growth of the company attracted many new investors including Scale Venture Partners that led a funding round and raised $27 million. In 2011, the company opened a new office in San Francisco that today has become the headquarters of the company. It also opened a new office in London in the same year. In 2012, DocuSign signed a deal with PayPal to carry out transactions with DocuSign Payment. After this joint partnership with PayPal, the company also entered into joint ventures with Google Drive and Salesforce.com.

In mid-2012, a report in Business Insider showed that the majority of the Fortune 500 companies have signed up for using DocuSign. In the last couple of years, DocuSign has acquired two companies, Spring CM and Seal Software. In 2016, the company ranked 3 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. The company hired a new CEO in 2017, Daniel Springer.

Daniel Springer – CEO of DocuSign

Daniel Springer has 30 years of experience in leadership and innovation across the SaaS industry. Before joining DocuSign, Daniel served as the Chairman and CEO of Responsys and prior to that, he worked at several other companies including Modem Media, Telleo, NextCard, and McKinsey & Company.

Qualtrics

Qualtrics – A 19-years Old American Company Funded By Top Venture Capitalists.

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In 2002, Ryan Smith along with his brother, father, and a friend co-founded Qualtrics. Qualtrics is an experience management company that is spread across the world. It has two headquarters in the US, one in Washington and the other one in Utah. Qualtrics is a public company listed on NASDAQ and it has more than 4,000 employees. The company specializes in experience management and provides a cloud-based platform for the same on a subscription basis.

About Qualtrics

In 2002, the company was founded by Ryan Smith, Scott M. Smith, Jared Smith, and Stuart Orgill. Currently, Ryan Smith is the executive chairman while the other members have departed from the company. Zig Serafin is the present CEO of the company. After a decade of founding the company, Qualtrics landed funding from the top two venture capital firms in the US, Sequoia Capital, and Accel. They invested consecutively in two funding rounds and the valuation of Qualtrics became $1 billion in 2014.

In 2018, SAP announced that it would acquire company for $8 billion and the deal was completed in 2019. Two years later, SAP expressed its intention to take Qualtrics public, and thus in January 2021 it was listed in NASDAQ. This year, an executive member of Microsoft, Brad Anderson left the company to join Qualtrics. In 2016 and 2017, the company appeared on the Forbes 100 Cloud List ranking 12th and 6th respectively.

Qualtrics
Image source: phenompeople.com

History of Qualtrics

When the Smiths along with Stuart Orgill started the company it was mainly a single-product survey company. The academics used this product to conduct research and it was not an ideal business model for a fresh start-up. They were initially serving a very small market with customers who weren’t willing to pay too much. As a result, Qualtrics was unable to land any investors in the early days.

One way to turn the future of the company was to make it a multiproduct company and by 2010 company was able to expand in various sectors. The products of the company helped many organizations to manage customer experience, perform market research, and get employee insights. The change in the business model of Qualtrics helped it attract two top venture capital firms in the country. The series A funding round took place in 2012 where Sequoia Capital and Accel jointly invested $70 million followed by another round of investment in 2014 by the same firms. After these two rounds, the valuation of the company reached $1 billion.

Recent Years

In 2017, Company launched its first experience management platform (XM) to help companies oversee the main four business experiences which are customer, employee, product, and brand. After launching this successful product, SAP showed interest in acquiring the company and the deal was closed in 2019 for $8 billion. In early 2021, the opening price of Qualtrics valued the company three times the amount. Throughout the journey of Qualtrics, the company has rigorously rebuilt the teach stack, replaced codes, and rearranged the company’s structure. It has taken many huge risks and reached its highest potential.

After becoming a multiproduct company, Qualtrics has made two acquisitions. In 2016, it acquired a startup called Statwing and after two years it acquired Delighted. The sum for the acquisition was not disclosed for either of the company. Qualtrics has also received several awards and accolades. Last year, the company earned the designation of “Leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Voice of Customers. The Core XM platform of Company was chosen by Edison Awards in the Applied Technology category for the gold winner.

Zig Serafin – CEO

Zig Serafin is the present CEO of the company. He joined Qualtrics in 2016 as the Chief Operating Officer and contributed to the development and launch of the Qualtrics XM Platform. Under his leadership, Qualtrics experienced very rapid growth and increased its customers to more than 13,000. Before joining Qualtrics, Zig worked at Microsoft for 17 years. He was the Corporate Vice President when he left the company.

Xero

Xero – A New Zealand-based Cloud Software Platform For SMEs.

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Xero is a cloud-based software platform that was founded in 2006. It provides Software as a Service (SaaS) and it is a public company listed in the Australian Securities Exchange. Rod Drury is the founder of the company and Steve Vamos is the present CEO. Xero mainly develops accounting software and it is based in Wellington, New Zealand. Apart from the headquarters in Wellington, the company has two other offices in New Zealand. Xero’s products are sold by subscription and are used in more than 180 countries.

About The Company

In 2006, Rod Drury along with Hamish Edwards founded Xero. When they founded the company, it was originally called Accounting 2.0. With time company has grown beyond New Zealand and it has established offices in Australia, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Africa. In 2017, Xero crossed the mark of having 1 million customers worldwide. It has also landed more than one million subscribers in Australia and New Zealand. From 2006 till 2018, Rod Drury acted as the CEO of the company and he was placed by Steve Vamos in early 2018.

Xero
Image source: wikimedia.org

Origin Of Xero

Before founding the company, Rod Drury explored a lot of other opportunities in the entrepreneurial ground. He tried bespoke software development in Microsoft Access and SQL Server but it was sold off in 1999. Then he started a documentation management startup followed by building an RDBMS for Microsoft Exchange and selling it to Quest Software. Selling the software gave Rod capital for starting Xero. He was also one of the board members of Trade Me that was sold for half a billion US dollars. With the total capital he raised, he was ready to launch Xero.

Xero As a Public Company

The idea of opening a business for cloud-based accounting software clicked in Rod’s mind when he was working at Arthur Young (now part of Ernst & Young). So, eventually, he started planning and raising money to launch the company. In 2007, Xero became a public company and got listed on the New Zealand Exchange (NZD) with a $15 million IPO. For the first few years, the company mainly focused on expanding and strengthening its presence in the New Zealand market and then entered the Australian market and went public there in 2012. In 2018, the company removed its name from NZD and was only listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. After one year, Xero became the third most valuable publicly traded company from New Zealand.

Fundings

In 2009, Xero received funding of $23 million and it was led by Craig Winkler, founder of MYOB. In 2010, it raised $4 million from Valar Ventures, and again in 2012 raised $16.6 million from the same firm. Xero raised $49 million in late 2012 and the major investors were Peter Thiel and Matrix Capital. In May 2013, the valuation of the company became $1.4 billion on the NZE. In October 2013, the two main investors invested another $180 million and with this, the total funding received by company became $230 million. In 2015, a new investor, Accel provided funding of $100 million to Xero. The company bagged the award of the best hybrid deal by Finance Asia in 2018.

After Xero became a public company it acquired a series of businesses. In 2011, Company acquired Paycycle, an Australian online payroll provider, and next year it acquired Spotlight Workpapers. In 2018, Xero established a joint venture with the US payroll platform, Gusto and acquired a data capture solution company called Hubdoc. The company acquired an Australian startup called Waddle that does invoice financing. This year, Xero acquired two companies till now which are Planday and Tickstar AB.

About The Founder

Rod Drury is a famous entrepreneur based in New Zealand. He became famous after founding Xero where he also continued as the CEO till 2018. Rod went to Victoria University of Wellington and started his career with Arthur Young, an accounting firm. Apart from founding Xero, Rod has also co-founded Context Connect and AfterMail.