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Datagroup

An IT Company Born In Germany That Even Today Serves Only The German Market.

Datagroup is a leading IT expert offering customized solutions to a wide range of customers. CORBOX is the main product suite of the company which is more like an all-in-one solution for its customers. It has been more than thirty-five years that Max Schaber has built this huge empire along with Herbert Schwarzkopf. Today, Datagroup is one of the top twenty IT companies in Germany offering various services from outsourcing to SAP services.

Datagroup has a very strong market all over the country with more than 3,000 employees catering to the needs of customers on a daily basis. The company has not stepped into any of the international markets but instead supports the local companies and businesses in every way possible. Datagroup has also started several projects to enhance the social and sports culture in various regions of Germany.

About Datagroup SE

When speaking of Datagroup, CORBOX is the primary product that gets the spotlight. This product is more like a modular kit with multiple services to smoothen the operations of any company. Once a business is buying the CORBOX module it is then up to the team which services they want to use. The various services in the CORBOX module are managed & private cloud services, application management services, communication and collaboration services, security services, network services, etc. Due to the compatible modules and services offering a great amount of flexibility, Datagroup has been able to thrive in the IT market.

Apart from the CORBOX modular kit, the company also offers IT Consulting, Mobile & App Solutions, Robotic Process Automation, and Industry Solutions. Datagroup also offers its solutions to various educational institutes and one of them will be the famous Max Plank Society. Datagroup is a publicly-traded company and it claims that there are several reasons to invest in its shares for it has an average revenue increase of 20% and an EBITDA margin of 12.6%. It has a very impressive track record when it comes to acquisitions and most importantly it is a company born in Germany and even after more than three decades is focused only on the German market.

Datagroup
Image source: kups.fi

History of the Company

In 1983, Max Schaber founded Datagroup which was under the name of Datapec back then. After a few years, DATANET was founded which today is a part of Datagroup Stuttgart GmbH. In the early 1990s, several organizations of the structure of the company took place along with the move-in of the Datagroup corporate headquarters. Entering into the 21st century, the company eventually started making strategic acquisitions starting with tec2b AG in October 2003. After a couple of years, Datagroup IT Services Holding AG was founded which today is known as Datagroup SE. In 2006, Datagroup filed its IPO and entered into the stock market and later that year also acquired messerknecht Informationssysteme and ICP. Datagroup acquired several companies in 2007 and 2008 including EGT Informationssysteme, Hamann, and Feil, Corporate Express locations Rostock and Schwerin, Best-Computer Support, etc. In 2009, the company opened a new office in Berlin and in 2010 it was recognized as one of the top 15 German computer companies.

Recent Events

As Company started acquiring more and more companies, its IT-based solutions were strengthened. It acquired several IT service providers and SAP companies to offer better solutions to the customer. In 2016, Datagroup became one of the top three companies in Germany for customer satisfaction. Recently, the company has acquired a 68% stake in Portavis thus strengthening its presence in the financial sector. It has also invested in a few startups and companies that offer IT solutions in the public sector.

About the Founder

Max Schaber is the founder of Datapec, a data processing company that eventually became Datagroup GmbH. He is serving as the CEO of Datagroup SE since 2006. Schaber completed his education at the University of Stuttgart and became a mechanical engineer. Before founding Datapec, he was a system engineer at Friedrich und Co. Company.

Netskope

Netskope, Indian Co-Founders who make a huge contribution to the success of the company.

Founded in 2012, Netskope is an American software company based in Santa Clara, California, United States. Netskope provides a computer security platform and offers cloud-native solutions for enterprises such that the companies can protect their sensitive data and defend their application and system against various cyber threats. Netskope is considered a leading company in its sector because of its Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB). The founders of the company are Sanjay Beri (current CEO), Lebin Cheng, Ravi Ithal, and Krishna Narayanaswamy. Apart from its headquarters that is based in Santa Clara, the company also has a software development facility in Bangalore, India. 

About Netskope

When the team of Netskope was formed, it brought in distinguished engineers from the security and networking field. Some of its early members are ex-employees of Cisco, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks, and VMWare. The company currently has more than 1,000 employees and it has some of the biggest multinational conglomerates as its clients (more than 25% of Fortune 100 customers). 

Netskope has expanded to various international markets including India, Singapore, Melbourne, London, etc. In the 21st century, Netskope is one of the fastest-growing SASE companies and the main idea behind building the company was to give people the power to access the cloud on their devices,

Netskope
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Founding History of Netskope

Before co-founding Netskope, Sanjay Beri was the VP of the Access & Security business at Juniper Networks. Since Sanjay worked at a very reputed company he made several connections throughout the year. So, for some time he took time and spoke to several CEOs of other companies and finally in 2012 co-founded Netskope. He started the company with initial venture capital of $21 million approximately. During the first six months, an office was set up in Palo Alto from where Netskope operated. When they established the company, the first thing that Netskope put their focus on was hiring the best talents. 

In October 2013, the company launched its first product which was security software available openly. The company also formed an advisory team and brought Enrique Salem, former Symantec Chairman onboard. In the funding round of 2014, the company raised $35 million followed by raising another $75 million in 2015. The latter funding round was led by ICONIQ Capital. The company announced that the latest fundings would be invested to expand in New Zealand and Australia. 

Funding and Acquisition

In 2016, the first two patents of Netskope were finally issued in its name for security and network-delivered services. Next year, the company conducted another funding round which was bigger than all the funding rounds held before that. Netskope was able to raise $100 million in the funding round and it was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. In the same year, the company acquired Sift Security, a software business that mainly focused on next-generation cloud infrastructure security. Cloud Hunter of Sift Security was renamed as Netskope’s Security Cloud after the acquisition. In 2018, another patent was issued to Netskope for context-aware data loss prevention. By the end of 2018, the company successfully raised another $168.7 million. 

Recent Days

In 2019, the company brought a new CFO of Netskope, Drew Del Matto (former Citrix and Fortinet executive). Earlier in 2020, Netskope conducted another funding round and raised $340 million. This funding round was led by Sequoia Capital Global Equities and the total funding summed up to $740 million. In February 2020, the company launched Netskope Private Access Solution, and the same year the company’s total valuation became $3 billion (tripled within fifteen months). The company has made Forbes Cloud 100 list because of its advanced cloud services that include protection against cyber threats. The company has already entered into a partnership with Cybersecurity and Exclusive Networks. 

Sanjay Beri – Co-founder and CEO

Sanjay pursued computer engineering from the University of Waterloo followed by completing his master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Though Sanjay came on the radar after co-founding Netskope, his first startup was Ingrian Networks which was eventually acquired by SafeNet. Some of the companies that he worked at before building his own company were Microsoft, McAfee, and Juniper Networks. 

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo – The Largest Cloud Market Intelligence Platform.

A business is all about marketing and sales. Better the marketing, the higher are the sales for a business. For the past many years, the marketing techniques had been the same, but for the last couple of years, we have become more dependent on online marketing and customer data for the growth of the businesses. Data, though, has always been an important part of marketing, today, the value of data has increased by 100 times. The user data, whether about their behavior, daily needs, or liking, is the basis of how the marketing strategies should be developed.
Considering the significance of the data in marketing, ZoomInfo took the initiative to make it the very basis of their business, too. The company is one of the biggest information and database companies providing subscription-based software as a service (SaaS) to its clients, helping them accelerate their sales and business growth.

About The Company

ZoomInfo is the provider of B2B data and information to companies which are helpful for the latter in marketing and sales of their products, leading to better business growth. The company provides a cloud-based platform including information about companies, business people, marketing, and recruiting professionals. This information is available to ZoomInfo customers through various subscription plans. Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown founded ZoomInfo in 2007 as DiscoverOrg. The company operated with the same name till 2019. In 2019 ZoomInfo acquired Zoom Information and renamed the DiscoverOrg as ZoomInfo.
With the merger of the two companies, they combined their platforms and developed a new flagship Go-to-Market (GTM) for its customers. ZoomInfo gathers and verifies data of various companies, such that to provide accurate information to its clients. It has curated an in-house research team of over 300 data analysts who use updated technologies, tools, and integrations to verify the information and provide the highest accuracy data to the customers.
ZoomInfo headquarters is based in Vancouver, Washington, United States, and over 2500 people are working for it. One of the founders, Henry Schuck is the current CEO at ZoomInfo. NeverBounce and Datanyze are the ZoomInfo subsidiaries. As of 2020, the company made revenues worth $476 million.

ZoomInfo
Image source: businesswire.com

The Founding Of ZoomInfo

Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown founded ZoomInfo as DiscoverOrg in 2007. The co-founders were law students but eventually, ended up launching DiscoverOrg, a completely different company than their education, at the age of 23. Henry Schuck took up a part-time job as a marketing analyst to pay his tuition fees for college. This very job helped Schuck conceive the idea of DiscoverOrg, and he founded the company with his college mate Kirk Brown.
RainKing was another newly founded company that worked on the same concept as ZoomInfo, except, RainKing had the funding, whereas ZoomInfo was just a concept, and the founders possessed no experience. But in the next ten years, with immense hard work, ZoomInfo was able to acquire RainKing in 2017. As soon as the company started to grow, it received investments from companies like TA Associates, The Carlyle Group, and 22C Capital.
ZoomInfo’s other acquisitions include NeverBounce (2018), Komiko (2019), Clickagy (2020), EverString Technology (2020), and Insent (2021), etc. The company had its first IPO in June 2020, and it went public on Nasdaq Global Select Market trading with ticker symbol ZI. Today the company serves over 16000 customers globally. ZoomInfo has won multiple awards for excellence, like Leader by Forrester in its B2B Marketing Data Wave and was ranked Number One in customer service by G2 Crowd.

The CEO At ZoomInfo

Henry Schuck is a lawyer by education and has got a license for practicing as a lawyer from Washington State Bar Association and Nevada Supreme Court. He received his BS in Accounting and Hospitality Administration from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Juris Doctorate in Law from the Ohio State University. While Schuck was still in college, he worked as a data analyst at Political Data Inc. Later he joined MGM grand as Hotel Operations Administrator. Schuck also worked as the vice president of operations at iProfile. In 2007, he launched DiscoverOrg with Kirk Brown, becoming the CEO of the company.

Datadog

Datadog – The Watchdog for the Cloud Services.

Cloud computing has opened new doors for new technologies and new ideas. The very technology is not quite old but has revolutionized the IT world. With the benefits, things also come with some serious problems, and in the case of cloud technology, it was data security. But since with a problem, there is always a solution, Datadog came into existence to solve the problem of data security for cloud services.

Datadog is an eleven-year-old company founded in 2010 in New York, and in just a decade, the company has gone global. The company provides services like monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services, etc., for cloud-scale applications using a SaaS-based data analytics platform.

About the Datadog

Datadog, as its name suggests, helps companies secure the data on cloud services. The company provides its services in the field of finance, manufacturing, and logistics, healthcare, retail/e-commerce, the public sector, media & entertainment, technology, and gaming, etc. It works on technologies, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift.

The company ensures to take all the end-to-end traces, metrics, and logs under observation so that they can provide maximum security to the client’s application, infrastructure, and third-party services. The company not only helps the companies secure their cloud services but also helps them enhance the user experience for their clients. Cloud migration, monitoring consolidation, shift-left testing, security analysis, hybrid cloud monitoring, IoT monitoring, log analysis & correlation are some of the services provided by Datadog. The Datadog platform has been developed using a Go-based agent. It also uses technologies like D3, Apache Cassandra, Kafka, PostgreSQL, etc.

Datadog
Image source: zenduty.com

The Back Story

Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc founded Datadog in 2010 in New York. The two founders were colleagues at Wireless Generation and developed the idea of founding Datadog while working at the company. Wireless Generation was acquired by NewsCorp, and at the same time, the two realized that there was constant friction between the developer and the systems administration teams. This led to the idea of developing software to help the teams working at cross-purpose, and hence Datadog came into being.

The founders held a seed round in 2010, and companies like NYC Seed, Contour Venture Partners, IA Ventures, Jerry Neumann, and Alex Payne participated in the funding. The rising demand for cloud services helped Datadog to become popular in no time. It was a cloud infrastructure monitoring service that every company required for their cloud services. Soon the company was working with all the major cloud service platforms, i.e., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat OpenShift, VMWare, and OpenStack. The company then started to expand by acquiring companies like Mortar Data, such that to enhance the capabilities of the Datadog platform. Datadog also established a research and development office in Paris in 2015.

The next year, Datadog announced the beta-release of Application Performance Monitoring. The platform provided full-stack monitoring for cloud platforms for the first time. In 2017, the company went on to acquire a Paris-based company named Logmatic. This acquisition added the service like querying and visualization of the logs to Datadog platform, such that it made easier for the platform to monitor and troubleshoot the online services. In 2019, a company named Madumbo partnered with Datadog adding its AI-based application testing platform to Datadog. The same year, Company also entered Japan by establishing a subsidiary company in the country.

On 19 September 2019, Company went public on Nasdaq and raised $648 million by selling 24 million of its shares. In 2016, according to Deloitte’s 2016 Fast 500 List, Datadog was among the top ten fastest-growing companies in North America.

The Founders

Oliver Pomel is one of the founders of Datadog, who is serving as the CEO of the company. He holds an MS degree in Computer Science from Ecole Centrale Paris. He is one of the original authors of the VLC media player. Pomel has also worked with companies like IBM as a software engineer. He developed the data systems for K-12 teachers as a VP at Wireless Generation.

The other founder of Datadog is Alexis Lê-Quôc, who also serves as the CTO of Datadog. He was an Ecole Centrale Paris alumni and earned a master’s degree in Computer Science. He worked at Wireless Generation as the Director of Operations for a few years. Before that, he has also worked at companies like IBM, ORange, and Neomeo.