Your Tech Story

Endpoint security

Absolute Software Corporation

Absolute Software Corporation: The Leader in Endpoint Resilience

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Stealing can be of any type, with the intention to damage or just to make free money. But the person who loses his/her device or data is always at loss. There have been methods applied to track down those thieves, which are not always successful, and we are stuck with the same problem we began with. This same problem had ignited an idea of developing an end-point tracking system in the minds of the founders of Absolute Software Corporation. And today, the company is the only firm-ware-embedded visibility and control platform developer helping companies track and trace the lost products.

About the Company

Founded in 1993, Absolute Software Corporation is the first of its kind. The company develops software products to provide endpoint and zero-trust security to its clients. Absolute Software is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has established two more headquarters in Canada and Austin. Healthcare, government sector, K-12 education, professional services sector, higher education sector, finance are the main areas of service for the company. It operates through device manufacturers, independent software vendors, resellers, and managed service providers, such that it can offer efficient services worldwide effectively.
Absolute Software Corporation is a publically traded company and trades on Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq as ABST. The company is known for its flagship product, Absolute Platform and Persistence technology, a platform protecting devices, data, applications, and users both on and off the corporate network. Today, Absolute Software has over 140 registered patents and more than 13,000 clients rely on the company for their data security purpose.

Absolute Software Corporation
Image source: azureedge.net

The Back Story

Absolute Software Corporation was founded with a unique idea, i.e., to manage, track and secure computers despite their physical location. This was simply the result of a laptop theft that led to data loss as well. Leading to the solution of such a problem, Absolute Software started to work on a track-and-trace software solution, such that even despite the theft or any damage to the device it could be tracked by the owners.

This was only possible with some great partnerships, and at the beginning of the 2000s, Absolute Software started to build ties with device manufacturers, such that the Absolute software was embedded into those devices on the BIOS level. This way, even if the thief wanted to remove the tracking software, he could not find it in the first place.

In the year 2000, Absolute Software went public on Toronto Stock Exchange. The company also started to expand overseas, as it opened its first European in Newbury in 2006. Further expansion included the establishment of offices in the UK, Austin, Malaysia, etc. Absolute Software then partnered with Microsoft and achieved the gold certification as a partner from the latter in the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem. The Absolute Software growth also included some major acquisitions such as LANrev product suite (2009), some assets of LiveTime Software (2012), Palisade Systems (2013), etc. This way, the company was able to enhance the features of its products. The company got listed in the Forbes list of cybersecurity companies in 2020.

The CEO at Absolute Software Corporation

Christy Wyatt is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Absolute Software Corporation. With more than twenty years of experience in the field of cybersecurity and IT, Wyatt has worked in different prominent positions in big-name companies, including Apple, Palm, Sun Microsystems, Motorola, and Citigroup. She also served Dtex Systems as the CEO. Christy was also the Chairman, President, and CEO of Good Technology. In 2019, she was among the Top 50 Women Leaders in SaaS and also got listed in the Top 50 Women Entrepreneurs of America by Inc. Magazine.

CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike – The Leading EndPoint protection Software Provider.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

With the first virus on the computer, the IT industry has seen multiple threats in the form of viruses, malicious activities, and cyber-attacks. Today, data is everything, and safeguarding the data has become the supreme task for the industry. There are several companies that are working towards providing a secure working environment and keeping the data safe from any sort of external threat. CrowdStrike is one of those companies bringing the most innovative products promoting cyber security and fighting such attacks. This 10-year-old company is best known for its endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.

About The Company

CrowdStrike is a publically traded company founded in 2011. The company trades on Nasdaq with the ticker name CRWD. Its founders include George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston. The company headquarters is based in Sunnyvale, California, U.S., and it operates globally. CrowdStrike is home to about 4000 employees, and as of 2021, it made revenues worth US$874.438 million. A few of the major products by the company include Endpoint security, Security and IT operations, and Security cloud. CrowdStrike has helped companies tackle major high-profile cyberattacks like the Sony Pictures hack in 2014 and the Democratic National Committee cyber attacks in 2015-16, etc.

CrowdStrike
image source: www.crowdstrike.com

Founding CrowdStrike

George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston co-founded CrowdStrike in 2011. The next year, the founders started a subsidiary with the name CrowdStrike Services, Inc. The subsidiary provided proactive and incident response services. The company’s first product was the CrowdStrike Falcon, a threat intelligence software published in the year 2013. In the following years, CrowdStrike assisted major organizations like the United States Department of Justice, Sony Pictures, and the Democratic National Committee in tackling the biggest cyber-attacks. The company was also successful in uncovering malicious activities by many hacking groups, such as the activities of the Energetic Bear that worked for the Russian Federation.
In 2015, CrowdStrike received investments from Google through a Series C funding round. CrowdStrike launched a version of its antivirus software Falcon for mobile devices in 2017. During the same year, it became a unicorn and had annual revenues worth $100 million. By 2018, the company value reached more than $3 billion. The company went public on Nasdaq and had its first IPO in 2019. In the years 2020 and 2021, CrowdStrike acquired companies, including Preempt Security and Humio.
The company has won awards like AWS Global Public Sector Partner Award for best cybersecurity solution and Canada AWS Partner Award as the ISV Partner of the Year in 2021. It also got ranked at number one for Modern Endpoint Security 2020 Market Shares in IDC’s Worldwide Corporate Endpoint Security Market Shares, 2020 Report in the same year. Telstra, Google, Rackspace, March Capital Partners, Accel Partners, and Warburg Pincus are some of the major investors in CrowdStrike.

The CEO of CrowdStrike

George Kurtz is the President, CEO, and one of the co-founders of CrowdStrike. He was born in 1970 and grew up in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey. Kurtz went to the Parsippany High School, and according to sources, he started to program video games at an early age. When he was in high school, he built a bulletin board system too. He has got an accounting degree from Seton Hall University.
As soon Kurtz graduated from college, he started to work at Price Waterhouse. He then was shifted to the security group of the company in 1993. In 1999, he co-published a book on cybersecurity named Hacking Exposed, which later came in 30 different languages. In the same year, Kurtz founded his first company named Foundstone, which he sold to McAfee in 2004, becoming the senior vice president and general manager of risk management at McAfee.
In 2011, Kurtz, along with the former chief financial officer at Foundstone, Gregg Marston, and Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founded CrowdStrike in Irvine, California. Since then, he has been working as the President and the CEO of CrowdStrike.