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Appian Corporation

Appian Corporation – Developer Of Cloud Computing As Well As Enterprise Software.

After the internet, cloud computing is one of the best technology that is most beneficial for every business. The very technology has reduced the hectic work of managing the storage for the businesses and just buying some subscriptions, the data is readily available for every user of the data through the cloud. Hence, the technology is now adopted by almost every company in the world that deals with data and the internet. To process the data on the cloud, some software is required. This software helps the companies manage, deploy and access the data on the cloud. Appian Corporation is one of the leading software development companies known for its enterprise cloud software development. Appian creates software that helps other organisations to build applications for mobiles, desktops, and even the cloud on their own. The company has been in the business for over twenty years and has become a prominent name in the cloud software industry.

About Appian Corporation

Appian Corporation is the developer of cloud computing as well as enterprise software. The company was founded in 1999, and the team of founders included Michael Beckley, Matt Calkins, Robert Kramer, and Marc Wilson. The company headquarters is based in McLean, Virginia, United States, and apart from that, the Appian Corporation has its offices in fifteen different locations globally. The company is home to over 1500 employees, and according to the 2021 FY report, it made annual revenues worth $369.3 Million. The company is known for its low-code automation platform and has developed multiple apps for its customers.

Appian Corporation
Image source: www.healthcareitnews.com

Founding Appian Corporation

Michael Beckley, Robert Kramer, Marc Wilson, and Matthew Calkin founded Appian in 1999. The idea behind the company was to gather talented people and use their knowledge and skills to get amazing results. This way, Appian was established to offer its employees the liberty to make their decisions to fulfill the company goals most innovatively. It was Calkin’s idea to build such a company, and other co-founders joined in later to found the company. 

The company introduced its first product, a web-based enterprise information service for the US army, named Army Knowledge Online, in 2001. The very service was also regarded as “the world’s largest intranet” at that time. 

The downturn of the economy during 2008 affected Appian too, but the leaders working for the success of the company had made a plan B for the company too. This time, Appian brainstormed over the concept of building software that would reduce most of the work for the organizations. So the company built a platform based on the “low-code technique”, which would allow the organizations to create their software on their own, without being a tech geek. The platform was a hit, as it was secure and could be used on any device, mobile, desktop as well as on the cloud.

The success of Appian’s new software platform brought it more success and investments. In 2014, New Enterprise Associates invested a sum of $37.5 million in Appian. In May 2017, the company went public on NASDAQ and started to trade with the ticker name APPN. With the release of Appian AI, the company introduced the integration of Artificial Intelligence to its platform in 2019. In the following years, Appian also made some acquisitions, including Novayre Solutions SL and Lana Labs.

Today, Appian offers its software services to industries like Automotive, Education, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Insurance, Life Sciences, Retail, Telecom, Transportation, etc. In fact, with the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, Appian launched apps that helped businesses with their work, like tracking the workforce’s health and safety, helping companies reopen their offices, and helping banks manage Paycheck Protection Programloan applications, etc. This way, those apps helped businesses to continue their work during the pandemic.

The CEO at Appian Corporation

Matt Calkins is one of the founders and the CEO of Appian. He is an Economics graduate from Dartmouth College. In fact, he was the topper of his class. In 1994, he joined MicroStrategy as the Director of Enterprise Product Group and left the company in 1999 to found Appian. Matt has been the CEO of Appian from the very beginning and has led the company to be the leading enterprise software developer. He is also known as the author of several award-winning board games.

nutanix

Nutanix – A Leading IT Company Offering An Unparallel Enterprise Cloud Platform. 

With a goal to make IT management easier for the industrial sector, Nutanix Inc was founded in September 2009. The company’s founding team was three successful Indian entrepreneurs, Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron, and Ajeet Singh. Nutanix’s headquarters is based in San Jose, California, US. The main products of the company are Enterprise Cloud Platform, Business Software, and IoT. It offers various cloud-based solutions and services as well disaster recovery, cloud monitoring, and much more. There are more than 20,000 leading companies that are customers of Nutanix including Volkswagen, Vodafone, Nasdaq, Seattle Children’s, etc. Currently, the company is focusing on developing more products for entering into the hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem. 

Founding Story

Nutanix is an IT company that mainly focuses on providing cloud-based enterprise software. It has also received several awards for innovation and best products and also as a startup. This startup was founded in 2009 and one of the co-founders, Dheeraj Pandey became the CEO of the company. Mohit Aron left the company in 2013 to found a computer data storage company, Cohesity. Nutanix was very lucky when it came to raising funds as, within four years of its establishment, it successfully hosted five funding rounds. By 2013, the company raised $312.2 million from funding and it also reached a $1 billion valuation in the same year and received unicorn status. In 2014, its valuation became $2 billion after the Series E funding where it raised $140 million. Some of the major investors involved were Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Blumberg Capital. 

Nutanix became a public company in 2015 but unfortunately, it suffered a net loss of $126 million in the same year. The company also started acquisitions in 2016 and acquired two companies, namely, PernixData and Calm.io in the same year. In 2017, Nutanix established a partnership with IBM, and again in 2018 acquired three companies, Netsil, Minjar, and MainFrame2 Inc. After the pandemic, the company shifted from making hardware applications to SaaS products. 

nutanix
Image source: itpro.co.uk

Awards & Accolades

Founded in 2009, Nutanix started receiving prestigious awards after a couple of years. In 2011, the company received the Best of VMworld 2011 – Gold Award for its products. The experts made Nutanix the winner based on innovation, usability, reliability, value, and performance. In 2012, Nutanix again received the “Best New Product of 2012” award by VMworld because they liked the SAN-free approach by Nutanix for enhancing virtualization performance. It received a series of awards in 2013 including VMworld vFlipcup 2013 Champions, announced one of the top 100 companies in North America by Red Herring, LinkedIn Top 10 InDemand Tech Startup, recognized as “Cool Vendor” by Gartner, and a few more. 

In 2014, Nutanix was named a Tech Trailblazer which is a new concept in the startup ecosystem. This award was mainly given to young startups and after it was recognized as such, the companies received a lot of support for growing their business. In the same year, it also bagged a customer service award and received the Technology of the Year award by InfoWorld. Dheeraj Pandey, one of the co-founders was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015. In 2018, the company was featured by well-known magazines and companies like Forbes, Gartner, Deloitte, and GEC Media Group. Nutanix was also named one of the 18 great companies for millennials in the San Francisco area. Recently, it has received a few awards for being one of the top workplaces. 

Rajiv Ramaswami – CEO of Nutanix

Rajib Ramaswami is the current CEO and President of Nutanix who joined the company late in 2020. Before he joined Nutanix, he worked in various positions at VMware. Ramaswami was the Executive Vice President and General Manager of VMware’s networking and security business and later he became the Chief Operating Officer of Products and Cloud Services. Ramaswami worked at various other companies including IBM, Cisco, Nortel, Tellabs, and Broadcom. He completed his bachelor’s degree in India and then went to the University of California, Berkeley.

TechnologyOne

Adrian Marco’s TechnologyOne Is Australia’s Largest Enterprise Software Company.

Adrian Di Marco, an Australian entrepreneur founded TechnologyOne in 1987. The company received unicorn status in 2014 and it is mainly known for offering commercial support software. It has its headquarters based in Brisbane, Australia and apart from the Australian market, it has an international presence in the UK, New Zealand, South Pacific, and Asia. TechnologyOne has 1,200 employees and currently, the CEO of the company is Edward Chung. It mainly offers SaaS products as in 2012 the company decided to transfer its business solution from on-premise business software to a SaaS provider. TechnologyOne is a publicly-traded company and it is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange under the symbol TNE.

About TechnologyOne

TechnologyOne is one of the first startups in Australia and when it was founded its main focus was deep research and using innovative cutting-edge technology. The company is known for investing heavily in its R&D unit. It invests 20% of the total annual revenue for research purposes. The company today operates in six market categories. They are local government, education, health and community services, government, asset and project-intensive, and financial services and corporates. TechnologyOne is currently associated with more than 150 health and community organizations for better health outcomes. The company started expanding in the 21st-century by opening international offices and also through several acquisitions.

TechnologyOne
Image source: technologyonecorp.com

History

Adrian Di Marco decided to establish a new enterprise software company when he saw the immense potential to build a new generation of accounting software. The initial investment to establish TechnologyOne was offered by J L Mactaggart Industries (John and Dugal Mactaggart) which was a former client as well. TechnologyOne developed configurable software such that every client can use the same code but the software can be configured to meet individual needs. In the year TechnologyOne was established, the company opened its R&D center in Mactaggart’s hide processing plant.

The company introduced its first product in the market, FinanceOne in 1991. Marco’s idea was to make the foundation of the company based on relational database technology and it paid off. After the first product was released, TechnologyOne was recognized by various magazines. In 1995, the company’s name was on top of the customer satisfaction survey list released by CFO magazine. In the late 1990s, the company opened several other offices in Australia. It also started getting international contracts and big projects. For example, in the 1990s the company built Automated Titling System (ATS) for the Queensland Department of Natural Resource and Mines. In 2000 and the following years, TechnologyOne opened new offices in London and New Zealand and currently it is focusing on the local government market and tertiary education.

Success

There was a shift in the strategy of TechnologyOne in 2005 when it decided to shift from functionality-centric software to people-centric software. In 2004, TechnologyOne recorded $1 billion market capitalization and entered the S&P/ASX 200 Index. Marco was the CEO and COO of the company until 2017 when he decided to step down and his place was taken by Edward Chung. By the end of 2017, TechnologyOne recorded a huge profit from its cloud business for the first time and landed 112 new cloud customers. Currently, its annual revenue has reached $300 million.

Acquisitions

TechnologyOne has also expanded its territory through a series of acquisitions. In 2000, it made the first acquisition when it purchased Tablelands Computer Systems followed by ProClaim software in the same year. In 2002, it acquired Infloplan and Avand Pty Ltd 2007. In 2015 the company acquired three businesses, namely, ICON Software, Digital Mapping Solutions, and Jeff Roorda & Associates.

Edward Chung – CEO of TechnologyOne

Edward Chung became the CEO of the company in 2017 but he has experience with TechnologyOne for more than 10 years. He worked for the products and solution division of the company and also became the COO of the company before getting appointed as CEO. Edward also worked for Queensland Rail and Queensland Audit Office for 10 years.

Temenos AG

Temenos AG – Enterprise Software Used By The Topmost Banks In The World.

Temenos AG is a European company that offers enterprise software especially to banks and other financial organizations. The company was founded in 1993 as Temenos Systems and today it offers its services to more than 145 countries around the world. Temenos AG witnesses daily transactions of more than 1.2 billion people using the technology of the company. Currently, 41 out of 50 top most banks of the world are clients of Temenos. From multinational corporate banks to small community banks, Temenos AG offers software across a wide range of demographics. The headquarter’s of the company is based in Geneva, Switzerland and the present CEO of the company is Max Chuard.

About Temenos AG

Founded in 1993, Temenos became a publicly-traded company in 2001 as it got listed on the Swiss Stock Exchange. Apart from the company’s headquarters, Temenos has more than 67 offices in various countries and the total number of employees is approximately 7,500. Temenos has also received several awards and featured in various popular magazines. In the IBS League Table (2017-2021) Temenos was the number one best-selling digital banking system. Temenos is one of the fourth largest European software companies.

There are more than 3,000 firms across the globe that uses Temenos’s banking software for daily transactions every day. The solutions and products offered by Temenos include core banking, payments, fund management, digital banking, wealth management applications, etc. The company has got every aspect of monetary need covered when it comes to smooth user experience and reliable applications. Though most of the banking companies don’t invest rigorously in R&D, Temenos 20% of the revenue into their R&D sector to focus more on renovation. Around 30% of the world’s banking population uses Temenos for any banking purposes.

Temenos AG
Image source: businesswire.com

History and Acquisitions

The baking project behind Temenos was started a few years before it was officially launched. A group of banking experts and technical researchers started developing a successful banking platform in the late 1980s. And, it was in 1993 that George Koukis and Kim Goodall acquired the rights to GLOBUS, the newly designed banking platform, and changed the name of the company to Temenos. The name of the company was taken from a reference lecture on money that was given by Hans Wolfgang Frick and Temenos Academy. Temenos became public in 2001 and right after going public, it made a big acquisition by purchasing a mainframe core banking software. The application it acquired was originally made by IBM and now it is sold as a part of Temenos Core banking.

Temenos launched the T24 banking package in 2003 with a more improved banking technology platform. To build the T24 package, the company required three long years of effort and also invested more than $24 million. After acquiring the banking application from IBM, the company made a major acquisition in 2007 when it acquired a German company called Actis.BSP. In 2008, Temenos acquired two UK-based companies, namely, Financial Objects Ltd and Lydian Associates Ltd. In 2009, it acquired a French company called Viveo and FE mobile, a UK-based company in 2010. After a few years, Temenos also started investing in the American market as it acquired Trinovus and Akcelerant, two US-based companies in 2013 and 2015 respectively. It has also acquired a couple of Indian companies to expand its territories in Asia. Recently, Tatra Banka, Slovakia’s largest mutual fund company chose Temenos Multifonds.

Max Chuard – CEO of Temenos AG

Max Chuard is serving as the CEO of Temenos since 2019. He joined the company a long time back in 2002 as the Director of Corporate Finance and Investor Relations and then got promoted to Chief Financial Officer in 2012. Before joining Temenos, Max worked at Investment Baking Boutique and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Max Chuard went to the University of Lausanne and holds a master’s degree in finance.

Axway Software

Axway Software – An American IT Company That Originally Emerged As A Part Of A French Conglomerate.

Axway Software is an American IT company founded twenty years ago. It is a publicly-traded company with its headquarters based in Phoenix, Arizona, US. There are more than 1,800 employees in the company serving approximately 11,000 customers who are spread across 100 countries. Axway, apart from America, has offices in various parts of Europe (Lyon, Paris, Bulgaria, etc) and support centers in India. Since Axway was originally a part of a French software company, Sopra Steria, the company has another headquarter in Puteaux, Paris. Axway was spun-off from Sopra as a subsidiary in 2000. The company has come a long way from there as once from Europe it built a vast business in the lands of America.

About Axway Software

Axway Software is known for providing software tools for various applications. Some of them are enterprise software, business analytics, and activity monitoring, mobile application development, API management, etc. Last year, Axway Software was recognized as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management for the sixth time. Axway, in twenty years, has filed more than 100 patents in technology innovation.

In 2011, the company was listed in the Compartment B of Euronext Paris meaning it had market capitalization between €150 million and €1 billion. The company is also named a leader in the Forrester Wave for API Management Solutions Q3 2020. Though API offers several products, its Amplify API Management Platform is the main product and the company has received several recognitions for the same. Other products are Axway B2B Integration, Axway Managed File Transfer, and Specialized Products for supply chains and other purposes.

Axway Software
Image source: thalesgroup.com

Major Events in the History

Axway was officially incorporated as an individual company on December 28, 2000. The company was originally the software infrastructure division of Sopra, a French IT company. But, Sopra decided to spun-off the division as an individual entity (a subsidiary of the company). After the spin-off, Sopra used Axway Software as a means for expanding into the Enterprise Application Integration market. Right after Axway was incorporated it started to make multiple acquisitions from the early 2000s. In 2002, Axway acquired a Swedish company called Viewlocity.

The series of acquisitions continued and in January 2006 Axway acquired US company Cyclone Commerce after which a huge part of the executive management team and the operations moved to Phoenix. Next year in February, Axway acquired Atos’s B2B software business in Germany and Tumbleweed Communications, a US-based company in 2008. In 2011, Axway Software detached itself completed from the Sopra Group and was listed in the Paris Euronext. Some of the companies acquired in the next few years are Vordel, an Irish company, SCI Soluções, a Brazilian company, assets of Information Gateway in Australia, and a French company called Systar. The company went public in 2011 and since then both its annual revenue and profit have increased steadily. But, recently, the company’s growth hasn’t been very impressive and its stock has declined by 22% in the past few months.

In 2015, Christophe Fabre stepped down from the position of CEO of the company which he was holding from 2005. Axway acquired many more companies in the recent year starting with Appcelerator, a US-based mobile technology company whose main product is Titanium, an open-source platform for mobile app development. In 2017, Axway acquired another US company called Syncplicity, a company that develops solutions for sharing and synchronization of files. Though Axway Software operates as an independent entity, Sopra Steria acquired an 8.62% stake in the company in 2006.

Patrick Donovan – CEO of Axway Software

Patrick Donovan is the CEO of the company since 2018 and he replaced Jean-Marc Lazzari for the position. Before becoming the CEO of Axway Software, he served as the CFO of the same company. Donovan being an American citizen has spent several years in France which gave him a good idea about both the American and French scenario of Axway. Donovan mainly oversees the company’s financial and legal functions and has in-depth knowledge about the business model of Axway.

Zuora

Zuora – A savior for large enterprises to help with their billing systems.

Zuora is an American enterprise software company that develops software for businesses to manage their subscription-based services. When the company was founded, its main goal was to assist large enterprises with a proper billing system. Zuora provides a cloud-based billing platform that is designed to automate several features like recurring billing, collections, revenue recognition, subscription metrics, etc. Zuora is a publicly-traded company that is currently headquartered in Redwood Shores, California. It has more than 1,200 employees working under Tien Tzuo, CEO of the company.

About Zuora

Zuora was founded in 2007 in a small office at Mountain View, California. The founders of the company are K.V. Rao, Cheng Zuo, and Tien Tzuo. They both had industry experience as they spent several years working at WebEx and salesforce.com. Zuora, today, has become a leading company in the subscription economy industry as its cloud-based platform automates all subscription order-to-revenue operations for its clients.

The company went public in 2018 and got listed on New York Stock Exchange. The same year it established a partnership with maximum automobile manufacturing giants. Recently, Zuora was named one of the best workplaces by Glassdoor (2018) and became Innovator of the Year (2019) by the San Mateo County Economic Development Association.

History of the Company

In 2007, the three founders established Zuora to help enterprise companies in the 21st century with their real-time billing platform. Before founding Zuora, Roa and Zou were engineers at WebEx while Tzuo was an executive at Salesforce. They named the company after their surnames (combination of three surnames) and launched their first flagship product in 2008. In 2008 they launched two products, Z-billing and Z-Force. The latter one was the first billing solution of the company fully integrated with Salesforce CRM.

Zuora
Image source: octotelematics.com

Expansion

Zuora attracted investors from the beginning and hence it was able to raise lucrative funding from many famous investors. This helped Zuora expand in international markets in a short time. In 2010, the company expanded to Europe, and the next year it made it into the OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies list. It was also featured in VentureWire’s FASTech 50 list and JMP Hot 100 Best Privately Held Software Companies.

In 2012 the company expanded to the Australian market and the next year it celebrated its 50th consecutive product release. In 2015, Zuora opened eight new offices worldwide and also entered the Japanese market, and became a total team of 500 employees. It also launched subscribed magazine and bagged the best technology innovation award from Ventana Research. 2016 was an eventful year for Zuora as it launched subscribed podcasts, featured on Forbes 100 Best Cloud Companies, Tzuo named E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year, crossed $40 billion invoice transaction volume, etc. This year Zuora also launched the Subscription Economy Index, a product that tracks revenue growth of subscription businesses.

By 2017, Zuora successfully landed 900 customers and released its 100th product since it was launched. Ken Goldman, CFO of Yahoo, joined Zuora’s board and the company also opened a new data center in Germany. Recently, Zuora has brought many experienced new members into the team like Robbie Traube (former Adobe executive) as Chief Revenue Officer and Todd McElhatton (former employee of SAP) as Chief Financial Officer.

Funding

Zuora successfully led its first round of funding (Series A) on the year that it was founded. It raised $6 million in Series A funding and it was led by Benchmark Capital and Marc Benioff. In September 2008, the Series B funding was led by Shasta Ventures where the company raised $15 million followed by $20 million in October 2010. By 2015 Zuora already conducted a Series F funding round and raised a total amount of $250 million. Major investors include Redpoint Ventures, Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, Index Ventures, Vulcan Capital, etc.

Tien Tzuo – Co-founder and CEO of Zuora

Tien Tzuo is a famous American tech entrepreneur who co-founded Zuora. He is currently the CEO of the company and was previously the Chief Strategy Officer of Salesforce. Tzuo was born in Taiwan and moved to Brooklyn when he was very young. He completed his studies at Cornell University and worked at Oracle Corporation for six years.