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Honeywell

Honeywell – American Conglomerate Making Big in the World.

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Honeywell, officially known as Honeywell International Inc. is a Charlotte, North Carolina-based conglomerate. The company is over a century old and operated independently as Honeywell Inc. until its merger into AlliedSignal in 1999. Since Honeywell was already a recognized name, the merger was then called Honeywell International Inc. Mark C. Honeywell founded the company in 1906 in Wabash, Indiana, and since then, it has seen steady growth economically as well as client wise.

About the Honeywell

Honeywell is a century-old company and has its headquarters based in Charlotte, North Carolina. It is a publically traded technology company that mainly deals in aerospace, building technologies, performance materials, information technology, safety, and productivity solutions. Honeywell is a multinational conglomerate having 110,000 employees working for it, among which 44,000 people are working for the company in its US offices only. Honeywell is a renowned company having its name ranked 92nd among the Fortune 100 company in 2019.

Honeywell
Image source: prnewswire.com

The Back Story

Mark Honeywell founded Honeywell Inc. as Honeywell Heating Specialty Company in Wabash, Indiana, a company that manufactured and sold mercury seal generators. The product was invented by the founder itself. It was the time when everyone was trying to build and sell home heating systems. Since the competition was high, the company first acquired Jewell Manufacturing Company in 1922 and later merged with Minneapolis Heat Regulator Company in 1927, forming Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company. Together both the companies started expanding to improve their control systems.

In 1934, Honeywell went international for the first time and entered the Japanese market after it partnered with a Japanese distributor Yamatake. The international expansion also led to the Canadian market, the market of the Netherlands as well as an office opening in Europe. Honeywell was also among the manufacturers who built and supplied products like superior tank periscope, camera stabilizers, C-1 autopilot, to the US military during World War II.

Working with the US army helped the company to grow other skills as well and make new products. After the world war ended, the company started to build parts for aircraft, like the automated control units. It also partnered with the USAF Wright-Air Development Center in 1953 for the same purpose. At the same time, the computer was an emerging industry, and the company also started a computer manufacturing division named Datamatic in partnership with Raytheon. The company launched DATAmatic 1000 as its first computer.

The 60s was the decade of growth and expansion, such that the company started to import the Pentax cameras and photographic equipment as well as acquired companies like Security Burglar Alarm Company.  

In the next decade, company had a joint venture with Groupe Bull and Control Data Corporation, named Magnetic Peripherals Inc. to enter the hard disk market. It also started to take interest in GE’s ongoing Multics operating system project. By the end of the 70s, the company was already a leader in the field of defense, aerospace, and computing.

In 1980, company acquired Incoterm Corporation to invest in the software market. The company was now selling airline reservations as well as bank teller software. By 2000, Honeywell was already valuing over $21 billion.

In the past twenty years, company has been acquiring big names in different industries. In 2015, it also stepped into the gas, electricity, and water meters business. The company has also started to work in the field of software, cyber-security, robotics, etc. As per the 2020 records, the company made revenues worth US$32.64 billion and owns assets worth US$64.586 billion.

Acquisitions

Honeywell’s acquisition policy has helped it grow rapidly. The major acquisitions of the company include Jewell Manufacturing Company (1922), Time-O-Stat Controls Company (1931), Brown Instrument Company (1934), Intervox Company (1950), Security Burglar Alarm Company (1969), GE’s process control business (1970), l’Informatique (1976), Xerox Data Systems (1975), Sperry Aerospace Group (1986), Duracraft (1996), AlliedSignal (1999), Pittway (2000), Ultrak (2002), GEM Microelectronics (2004), ActiveEye (2007), IAC (2008), Iris Systems (2011), Intermec (2013), Com Dev (2016) and Sparta Systems (2021), etc.

The Founder

Mark Charles Honeywell, a recognized electronics industrialist, founded Honeywell Inc. in 1906 and served the company as the first president and chairman for a period of 6 years. Honeywell was born and brought up in Wabash, Indiana. He went to Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and graduated in 1891. He founded Honeywell Inc. as a water heating system manufacturing company, and today, after about a hundred years, the company is known as a leading conglomerate operating worldwide in different fields.

SmartBear Software

SmartBear Software – A Company Originally Founded By Jason Cohen Now A Part Of Bigger Enterprise.

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SmartBear Software is an American-based IT company that went through several folds of acquisitions since 2003. Jason Cohen, a successful entrepreneur and also an author, founded SmartBear and sold the company in 2007. The SmartBear company that we see today is the result of multiple acquisitions that took place between 2007 and 2009. SmartBear Software is known for delivering products for software development and testing, API testing and management, etc. Currently, the company is based in Somerville, Massachusetts, US and it operates under the leadership of CEO, Frank Roe.

About SmartBear Software

SmartBear is an information technology company that focuses on developing quality software for its clients. The products and solutions of SmartBear encompass a wide variety of options from test automation to code collaborator. SmartBear develops its products in such a way that it is not only affordable but also easy to try and integrate into your current system. So, the company makes sure to provide quality solutions at affordable pricing. More than 24,000 organizations have used the products of SmartBear including some famous brands like Adobe, Microsoft, FedEx, etc. The SmartBear tools are used by more than 15 million users in over 194 countries for different purposes.

SmartBear Software
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History of Today’s SmartBear Software

Jason Cohen bootstrapped SmartBear for seven years and turned it into a success. The company started generating profit in millions and then he sold the company in 2007. Insight Venture Partners acquired SmartBear Software during that time along with two other companies, namely, AutomatedQA and Pragmatic Software. These three companies became a single entity and operated as AQA Holdings which in 2010 became SmartBear Software.

Automated QA was a software company founded in 1999 in Nevada. The company was well-known for building automated software testing tools. The company, before the acquisition and merger, was featured in the SD Times 100 list in the software development field. Born in 2005, Pragmatic Software became the first Microsoft Certified Partner software company in Albania. As the three companies started working together as a single brand, it acquitted another business called Eviware in 2011. A series of companies was acquired by SmartBear in the next few years including AlertSite, Lucierna, Swagger, and many more. The acquisitions led to some of the founders joining SmartBear which uplifted the quality of the team. In 2017, SmartBear was further acquired (major stake) by Francisco Partners.

SmartBear During the Pandemic

Frank Roe recently became the CEO of the company which was two weeks before the lockdown started due to COVID-19. A situation of sudden shutdown and shifting to a completely online mode of work became a new challenge for each and every company. So, being the new leader of SmartBear, Frank tried to maintain a very strong communication line among the employees, not only meeting but also virtual social gatherings. Most of the employees at SmartBear are very young, so their enthusiasm and curiosity helped the company move swiftly to the WFH environment without such amendments. Frank also believes that one of the most important reasons that SmartBear has successfully stayed strong during COVID-19 is because of the entrepreneurial spirit in the team. As the founders of the business acquired by SmartBear have come on board and joined the team, it has created a diverse team bonded with the same spirit of passion.

Awards and Recognitions

The new SmartBear Software has won many awards in the past years and still continues to thrive. Some of them include becoming the best medium-sized company to work in 2014 which was awarded by Glassdoor. Boston named SmartBear as one of the ‘50 on Fire’ companies in 2019 and the next year it was in the list of 100 Best Places to Work in Boston 2020 by BuiltIn.

Frank Roe – CEO of SmartBear

Frank Roe joined SmartBear with 25 years of rich experience in the business world. He started off his career by working as a strategy consultant and slowly moved up the ladder. Frank worked for multiple companies including Deloitte Consulting, Incentive Systems, Progress, Oracle, RSD, etc. He joined SmartBear as the Chief Revenue Officer in 2018 and became CEO in February 2020.

G20 to Double their Efforts in Wrapping Up the Digital Tax by 2020

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Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, these are some of the top tech giants that are working globally, and in the past few years, questions have been raised on the tax these companies have been cutting off by shifting to low tax countries. The financial authorities of the developed countries have always seen this as an unfair move, as they earn complete profits but pay lesser tax.

G20
Image Source: middleeastmonitor.com

To resolve this problem, the finance ministers of the G20 countries have finally agreed on imposing new rules on those tech companies, such that they will now pay taxes based on their profits and in which countries they are serving, instead of where they are based.

G20 is an international organisation, comprising of world’s 19 biggest economies and the Europian Union, making a total of 47 countries, that works towards economic stability.

Reuters reported the news first, through a draft communique obtained by the former, according to which, the G20 companies will compile common rules to close the loopholes for the tech companies. Though the low tax had been beneficial for small countries to attract international tech giants.

The new rules will include a two-pillar approach. According to the first pillar, the tax will be based on two things, what are the services or goods that the companies will be providing and where these companies are operating. The second pillar will impose a minimum tax rate on every company, such that even the services are moved to another country, the basic tax will be the same.

“We welcome the recent progress on addressing the tax challenges arising from digitization and endorse the ambitious program that consists of a two-pillar approach. We will redouble our efforts for a consensus-based solution with a final report by 2020.” stated the draft communique.

For the support of the agreement, countries like France and Britain have been quite supportive as the tech giants strategically pay lesser tax in those countries. But upon this, the U.S. based companies have also raised the concern of being most targeted by the European countries.

The finalisation of the rules for the taxes to be imposed on the global tech companies is still under process. But according to the reports, G20 will release the final report on the new rules in 2020.

The Success Story of Hewlett-Packard (HP)

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HP is not a new name in the IT industry, and the narrative of the company is over 80 years old. The company was founded by two Stanford graduates Bill Hewlett and David Packard, in January 1939.

The two co-founders met each other in a social outing during the time they were studying at Stanford. Both were pursuing a degree in electrical engineering and shared a common interest in starting a business after completing their education. They discussed their idea with their fellowship professor Frederick Terman at Stanford and with his supervision started working on the same.

The two started their company from Packard’s garage in Palo Alto, in 1938, with an initial capital investment of US$538, even without deciding a proper name for it. In 1939, they tossed a coin to decide the name for the company adopting the surname of their names. The toss was among Hewlett-Packard and Packard-Hewlett, in which Hewlett-Packard won.

hewlett-packerd
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The first product from the company was a precision audio oscillator, the Model HP200A. It was cheap and efficient, and became one of the most successful product, commercially. The same product was also used by Walt Disney Productions, for the movie Fantasia, in certifying the Fantasound surround sound systems installed in theatres.

In 1957, the company went public in its initial public offering.

In the 1960s, Hewlett-Packard started producing the semiconductor devices for the instruments and calculators. In 1966, the company entered into a new business of computer manufacturing and rolled out the accumulator-based design HP 2100 / HP 1000 series of minicomputers, followed by the HP 9800 and HP 250 series of desktop and business computers.

In the 70s the company started producing the advanced business computers, i.e. stack-based HP 3000 computers. During the same time, the HP 2640 series smart computers were also introduced that included one of the first bit mapped graphics displays. The same computer was used to develop the first commercial WYSIWYG Presentation Program, BRUNO, by coupling the HP 2100 21MX F-Series micro-coded Scientific Instruction Set.

In the same decade, the company produced the world’s first handheld scientific calculator HP-35, world’s first handheld programmable HP-65, first alphanumeric, programmable, expandable HP-41C and first symbolic, and the graphing calculator HP-28C.

In the 80s, Hewlett-Packard expanded its business to build printers and scanners for desktop computers. With the rise of the internet, the company registered its website domain as HP.com, on 3 March 1986, becoming the ninth Internet .com domain ever. In 1989, HP acquired the Apollo Computer, and in 1995 it acquired the Convex Computers.

By 1998, the company had become one of the leaders in the desktops, laptops, and servers for many different markets. Later, it also started its online service hpshopping.com, to sell its products online, which was rebranded to “HP Home & Home Office Store” in 2005.

In 2005, due to the merger with Compaq, Hewlett-Packard was facing heavy losses in the business. In 2006, the company offered a new range of products in both hardware and software, reducing the costs. In 2007, the company’s revenues skyrocketed, and HP hit the $100 Billion mark for the first time.

In 2011, Hewlett-Packard launched its first tablet named HP TouchPad, followed by the industries’ first wireless mouse. But by the end of the same year, it announced that it won’t be operating in the tablet and smartphone business anymore, and will focus more on the Cloud, solutions and software business.

In the years 2012-13, the Hewlett-Packard faced a great decline in its profits, cutting down 34000 jobs in the same years.

In October 2014, the news of splitting up of Hewlett Packard into two separate companies came into knowledge. The two wings would do their separate business of personal computers and printer manufacturing. Finally, in November 2015, the company separated into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc. retaining the Hewlett-Packard’s stock price history.

Although the company has seen many ups and downs during its long journey, the vast history of HP has introduced the world with many great inventions. The company also gets credits for many patents and will be known for its contribution to the IT industry.