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SolarWinds Inc – A Software Development Company that has Recently Fallen Victim to the World’s Largest Cyberattack.

In the past year, the name of SolarWinds Inc has been crawling in every news website speaking of cyberattacks. SolarWinds is a major software developing company based in America which has many reputed multinational companies as its clients. Last year, the company was the victim of the most sophisticated and the largest cyberattack the world has ever witnessed. After this attack, a security firm called Trustwave raised some concerns regarding the security flaws in the products of SolarWinds which questioned if the company can protect its client’s privacy at all. The cyberattack followed by these allegations had a negative impact on the company’s reputation and the share price fell.

About SolarWinds Inc

SolarWinds Inc is an American software company with headquarters based in Austin, Texas. The company develops software for enterprises that helps in managing networks, IT infrastructure, and systems. SolarWinds has several offices in the US and overseas with more than 3,200 employees working for the company. Donald Yonce and David Yonce founded the company in 1999 and it became a publicly-traded company in 2009. The company has approximately 300,000 customers which include most of the Fortune 500 companies. There was a huge investigation last year when Orion, one of the SolarWinds products was compromised by a cyberattack.

Early days

Donald Yonce, who was a former executive at Walmart along with his brother, David Yonce started SolarWinds in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Though the company was established in 1999, the two brothers started working on their products ahead of time. Trace Route and Ping Sweep were the first two products rolled out by the company. In November 2001, SolarWinds released its first web-based network performance monitoring application. In 2006, Michael Bennett became the CEO of the company and the headquarters were shifted from Tulsa to Austin. During 2007, the company raised funds from Bain Capital, Insight Venture Partners, and Austin Ventures. After the fundings, the company decided to file its first IPO of $112.5 million and became public in 2009.

After the first IPO, the company made several acquisitions and expanded rapidly. In 2011, it was featured in Forbes magazine as one of the top fastest-growing companies. Bennett’s leadership ended in 2010 and he was replaced by the former CFO of the company, Kevin Thompson. In 2013, the company announced that it will be investing in an operations hub in Utah. The company’s target was to develop high-functioning products at a low cost which is desirable by every enterprise. The same year, SolarWinds was named the Best Small Company in America by Forbes. The number of employees in SolarWinds doubled from 2011 to 2013 as the total count became 900. In 2016, the company had more than 1700 employees and generated annual revenue of half a billion dollars. During this time the company was taken private and again filed a public offering in 2018. Last year, Kevin Thompson retired and he was replaced by Sudhakar Ramakrishna. Currently, the company is trying to cope up with the losses it faced during the recent cyberattack.

Acquisitions

In 2007, the company received good funding and it decided to invest the money in new acquisitions. So, the company acquired Neon Software and monitor Corp. The company also opened a new office in Ireland for sales purposes. The company didn’t just acquire companies but also focused on acquiring products that matched the interest of the company. After the company became public in 2009, it acquired many companies including Kiwi Enterprises, Hyper9 Inc, TriGeo, EminentWare, etc. By this time the company opened offices outside the US, including Australia, Czech Republic, India, and Singapore. The recent companies acquired by the company are Capzure Technology, Librato, SpamExperts, VividCortex, etc.

Sudhakar Ramakrishna – CEO of SolarWinds

Sudhakar Ramakrishna has recently become the CEO of the company. He has 25 years of professional experience in different fields including networking, security, mobility, etc. He is the former CEO of Pulse Secure and also worked at Citrix, Motorola, 3Com, etc. Ramakrishna is an alumnus of Kansas State University.

Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

Cisco – Journey from developing a simple router to becoming pro in networking and telecommunication sector

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Jayshri

The present world we are living in is complex, and much progress, and more communicative. While advanced networking is responsible to connect us to any corner of the world. However, many firms working in this field made communication easier, and more efficient. Cisco Systems is doing an excellent job since its foundation. It is set up in 1984 by a scientist at Stanford University, who also contribute to connecting computers at the university. That is Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner. Today, the firm has counted in the leading companies that manufacture world-class network infrastructure. As well, the firm explored its business all over the world. Currently, it is having more than 75K employees and networking experts.

About Cisco System

A USA based multinational company Cisco is headquartered in San Jose in California. Recently in 2020, Cisco ranked fourth as per the Fortune Magazine. Thus, became the part of 100 best companies to work for in 2020. However, the firm is well known for manufacturing both software and hardware for network infrastructure. As well as manufactures high-tech products and telecom equipment that are known as promising in the international market. Apart from being expertise in the networking field, it also specializes in explicit tech markets. Such as domain security, IoT, and energy management. Jabber, Webex, OpenDNS, Jasper, etc are leading subsidiaries that Cisco acquired to compete in the changing market.

The backstory of foundation

As said earlier, Cisco is born out of the unique idea of computer scientists at Stanford University. As per the part of the research and need to connect computers they created the technology on the campus. For this, the founder Leonard and Sandy developed a router called ‘Blue Box’. With this, each computer could communicate with other computers easily. It was no doubt a small size network infrastructure, later on, shaped as Cisco system in 1984. As a matter of fact, the idea of the name “Cisco” has come from the city name San Francisco.

However, the firm had gone through lots of hurdles in the initial days. During the first phase of development, the founders unfortunately were accused of stealing the idea. This matter closed after both of them resigned from the firm. No matter what, but the firm has offered miscellaneous service in the networking field. In fact, it was the first firm to introduced multiple network protocol routers in the market. After 1990, Cisco expanded the business with the acquisition of several leading companies like OpenDNS, Webex, etc.

Glimpse on founders’ lives

Bosack and Learner build the base of the Cisco system with the implementation of research of William Yeager’s. For this, they had to face lots of hustles. Even both of them accused of stealing the idea, software, and hardware design. This dispute ends after leaving the firm that they build with great vision. Though, they played an applausive role in Cisco’s establishment that today known as one of the leading companies all over the world.

Leonard Bosack

Despite belonging to a catholic family, Bosack was interested in technology. He attended La Salle College High School. Thereafter, he went to the University of Pennsylvania for graduation. Leonard then joined a digital equipment corporation just after his graduation. During this job, he found interest in network technology. To follow his interest and to work in this field, he registered at Sandford University in computer science. While studying at Stanford, he met Sandy learner, who later became his partner in life as well as in business.

Sandy Lerner

She is hailed from North California, attended California State University for under graduation. Thereafter, Sandy attended Claremont Graduate School to study econometrics. As well, she also went to Stanford University to study statistics and computer science. In 1984, Lerner’s cooperation resulted in the formation of the Cisco system.

Later Success of Cisco

After lots of up-downs, the firm went public meanwhile. Thereafter, it started the expansion of the business all over the world including India. The firm has never compromised its products and services. As well, it evolved as per changing technology and appropriately noted the requirements of the market from time to time. To advance in and achieved supremacy in modern technology, the firm used an acquisition strategy. ParStream, AppDynamics, Lancope, Accompany these are some of the noticeable acquisitions that Cisco made.

Jayshri

Jayshri is an Electronics Engineer, but her passion towards writing made her to be in this field. Apart from content writing, she loves reading, writing and surfing on various topics. In her free time, she likes to watch TV series and news. Sherlock Holmes is her all time favorite show. Jayshri loves cooking various Indian-western dishes.

CISCO SYSTEMS, A BLESSING IN THE SPHERE OF TELECOMMUNICATION AND NETWORKING

Leave a Comment / Founder, Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Smart and advanced networking is what connects the world more efficient today transferring data within a fraction of second. There are many huge companies that today sells product both software and hardware-based on telecommunication engineering. Cisco Systems is one such company, in fact, one of the biggest multinational conglomerates with more than 74,000 employees around the globe. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California with Chuck Robbins as the current Chairman and CEO of the company. Cisco was founded in 10th December 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner.

About the founders

Born into a Catholic family in Pennsylvania, Bosack went to La Salle College High School followed by Wharton School in 1973. He pursued his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and right after graduating joined Digital Equipment Corporation. Bosack worked there as a hardware engineer and he was highly interested in networking. Bosack went to Stanford University to study Computer Science where he started working under a project dealing with the network router. During this time, he met Lerner at the Business School Lab and both of them got married.

Lerner was from North California and received her undergraduate degree from California State University. In 1977, she graduated from Claremont Graduate School with a Master’s in econometrics after which she went to Stanford and received another Master’s degree in Statistics and Computer Science. Since both of them were working on the same project of managing a computer network, they started working in their home and developing routers from scratch. They turned their garage into an office and finally co-founded Cisco in 1984.

Early History of Cisco

Since both of them were a part of Stanford University, they started there early research and development in the campus itself. In 1984, the couple created a technology that helped to communicate each computer of Stanford with each other through a multiprotocol router called “Blue Box”. Even before the company barely scratched the surface the co-founders were accused of replicating ideas and software in 1986. After going through a lot of hustle-bustle the company finally went public in February 1990 and was added in the NASDAQ stock exchange. The legal disputes of Cisco finally ended in August 1990 when Lerner was fired along with his husband signing off from the company.

Cisco was the first company in the tech industry to sell routers with multiple network protocols making that a very big advantage for the company. The company made an impressive amount of acquisitions in the 1990s which includes companies like Stratacom and Current Corporation. Even when the dot-com boom crushed the market, Cisco stood still as one of the most valuable companies with it’s market value rounding up to $500 billion.

Intermediate Phase of Cisco

Once Cisco started expanding around the world, it also established firm roots on the market of India as well. The company established a Globalization Centre in Bangalore spending around $1 billion for it. In the year 2011, the company started cutting expenditures strictly as the profit wasn’t up to the mark. Around 3,000 employees were eliminated through early retirement plans and the $1 billion was cut from the annual expenses of the company.

Present-day Cisco with Chuck Robbins

Chuck Robbins joined Cisco in 1997 as an Account Manager but once he reached the executive position, he brought an entirely new era for the realm of Cisco. He brought cloud computing to the company threading to the networking tech of Cisco and more advanced software. Robbins after becoming the CEO of the company in 2015, mainly focused I two things, cloud computing and software-subscription revenue. Robbin’s main motive was to bring more modernization into the company by both updating their products as well as methods of getting things done. Besides cloud computing, Robbins also promoted fog computing in his company and founded OpenFog Consortium with ARM Holdings, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Princeton University.

After the mid-2015, Cisco acquired companies like ParStream, Lancope, and AppDynamics etc. With advancing in the field of modern tech, Robbins didn’t step back from delving into the segment of AI and ML which made him acquire Accompany, an AI-based start-up for $270 million.
The company has been featured several times in several business magazines which include Cisco securing 444th rank in the list of Forbes Global 2000. The company had total equity of $43.2 billion in 2018.