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ForgeRock

ForgeRock – Accessing the Internet With Security.

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The past two decades have brought a lot of changes in almost every industry. From personal computers to having multiple personal virtual accounts on various sites and for work, we are all about usernames and passwords today. Having a different account for each client helps the companies manage them better, hence, from having a work identity to a shopping identity, we have to have those IDs for almost everything. But when we are logging in to various such sites, whether for shopping or work only, we have constant doubt of identity theft. Therefore, companies like ForgeRock are there.

ForgeRock is an American company building an enterprise-grade platform for managing, securing, and governing different types of organisations. The ForgeRock platform from the company helps the organisations to work faster and in a safer environment. With the changing technologies, the company is using cloud architecture to make every site, app or any other platform using ForgeRock accessible from anywhere securely.

About ForgeRock

ForgeRock is an identity and access management software company founded in February 2010. A group of people who worked at Sun Microsystem had founded the company in Norway, and the headquarters of the company resides in San Francisco, California, United States. It is a publically traded company and trades as FORG on NYSE. Its flagship product is identity management software named after the company’s name, i.e., ForgeRock. The company produces identity solutions for big organizations and offers its service in over 50 countries. As per the 2021 records, over 700 people are employed at ForgeRock, whereas it has gained more than 1300 permanent clients globally. The company made annual revenues worth $100 million for FY2019.

ForgeRock
Image source: solutionsreview.com

The Back Story

A group of people, who were employed at Sun Microsystems founded ForgeRock in 2010, in Norway. ForgeRock was a concept upon which Sun was already working, but after Oracle acquired the company, it discontinued the project, and the founders of the Company started to work on the same project and eventually founded the company. In the very beginning, only the employees of a company using computers for their work needed identity protection, but the founders of ForgeRock had a larger vision. They knew that the concept of identity management has a bigger scope in general. This vision helped the company build a platform that is sufficient to manage identities across and for the workforce, consumers, and things.

The company provides two different types of products, i.e., a platform for organisations and SDKs for building apps. The company also offers training and certification programs for developing and deploying identity solutions under its ForgeRock University.

For the establishment of the company, the founders bagged investments worth $250 million from investors like Accel Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Riverwood Capital, etc., in venture capital. Names like BMW, Toyota, BBC, Philips, Geico, Richmond, etc., are a few of the permanent clients of ForgeRock, and the company serves industries including financial services, healthcare, government, retail, manufacturing, telecommunication, media, auto, smart mobility, etc.

ForgeRock is a publically traded company and went public on NYSE in September 2021. The ForgeRock platform offers services like Access Management, Identity Gateway, Directory Services as well as Identity Management, etc. The company has also won some recognition, including the SC2020 Awards, 2020 Fortress Cyber Security Award, Silver 2020 Stevie Award, etc.

The CEO at ForgeRock

Fran brings is the current CEO at ForgeRock. He has over twenty years of experience as a management leader in various leading name companies, including VeriSign and Symantec. Rosch holds B.S. in industrial engineering from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA.

ESET

ESET – Establishing a Secure Digital Environment for People.

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Though having computers connected with the internet has brought lots of benefits for people, making the work faster and accurate, it has also caused some threats to the same work. With the rise in the facilities with the technology, people are now more prone to data theft and malware on their computers. So since we needed the IT field to grow, we also needed some software and techniques to tackle such situations. For that, many companies started to work to provide security in the form of antiviruses and firewalls such that from surfing on the internet to making huge transactions online have become safer.
One of such companies that have been working to make the internet a safer place for people is ESET. ESET is almost 30 years old and has earned a good reputation as a security software development company in the industry. In fact, ESET is one of the most successful Slovak IT companies in the IT industry. The company provides security solutions for Windows, Linux, Mac as well as Android devices.

About the Company

ESET is a Bratislava, Slovakia-based software technology company, founded in 1992. The company mainly deals in the development of antivirus and security software. It has a long product list, among which, ESET Smart Security for Windows, ESET Cybersecurity for Mac, ESET Mobile Security for smartphones, and ESET SysRescue Live the most famous ones. The company is the home for more than 1700 employees and as of 2018, made revenues worth €504 million. In the past thirty years, the company has successfully expanded its operations overseas, having its multiple branches based in over 200+ countries, including the US, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Australia, etc.

ESET
Image source: 1000logos.net

The Founding of ESET

Rudolf Hrubý, Peter Paško, and Miroslav Trnka are known as the founders of ESET. Miroslav Trnka and Peter Paško had already worked together on the antivirus software named NOD in 1987. The two met Rudolf Hrubý and partnered with him to build a new company, named ESET. The name was taken from the Egyptian goddess of health, marriage, and love. The three founded the company in 1992 with NOD as their first product. In 1998, they brought the next version of NOD, the NOD32 Antivirus, which in the same year was awarded the first Virus Bulletin Test award. The success of the product helped the company to grow outside the country as well, and they opened branches in countries like the US, Argentina, Singapore, etc., during the same time.
In 2001, ESET went on to open another branch in Prague, Czech Republic, and in 2008, the company established its Research and Development Center in Poland. The next year, the company was honored with the CNET Editor’s Choice Award under the Internet security suite category for ESET’s Smart Security 4. In 2011, the company was awarded the Global Customer Value Enhancement Award, followed by the North American Endpoint Security Products Customer Value Enhancement Award in 2012.
In 2012, ESET established another Research and Development Center in Montreal, Canada. Till now, Company has established 13 such centers in different parts of the world. The company also launched its first authentication product named ESET Secure Authentication as well as the Managed Service Provider (MSP) Program, in 2013. The company’s Endpoint Security software also won the Best Antivirus Software by Maximum PC in 2013. In 2018, the company became a part of 40 companies’ initiative to protect the end-user data providing cybersecurity through the Cybersecurity Tech Accord program.
Compay provides cybersecurity as well as antivirus solutions to homes, offices as well as enterprises. Smart Security, Internet Security, NOD32 Antivirus, Cyber Security, Endpoint, Remote Administrator 6, ESET SysRescue Live are some of ESET’s major products.

The CEO at ESET

Richard Marko is the current CEO at ESET. He has been voted as the “Most Respected CEO” in Slovakia in 2015, by 121 business leaders. Marko went to the Slovak Technical University in KoÅ¡ice and received a graduate degree in Information Systems Department in 1996. He has been with the company from the very beginning and was one of the authors of ESET NOD32 Antivirus scanning engine. He worked as the Chief Software Architect of the scanning core for a period of ten years, and in 2008 he was appointed as the CTO at ESET. In January 2011, he became the CEO of ESET.

Proofpoint Inc

Proofpoint Inc – An American SaaS Provider Specialising In Security Software.

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Proofpoint Inc is a security software company based in Sunnyvale, California, US. Eric Hahn founded the company in 2002 and since then it has grown into a big family of more than 3600 employees. Proofpoint is a very well-known and reliable company when it comes to providing SaaS and products. The main product of the company is providing security software for inbound email, email encryption, outbound data loss prevention, email archiving, etc. Proofpoint currently serves more than 8,000 organizations across the globe. Apart from its headquarter, the company also has offices in Australia, Europe, Canada, US, and several Asian countries. Currently, Gary Steele is the Chairman and CEO of the company.

History of the Company

In June 2002, Eric Hahn founded the company, Proofpoint Inc. He is most famous as the CTO of Netscape Communications which lost the market to Internet Explorer. For a year, the company made attempts to raise a good amount of funding. So, after it received Series A funding, the company raised $7 million and then decided to launch publicly in July 2003. During the initial days, venture investors like Benchmark Capital along with Stanford University backed the company. The same year, Proofpoint released its first product and raised another $9 million from Series B funding.

The first-ever product that was released by Proofpoint was called the Proofpoint Protection Server. This was built for medium and large-scale businesses and it used machine learning algorithms to detect spam mails more accurately. The span detection software was hit in the market in the 2000s and it was one of the top business properties. This led to the very rapid growth of Powerpoint as it gained many customers in a short span of time.

With the increase in the number of cyber threats in different forms, the products of Proofpoint evolved accordingly. The company also introduced features like email encryption and identity-based encryption in its products. In 2008, the company introduced Proofpoint on Demand- Standard Edition which was especially for small and medium scale businesses that don’t run on their own servers. In 2012, the company filed its first IPO and became a publicly-traded company. A few months ago, Proofpoint declared that it will be acquired by a private equity firm, Thoma Bravo.

Proofpoint Inc
Image source: itsupplychain.com

Shifting Strategies During the Pandemic

With the start of lockdown that is still continuing in many places, business scenarios and goals changed for many companies. Proofpoint also had to evolve because of the sudden change in the work environment and something it didn’t plan to do. A major part of Proofpoint’s solutions revolves around mail, especially direct mail programs. But with the onset of the pandemic, they needed to change strategies as employees of companies all over the world shifted to their home environment. Halting the services of the company was never an option, so the company laid new strategies according to the remote workflow within only a week and a half and made some effective changes. Proofpoint decided to modify their direct mail programs and focus on targeted intent-based digital outreach.

Acquisitions

Proofpoint has acquired several companies in its journey since 2003. The first company acquired by Proofpoint was Fortiva which was back in June 2008 followed by Secure Data in Motion in the same year. In 2012, the company acquired NextPage and next year bought three companies in a row, namely, Abaca Technology Corporation, Armorize Technologies, and Sendmail Inc. The two biggest acquisitions in the history of Proofpoint are Wombat Security Technologies and ObserveIT, both for $225 million. The company’s latest acquisition was in February 2021 when it bought InteliSecure.

Gary Steele – CEO of Proofpoint Inc

Gary Steele has been serving as the CEO of the company since day 1. He is responsible for all the successful funding rounds and filing its first IPO. Before joining Proofpoint, he worked at many famous companies like Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Portera, and Sybase Inc. He studied computer science at Washington State University.