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Varonis Systems

Varonis Systems – A Software Company That Started To Mainly Protect Unstructured Data.

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In 2005, Yaki Faitelson and Ohad Korkus founded Varonis Systems to help organizations track, visualize, and protect their unstructured data. Varonis Systems is based in New York City, US and it has R&D offices in Herzliya, Israel. Varonis offers services globally and it has approximately 1,700 employees and more than 7,000 customers.

Though Varonis is a computer software company working to protect the unstructured data of its clients, it works a bit differently than other conventional cybersecurity firms. With the help of various platforms and data-tracking technology of Varonis, organizations can keep a real-time awareness of how every employee is accessing and using data to stop any malicious attacks.

About Varonis Systems

Since data is at the center of every organization, Varonis builds advanced platforms to help clients protect their unstructured data. In every organization, multiple malicious attacks that compromise sensitive data take place both from an external and internal source. To protect data, Varonis performs User Behavior Analytics (UBA) to identify any abnormal behavior before a cyberattack. The principle working pattern of Veronis is to extract the metadata from an organization’s IT infrastructure and then use the necessary information to map relationships among employees, data, etc.

Varonis has multiple types of products as per the need of a customer. Some of them are DatAlert (UBA and Data Security), DatAdvanatge (Data Governance and Data Protection), DatAnywhere (Enterprise File Sync and Sharing), etc. In 2008, the company made it to the list of Fast 50 Reader Favourites. Earlier this year, the company was awarded a Cyber Catalyst designation for its data security platform.

Varonis Systems
Image source: tadviser.com

The Idea Behind Founding Varonis

A big idea doesn’t emerge out of thin air. Whenever we are trying to find a solution to fix our problem, we hardly have any idea that how many people can benefit from an effective solution. The idea to establish Varonis Systems always emerged as a solution when the two founders were trying to find a solution to protect data. In 2003, an oil and gas company almost faced a disaster when they took high-resolution images of the ocean floor. But, one day the photographs suddenly disappeared from their server and no experts were able to discover what took place.

Unable to understand if the data was deleted by an accident or deliberately, the security experts saw an opportunity in the software industry. With every passing data, data is becoming more valuable to an individual, an enterprise, a nation, and to the whole world. So, security and systems experts (who previously worked at NetVision and NetApp), Yaki Faitelson, and Ohad Korkus founded Varonis Systems in 2005. They wanted to give organizations more visibility to their data and protect sensitive information.

History Of The Company

Varonis offers multiple ways for an organization to protect its data from both the employees of the company and external sources. The company mainly addresses issues like file activity tracking, access control, and information rights management. Varonis enables a company to track the behavior of an employee in the data server and if there is any abnormal behavior the system will be alerted. The co-founders created a system such that it would be able to extract metadata in the file systems.

While they were developing the product, they brought Dr. Jacob Goldberger, statistical modeling and machine learning expert onboard. He mainly helped the team to develop the algorithms that would provide the user data link. In 2005, these three people filed a patent and it was approved in 2006. The same year, Veronis released its first product, DatAdvanatge so that enterprises can monitor their file activity, data access rights, user behavior, etc. After a few years, the company added the IDU Classification Framework so that the system was able to search for various keywords and phrases. The main investors of the company are Accel Partners, Evergreen Venture Partners, Gitano Venture Capital, and EMC.

Yaki Faitelson – CEO Of Veronis Systems

Yaki Faitelson is the co-founder and current CEO of Veronis Systems. He is also the Chairman of the Board. Before co-founding Veronis Systems, Yaki served at many leadership positions in the global professional services and systems integration divisions of NetVision and Network Appliance.

Asana

Asana – The Makers Of Simplified Management Tools To Help Companies Focus On Their Goals.

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Small or big, goals are necessary for every type of growth, be it personal growth or growth as a big company. To achieve these goals, one needs to have a system or discipline that would help manage the tasks required to be fulfilled for those goals. The idea behind founding Asana has been the same. The company was founded to provide companies with software and web applications that would help them reduce the complexity of managing their teams, daily tasks, etc. so that they can achieve their targets (small or big) with lesser efforts and in time. The applications by Asana do not only help companies manage their teams and tasks, but also help the employees increase their productivity.

About Asana

Asana is a task management and productivity software development company founded in 2008. Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein founded the company to reduce the complexity of daily office work for the companies so that they can focus on the major part of the work. Asana is a Sanskrit word that means Yoga pose. The company headquarters is based in San Francisco, California, US and offers services to its clients globally. The software and applications by Asana include tasks like organizing and managing daily office work, managing the teams, and tracking the progress. Apart from web applications and software, Asana also provides API integration to third-party applications. Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Slack are some of those applications with Asana API integrations.
As of 2019, around 1000 people are working at Asana, and it made annual revenues worth $142.2 million in the same year. The company is publically traded, trading on New York Stock Exchange as ASAN.

Asana
Image source: thisweekinstartups.com

The Company History

Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein were working together at Facebook in its beginning years. The two worked on improving the productivity of the Facebook employees, as CTO and the engineer manager, respectively. In 2008, the two left their jobs at Facebook to establish Asana. The company launched the beta version of their software in 2011 and offered it for free to companies. Later in 2012, Asana released the software for commercial use. The software from Asana is to manage the collaboration of the employees and daily tasks. It is a software-as-a-service that provides multiple features helpful for companies to handle their projects and their teams.
In 2013, Asana launched another software named Organizations providing administration tools for companies. The next year, the company released Calendar View for iOS and the Android app for the same came in 2015, including team conversations feature. By the next year, Company had added more features to its software like team management, member management, status updates, task dependencies, custom fields, Boards, pre-made project templates, and security features, etc.
Asana partnered with Microsoft in 2017 and integrated its features into Microsoft Teams. The same year, Gmail also integrated some Asana features into it, resulting in the release of comment-only projects. Asana also released its versions in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese in 2017 and 2018. CSV importer and Timeline came in 2018. In 2021, Asana launched a special app for Zoom as well as a new Enterprise Work Graph suite.
Though Asana is not a very old company, it has been successful in bagging contracts and partnerships from big names like Google, Slack, Wufoo, Okta, Uber, Zoom, IBM, eBay, and Microsoft, and over 100,000 other paying customers. The company has won a few recognitions, like “one of the best collaboration and productivity apps for teams” by PC Magazine in 2017 and “one of the Best Workplaces for Parents” by Great Place to Work in 2020.

The Founder/CEO

Dustin Aaron Moskovitz is one of the co-founders and the present CEO of Asana. He was born on 22 May 1984 in Gainesville, Florida, U.S. Moskovitz went to the Vanguard High School and joined Harvard University to pursue a graduate degree with an economics major. He was one of the four roommates with Mark Zuckerberg at the university. So when Zuckerberg decided to drop from college to work on a Facebook full time, Moskovitz too joined in and moved to Palo Alto with him. Moskovitz was the first CTO at Facebook and spent four years at the company. In 2008, he, along with Justin Rosenstein, left Facebook and started Asana. Moskovitz became the first CEO of Asana and is still serving the company as the CEO.

FactSet

FactSet – Solving All Financial Industry Problems Using The Latest Technology.

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The rise of the IT industry has given great opportunities to other fields to level up their game using technology and remain up to date and relevant in today’s changing trends. Thus from hospital industries to aviation, from hospitality to finance, every field has opted to include technology to achieve the required growth in lesser time.
Talking about the finance industry, there has been a rise in the number of fintech companies as well and companies that provide software solutions to such companies. FactSet Research Systems Inc. falls into the latter category, a financial data, and software company that chose a traditional way of working in the beginning, but today is offering services based on the latest technologies. The company is about more than forty years old, but it has tried to walk with the changing trends, and thus, today is known as one of the leading financial data and software companies.

About The Company

Howard Wille and Charles Snyder founded FactSet in 1978. The company is an American financial services company, with its headquarters based in Norwalk, Connecticut, United States. The company is responsible for data integrations, large-scale transitions, reporting, and research analysis, API integration, index services, portfolio data management, etc. It is a publically traded company and trades with the symbol FDS on New York Stock Exchange. In the past 43 years, FactSet has reached 22 countries and has set up offices in 48 different locations. It has over 10000 people working for it globally and made annual revenues worth US$1.49 billion in the financial year 2020. With high revenues in 2020, FactSet became a unicorn 2020.

FactSet
Image Source: financialit.net

Founding FactSet

Howard Wille and Chuck Snyder founded FactSet in 1978. The two co-founders used to be co-workers at Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan, Wall Street. At the beginning of the 70s, computers became quite popular for office work, and with the acquisition of Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan by Shearson, the two thought of founding a company of their own that would directly sell user data to their clients. Hence in 1978, they founded FactSet, a company that began with delivering data on paper to the clients under the program, “Company FactSet”.
During the early 80s, FactSet offered its clients the option to download data directly to their spreadsheets, making the process simpler for the clients. In 1989, the company also started a new and advanced service with the name Private Database Service. The service helped users directly include the proprietary data into their research information.
In the next decade, Company released its software for Windows operating system and expanded overseas by establishing offices in countries like London and Tokyo. During the mid-90s, the company was serving the top investment managers in the US. In 1995, FactSet was renamed FactSet Research Systems Inc., and the next year, it went public on NYSE in 1996. In further years, the company released platforms like Portfolio Management Workstation, Economic Analysis, and Company Explorer. Along with those platforms, it also introduced the DIRECTIONS interface and Online Assistant for those platforms. It also started a 24*7 customer care telephone service in 1999.
In the next few years, the Company included more products and applications such as SPAR, Data Central, Marquee, IBCentral, etc. Later, the company merged DIRECTIONS interface, Marquee, and IBCentral into one, to form FactSet, a more versatile product for the FactSet clients. In further years, FactSet made some acquisitions including of Thomson Fundamentals database (2008), Market Metrics (2009), StreetAccount (2012), Revere Data (2013), Code Red Inc (2015), Vermilion (2016), BISAM (2017), Data Managed Solutions (2017), Truvalue Labs (2020), etc., adding to the growth of the company.

The CEO At FactSet

F. Philip Snow is the current CEO of FactSet. He is a B.A. graduate in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley and holds a Master’s degree in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Snow started his career by working at companies like Global Content Sales and Americas Sales. He joined FactSet in 1996 and served the company in different positions. For a long time, he handled the Asia Pacific regions for FactSet, operating from Tokyo and Sydney. In 2015, he became the CEO at FactSet. He is also a board member of the company.

Alteryx

Alteryx – An American-based Software Company That Develops Products For Data Science And Analytics.

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Founded in 1997, Alteryx was established as a software company in Irvine California. The products of Alteryx are used for making significant advancements in data science and analytics that help several organizations. The company offers a series of products as a part of its platform including Alteryx Connect, Alteryx Designer, Alteryx Promote, Analytics Hub, etc. It also hosts a cloud-based website which is called Alteryx Analytics Gallery. In the last two decades, Company has expanded worldwide with approximately 1,200 employees. Currently, the CEO of the company is Mark Anderson. Under his leadership, the company has acquired a lot of companies.

History Of Alteryx

The foundation history of Alteryx began with the establishment of SRC LLC in 1997. This company is the predecessor of Alteryx as the name of the company was changed in 2010 after its core product. Dean Stoecker, Duane Adams, and Ned Harding are the three founders of the company. When the company was newly launched, SRC was building a data engine that was the first of its kind to deliver demographic-based mapping with a very short reporting time. After one year, the company released Allocate, a new product 1998, It was a data engine that incorporated geographically organized US census data. This data engine allowed the users to analyze, manipulate, and map data.

The product line of the company eventually started growing as it rolled out another product, Solocast in the same year. This product was developed for the main purpose of customer segmentation analysis. After two years, a modified version of the Allocate software was developed as per a contract between SRC LLC and US Census Bureau. The bureau used the updated software to integrate on the CD-ROMs of Census Data. In 2006, the company developed a new product called Alteryx. This product had both spatial and non-spatial data environments for building various applications based on analytics.

Alteryx
Image source: medium.com

Expansion And Acquisitions

After the rollout of Alteryx, it became the core product of the company, and thus in 2010 SRC LLC changed its name to Alteryx. The funding received by Alteryx started escalating during this time as in 2011 the company raised $6 million from the Palo Alto investment arm of SAP Ventures. After two years it again raised $12 million from SAP Ventures and Toba Capital. The company conducted its Series B funding in 2014 where it was able to raise $60 million from existing investors and Insight Venture Partners. After this funding round, the company decided to expand its workspace by 30 percent.

In 2015, Alteryx raised another $85 million in a funding round led by ICONIQ Capital. The company announced that this fund will be used to expand internationally, improve their R&D facilities, and increase sales and marketing efforts. In 2016, Company was featured in the Forbes Cloud 100 list and a year after that it filed its IPO and went public. After the company started trading publicly, it made a series of acquisitions starting with a software company called Semanta in 2017. Later in 2017, Company acquired a data science startup, Yhat for $10.8 million. Some of the other companies acquired in the last few years are Alteryx ANZ, ClearStory Data, Feature Labs, etc.

Awards

The company has become one of the noticeable companies in the data science platform. In 2018, Gartner recognized Alteryx as a leader in the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms. Gartner Peer Insights also named the company “The Best Business Intelligence and Analytics Software of 2017.” KeyBanc Capital Markets named the company a Top 20 AI All-Stars Technology and the former CEO and co-founder of the company Dean Stoecker received the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2017.

About The Founders

Dean Stoecker is famous as the co-founder and former CEO of Alteryx. He went to the University of Colorado followed by Pepperdine University to complete his MBA. In 2019, the net worth of Stoecker was $1.2 billion.

Duane Adams is one of the co-founders of the company and the Chief Advocacy Officer of Alteryx. One of her main goals in the company is to diversify the workforce and upskill the people of the company to keep up with the constantly evolving business world. Before co-founding Alteryx, she worked at Strategic Mapping, Donnelley, and VNU Business Media.

Ned Harding has recently retired from Alteryx. But, while he was a part of the company he served as the Vice President and CTO of the same. Before co-founding Alteryx, he worked at several companies as a software engineer.

Anaplan

Anaplan – A San Francisco-based Software Company Mainly Famous For Its Enterprise Management Products.

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Based in San Francisco, California, Anaplan is a software company that sells subscription-based products for enterprise management helps in decision making. The software developed by the company are cloud-based products that mainly focus on business planning and it also provides data for business analytics. The founders of the company are Guy Haddleton, Sue Haddleton, and Michael Gould. Anaplan was founded in 2006 and currently, it has established markets in 13 different countries and employs nearly 2,000 people. Anaplan has customers from very diverse industrial sectors like healthcare, telecom, retail, banking, etc. Some of the big customers of the company are DocuSign, Tata Steel, and Zillow.

History Of Anaplan

Anaplan was originally founded in Yorkshire England by the Haddletons and Gould. The company made significant expansion, acquisition, and growth in the last century. In 2010, four years after officially founding the company, it sold its first product. The same year it received its first capital funding and within the next two years, Anaplan was able to host another funding round. In 2012, Anaplam raised $11.2 million in its Series B funding round. The main investors were Granite Ventures and Shasta Ventures. Anaplan also hired Frederic Laluyaux as the new CEO of the company in the same year, but he resigned from the company in 2016.

The company eventually started its acquisition and in 2013 bought Vue Analytics, one of its resellers based in the UK. The monetary terms were not disclosed to the public. In 2013, the company again had another round of funding (Series C) in which it raised $33 million. Apart from Shasta and Granite Ventures, some other significant investors were Meritech and Salesforce.com. A year from its Series C funding, the company announced that it hosted Series D funding from which it raised $100 million and it made the total amount of investment to $150 million.

Anaplan
Image source: ggpht.com

Growth And Success

By 2014, the company was able to raise a handsome amount of money from the investor. So, the same year Anaplan rolled out its marketplace Anaplan Hub whose main goal was to assist customers to find pre-designed planning models. The platform also has an option such that it can allow customers to share their planning models as well. By the end of 2014, the company opened 11 offices in 7 different companies and it was still expanding to other international marketplaces.

In 2016, Anaplam conducted another round of funding and it received $90 million from it. After this funding round, the valuation of the company reached the $1 billion mark and it obtained unicorn status. The then CEO of the company, Frederic Laluyaux announced that it was the last private funding round of the company and an IPO was around the corner. Before going public, Anaplan hired James Budge as the new Chief Financial Officer of the company and after a year appointed Frank A. Calderoni as the new CEO.

With Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriters, Anaplam went public in 2018 and got listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The position of Simon Tucker changed from Chief Customer Officer to Chief Planning Officer and he was given the responsibility to reshape the company’s core business. Recently, Anaplan has acquired an Israeli company called Mintigo which specializes in sales analytics. Anaplan also appeared on the list of Deloitte Technology First 500.

Frank Calderoni – CEO Of Anaplan

Frank Calderoni is not only the CEO of the company but also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Anaplan. Frank has experience in industry leadership for more than 30 years and he served in many other companies before joining Anaplan. Prior to joining Anaplan, Frank was the Executive Vice President, Operations, and CFO of Red Hat Inc, for two years. He also worked at Cisco Systems for 7 years and other companies like Adobe and SanDisk. In an interview, Frank said that Anaplan is full of opportunities and that is one of the main reasons he decided to join the company.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace – The Software Intelligence Company Assuring Error-free Execution of Business Applications.

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It won’t be inappropriate if we call the current era the era of Information Technology. There is no business that is not using the very technology to accomplish their daily work. Though there have been discovered various software to ease out the tasks for companies, still to deal with some conflicts in that software we require some application monitoring software too. This software ensures the seamless working of the software without having to face any errors or other conflicts. Dynatrace is one of the companies which is responsible for building such software and helping companies work without any difficulty. Dynatrace is a U.S.A.-based software intelligence company that offers monitoring and optimization services to ensure a better user experience for its clients.

About The Company

Dynatrace is a sixteen years old company founded in 2005 in Linz, Austria. The company has its headquarters based in Waltham, Massachusetts, U.S., but it offers services to its customers globally. Dynatrace is best known for its Software Intelligence Platform, which uses AI to provide monitoring and application optimizing services to its customers. Other services by the company include Application Security, Cloud Automation, Digital Business Analytics, Infrastructure Monitoring, and IT Operations Analytics, etc.
It is a publicly-traded company, as it trades on the New York Stock Exchange as DT. As of the year 2021, about 3000 people are working at Dynatrace, and for the fiscal year 2021, it made revenues worth US$703.509 Million. Apart from its headquarters in the U.S., the company has opened about 50 offices in countries like Canada, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Egypt, Italy, Poland, Ireland, the U.K., Estonia, Finland, France, and Greece, etc. From Mastercard and Bank of America to At&T and Vodafone, almost every big-name company is using services by Dynatrace.

Dynatrace
Image source: wikimedia.org

Founding Dynatrace

Bernd Greifeneder is the founder of Dynatrace. He founded the company Dynatrace Software GmbH on 2 February 2005 in Linz, Austria. During the dot-com boom, Greifeneder was studying Computer Science at the JKU Linz. Despite the popularity of the internet around, he always felt confused about online shopping stores getting crashed due to more than ten users using the website. This problem led to a solution by Greifeneder, as he invented software for websites to handle rush with ease and without getting them collapsed. This led to the birth of Dynamic Tracing with the help of AI and then to the founding of Dynatrace in 2005. In the beginning, the company used a few servers for the business, but later with the growth, it started using thousands of servers for its work.
Within one year of founding Dynatrace, the founder of the company was able to bag investments from the leading venture capitalist Bain Capital Ventures. In the next three years, the company received 13 million US dollars from Bay Partners of California.
In 2011, Compuware acquired Dynatrace for a sum 256 of million US dollars, and with the acquisition, Compuware (previously a public company) became private. After the acquisition, Greifeneder held the position of CTO at the company, and the company growth skyrocketed like never before. The two companies were different in their field of work, and Dynatrace remained a separate division of Compuware handled by Greifeneder. Later in 2014, the Compuware APM group was renamed Dynatrace. In the same year, the company also established the Digital Performance Management category. Dynatrace had its first IPO in 2019 and started to trade on NYSE. For the past many years, Dynatrace has won several awards of excellence, including Best Large Company to Work For by Built In Boston.

The Founder

Bernd Greifeneder is the founder and the current CTO at Dynatrace. He is a software engineer with a graduate and postgraduate degree in computer science from Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. He has held many prominent positions in various companies. Greifeneder has spent more than seven years at Segue Software Inc., where he started as the Project lead and was promoted to be the CTO of Globel Technologies and Chief software architect. Greifeneder also served Ruxit as the Senior Vice President and CTO of the company. He founded Dynatrace in 2005, and since then, he has served the company as the CEO, CTO, Vice President Engineering, etc. Currently, he is leading the company as the Senior Vice President and CTO.