Your Tech Story

Software Company

Descartes Systems

Descartes Systems – A Company That Survived The dot-com Burst And Became One Of The Most Successful Canadian Tech Brands.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Descartes Systems is a famous logistics and supply chain management platform based in Ontario, Canada. It is a 40-year old company that is making remarkable innovations to offer cloud-based logistics solutions. Apart from its SaaS products, the company also has Descartes Global Logistics Network. Currently, its annual revenue is more than $400 million and it has also expanded to various international markets including Europe, America, the Middle East, the Asia Pacific region, and Africa. Descartes Systems has more than 24,000 customers worldwide who are managed by 1,800+ employees. 

Early History 

Descartes Systems was founded in 1981 but it became famous for making a remarkable turnaround after the collapse of the dot-com bubble. The company went public in 1998 and was listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange where its common shares were traded under the symbol DSG. One year after getting listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, it also made it to the NASDAQ Stock Market and started trading under the symbol of DSGX. Entering the 21st century, as expected, Descartes’s share price peaked during the dot-com bubble and then crashed subsequently. Descartes, like every other company that was affected by the market crash, plotted strategies to survive. So, in 2001 Descartes decided to change its business model from offering full-featured enterprise software licenses to subscription-based products. Thus it became one of the first companies in the logistic sector to offer SaaS products. 

Descartes Systems
Image source: resources.inboundlogistics.com

Surviving the Market Collapse

The next few years were followed by huge losses and the company came close to bankruptcy in 2004. In the need of restructuring the company immediately, it decided to lay off 35% of the workforce and wanted to bring a transformation in the corporate culture of the company. So, in 2005 Descartes Systems appointed Arthur Mesher as its new CEO. As the new CEO of the company, Arthur worked wonderfully because after years of losses in 2005 the company was again back to profitability. Under the leadership of Mesher, Descartes Systems was awarded the Best Canadian Corporation by the Canadian Business Magazine and Best Business Turnaround in 2006 by International Business Awards. 

By 2015, Descartes became a very successful business as it was offering logistic services to more than 10,000 logistic-centric companies. It expanded its customer base as well as included ground transportation, airlines, retailers, distributors, and many more. Some of the major customers of the company are Air Canada, British Airways, Volvo, Del Monte, DHL, and American Airlines. 

Acquisitions

After the company returned to profitability, it also started acquiring several companies. In 2006, Descartes acquired three companies, namely, ViaSafe, Flagship Customs Services, and Cube Route. All these companies focus on various customer management and supply chain purposes like filing software, logistics management software, etc. It again acquired a series of three companies in 2007 which are Ocean Tariff Bureau and Blue Pacific Services, Global Freight Exchange, and RouteView Technologies. Not all companies that Descartes was acquiring were based in Canada as some were based in the USA and Europe. In 2008, it acquired two USA-based companies namely, Pacific Coast Tariff Bureau and Mobitrac Fleet Management Business. Descartes has also acquired several Belgium-based companies like Dexx, Porthus, and Routing International. Some of the companies it has acquired in the last few years are STEPcom, Peoplevox, ShipTrack, GreenMile, NetCHB, etc. 

Edward Ryan – CEO of Descartes Systems

Edward J. Ryan became the CEO of Descartes Systems in 2013 and he was also made a member of the Board of Directors in 2014. Ryan joined the company in 2000 after the company completed the acquisition of E-Transport Incorporated. Between 2000 to 2013, Ryan has occupied various management positions including General Manager of Global Logistics Network, Executive Vice President of Global Field Operations, and Chief Commercial Officer. He completed his education at Franklin & Marshall College. 

meltwater

Meltwater – Formerly known As Magenta News Is The World’s First Online Media Monitoring Business.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Meltwater (formerly known as Meltwater Group) is a publicly-traded company based in California, US. The company was originally founded in Oslo, Norway in 2001 as Magenta News. Today, the company has a worldwide business and employs more than 1,600 people. Meltwater mainly offers software as a service (SaaS) solutions and currently, it has more than 27,000 customers on a global scale spread across 120 countries. It has also built 50 offices in 20 countries in various parts of Europe, Africa, Asia Pacific, Australia, and North America. The company also has a non-profit division called The Meltwater Foundation and its project started in Accra, Ghana.

The Story Behind The Success

Meltwater was founded in 2001 by two legends, Jørn Lyseggen and Gard Haugen. They started the company as Magenta News and it was established in Oslo, Norway. When the two founders decided to open their business, all they had was a coffee machine and a capital of $15,000. Their first office was a very little space in a shipyard from where the team tried to create the first server farm. The company’s first target was to educate the Norwegian market to make their influence strong in the home country. The company educated its existing and potential audience regarding the value of tracking and monitoring online news. After struggling for a couple of years, the footprint of the company began growing in the mid-2000s.

Since Meltwater was the world’s first online media monitoring company, once it stabilized itself in the digital market it started growing rapidly. After establishing the company, it rolled out its first product which was a news clipping service. The product was capable of scanning 100,000 news sources at a single time for collecting keywords relevant to a business and its customers. In 2005, the company decided to shift its headquarters from Ohio to San Francisco and also changed the name of the company to Meltwater News.

meltwater
Image source: wikimedia.org

Expansion

Amidst the rapid growth that the company was making, it decided to open a non-profit arm to offer business and educational support to the people of Africa. The Meltwater Foundation launched the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) to offer entrepreneurial training in Ghana. Within 2008, the company expanded to almost every continent and secured an impressive customer base in each one of them. In 2010, the company announced the release of Meltwater Press which was a web-based media contact database. The same year, Company acquired an Indian-based social media monitoring company, BuzzGain followed by a CRM software developer, JitterJam 2011. After these two successful acquisitions, Meltwater released an in-house social marketing and business intelligence tool called Buzz Engage. Meltwater made another acquisition in 2011 (IceRocket) to integrate its functionality with the Buzz Engage Platform.

In 2015, the company decided to launch a new media intelligence platform and named it Meltwater. For the next few years, Meltwater made several acquisitions and each of the company’s platforms was integrated with some of the existing Meltwater products to make them more flexible. In March 2016, the company acquired Encore Alert and in 2017 it acquired an Oxford University spin-out, Wrapidity. Later in 2017, Meltwater acquired a big data company called Klarity followed by Algo. In 2018 it acquired two companies, namely, Datasift and Sysomos. In 2020, Jørn Lyseggen stepped down as the CEO of the company and he was replaced by Niklas De Besche. But after a few months, he was made the COO of the company and John Box became the new CEO.

Jørn Lyseggen – Founder & Chairman of Meltwater

Jørn Lyseggen is a famous Norwegian entrepreneur who is currently the Executive Chairman of Meltwater and MEST. Lyseggen’s career started as a research scientist at the Norwegian Computing Center. Since he has a very entrepreneurial mindset, Lyseggen worked for different startups and also became the CEO of Mogul AS. The biggest highlight in his career was founding Magenta News (now known as Meltwater) and also a non-profit organization to boost the startup culture among Africans.

monday.com

Monday.com – A Company That Gives The Liberty To Design Their Own Work Management Applications.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Founded in 2012 by three entrepreneurs, Monday.com was built in a way to give companies and individual clients the liberty to develop their own applications. Depending on the needs and goals of a company, it has to buy or develop customized work management software. Monday.com is a publicly-traded company that specializes in several domains including project management, team management, no-code development platform, and many more. The project of Monday.com was started in 2012 and was officially launched two years after that. The company’s headquarters is based in Tel Aviv, Israel and currently, it has more than 1,000 employees.

About the Company

Being an expert in project and work management, the main services offered by Monday.com are sales and CRM, inventory tracking, software development, HR, operations, etc. Monday.com can be best described as a Work Operating System (Work OS) that is a very flexible option, especially for the remote work environment. It helps in shaping the entire workflow in a team from collaboration to developing custom work applications. The UI of Monday.com is very careful and it helps in visualizing a lot of information from a different perspective. Monday.com was originally famous as daPulse and its name was changed in 2017. Recently, the company was also awarded Calcalist’s most promising startups.

History

The founders of Monday.com are Roy Mann, Eran Kampf, and Eran Zinman. These three founders started the project to develop something innovative and easily customizable so that it can be used by everyone. In 2012 the company was started and it was a huge triumph for the company that later in the same year it was able to raised funding of $1.5 million in the seed round. The first step towards developing a new project, the founders tried to understand the pain points of their target customers and eventually built a prototype under the brand name daPulse. In 2014, after two years of hard work the company was finally able to launch its first commercial product, and in the same year, it was able to land its first six customers. The business started out of an apartment in Tel Aviv and in that tiny office, they hosted their first board meeting.

Expansion

The company started growing impressively as within one year of launching its first product its customer base went from having six customers to 3,181 new customers. So, it expanded the team as well and added nine new members. In 2016, the company hosted its Series A funding round and raised $7.6 million. This funding round was led by Genesis Partners and Entrée Capital. By the end of this year, the company was able to acquire more than 7,000 new customers. Monday.com released a new mobile application in 2016. The Series B funding round of the company took place in 2017 and the company successfully raised $25 million. Insight Venture Partners along with existing investors from the Series A funding round. The total customer base of the company exceeded 20,000. Monday.com eventually got some exposure in 2017 when it was featured in Globes Most Promising Startup of the Year and also became one of the top 15 companies in 500 Fastest Growing Companies. By the end of 2017, daPulse was officially branded as Monday.com.

In 2018, the company expanded more as it opened its first international office in New York City. The company also raised $50 million in Series C funding and a new investor called Stripes Group was added. In the Series D funding round, the company was able to raise $150 million and it was raised by Sapphire Ventures. The company became the recipient of the 2020 Webby Award and also achieved unicorn status. It has also expanded to the UK, Miami, and San Francisco.

monday.com
Image source: onlinegeniuses.com

Roy Mann – CEO of Monday.com

Roy Mann is one of the founders of Monday.com and the present CEO of the company. He started his career as a web developer at Finjan. Apart from co-founding Monday.com, he is also the founder of SaveAnAlien.com and served as the former C-CTO of wix.com. Mann studied computer science at Reichman University.

Nemetschek

Nemetschek: Digitalizing the Architecture, Engineering, Construction Industry.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

The software has made almost every kind of work easier, the designing and architecture work being one of them. There are several software development companies that have introduced multiple software packages that have become essential for engineer professionals, such that they cannot do without them. Companies like Nemetschek are among those companies that make those architecture software products used to plan, design, and build critical architectural parts. The company works through its four business units, i.e., Planning & Design (Architecture and Civil Engineering), Build & Construct, Manage & Operate and Media & Entertainment. So along with the construction and architectural software, Nemetschek also creates software for the entertainment and media industry.

About Nemetschek

Nemetschek, aka the Nemetschek Group, is a German software development company that makes software for the architecture and construction industry. The company is over 70 years old (founded in 1963) and has headquarters based in Munich, Germany. Prof. Georg Nemetschek was the founder of Nemetschek and Yves Padrines is the cureent CEO at the company. As the company develops the software for the construction industry, this software includes works like planning, designing, building, and managing buildings as well as real estate. The company also builds software for the media and entertainment industry. As per the 2022 records, over 3300 people are working for Nemetschek, and the company made revenues worth € 597 Mio for the financial year 2020.

Nemetschek
Image source: www.nemetschek.com

The Founding

The company history dates back to 1963, when Professor Georg Nemetschek founded Nemetschek as Ingenieurbüro für das Bauwesen. The founder was a certified engineer and wanted to bring a new change in the construction industry. The company was into structural designing from the very beginning and became the first company to make use of computers for designing purposes and also developed software for engineering professionals. Georg himself joined a programming course to make more development in this regard.

In the beginning, the company produced software for its own use, but in 1977 it started to commercialize its Statik 97/77 program for civil engineering professionals. In 1980, Company introduced another software package (a computer-aided engineering software) that enabled instant calculations and designing of some important components used in solid construction. The software was a revolutionary product (and relevant for many years) that was the first to be used on a microcomputer.

In 1987, Nemetschek brought a fully equipped workstation for architects and engineers that also included a printer and a plotter. The next year, the company introduced Allplan, a premium software to create 3D models, and in 1992, Company launched a new high-performance version of the same. In 1994, the company was renamed Nemetschek AG, and it went public in 1999. The company operates in about eight European countries through its different subsidiaries.
The company also started to expand through acquisitions and acquired names like Graphisoft (2006), Data Design System (2013), Bluebeam Software, Inc. (2014), Solibri (2015), dRofus (2017), RISA (2017), MCS Solutions (2018), etc.

The CEO at Nemetschek

Yves Padrines is the current CEO of Nemetschek and has more than twenty years of experience. He started as a consultant at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and worked as a financial & business development manager at Creative Labs, Inc. In 2002, he joined Canal+ as the area sales manager. Padrines worked at NDS for about eight years, where he held posts like Vice president and director of sales and business development. In August 2012, he joined Cisco and later switched to Synamedia. He has also been an advisor for multiple companies. In March 2022, Padrines was appointed as the CEO of Nemetschek Group.

TechnologyOne

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

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

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.

F5 Inc

Jeffrey S. Hussey, An Investment Banker Behind The Idea Of Foundation Of F5 Inc.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

F5 Inc is an American software company that was established in 1996. The company was originally founded as F5 Labs and formerly branded as F5 Networks Inc. The main solutions offered by F5 Inc include application security, online fraud prevention, application delivery networking (ADN), multi-cloud management, network security, and many more. The headquarters of the company is based in Seattle, Washington, US. Apart from the headquarters, the company has 75 offices in 43 countries. Apart from the development of main software products, these offices are built to support marketing, sales, support, etc, especially on the international markets. Apart from America, F5 has a strong market in Europe.

About F5 Inc

F5 Inc was originally a provider of application delivery controller (ADC) technology. Eventually, the company expanded to other related sectors like automation and security services. F5 has landed some of the biggest tech companies in the world as its clients like Microsoft, Oracle, Tesla, and Meta. It also serves many companies from the Fortune 1000 companies and 48 out of Fortune 50 are also clients of F5 Inc. Apart from North America and Europe, F5 is also expanding its market to the Asia-Pacific region. F5 has also made a few significant acquisitions in the last few years. They include NGINX Inc for $670 million, Shape Security Inc for $1 billion, Volterra Inc for $500 million, and Threat Stack Inc for $68 million.

F5 Inc
Image source: golicense.net

History

The original brain behind the foundation of F5 Inc was an investment banker, Jeffrey S. Hussey. After he passed out from the University of Washington, he opened his business in Seattle. At the time when he opened his business in Seattle, that place was the hotspot for all types of IT activities, and his idea revolved around assisting businesses to help with internet traffic. When Hussey started the company, there was no initial product that he had in mind but he relied on the potential of the new economy that was to be formed with the rapid expansion of an internet-based world. After the company was established in 1995, he became the CEO, President, and Chairman of the company and started hiring employees. It took one year to build a product to market and then finally in 1997 the company was ready to roll out BIG/ip Controller.

Expansion

It was only a few months that F5 Inc rolled out its first product in the market that it came under the radar of its gigantic competitors. Companies like Cisco Systems Nortel Networks Corporation were already big companies but F5 got a foothold in the market and its product was good enough to compete with these tech giants. By the end of FY 1998, F5 generated annual revenue of $4.7 million from a single product. Shortly, the company released another product, 3DNS Controller and after launching these two products F5 Inc planned to go public. In April 1999, after the company changed its name from F5 Labs to F5 Networks it went public. By the time the company entered the 21st century, it landed more than 1,600 customers. There was a big change in the year 2000 as Hussey stepped down as the CEO of the company and his place was taken by John McAdam.

The company faced a decline in its sale and there was a loss of revenue in 2000. So, McAdam’s first priority was to improve the reputation of the company and turn around its fate. After a few years, from the mid-2000s, the company again started making profits and in 2004 its profit gain increased by 705%. In 2017, John McAdam was replaced by François Locoh-Donou and the headquarters shifted to the F5 Tower.

François Locoh-Donou – CEO of F5 Inc

François Locoh-Donou joined F5 Inc in 2017 and he has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise technology. Before joining F5 Inc, he was a part of Ciena and Photonetics, a French company. He also co-founded Cajou Espoir, a social enterprise. Donou completed his undergraduate studies in France and then Stanford Graduate School of Business.