Your Tech Story

Software Company

Playtech

Playtech, 22 years Old Online Casino Gaming Software Company.

The video game industry has been one of the largest industries out there. In the past few decades, the industry has seen steady but fast growth, and the craze for these games has only risen. One of the popular wings of video games is the casino games that now have become online too. Companies like Playtech are making innovative casino games and providing people with the ease of accessing them online. The company makes a variety of casino games that include online casino games, poker room games, online bingo games, and scratch games, etc. Playtech is a 22 years old company that is one of the leading groups of its industry.

About the Company

Teddy Sagi founded Playtech in 1999 in Tartu, Estonia. Today the company has its headquarters based in Douglas, Isle of Man, and it trades as a public company on London Stock Exchange with ticker PTEC. Playtech is known for making online casino and poker games. Apart from these, it has also developed online bingo games, sports betting games, mobile games, arcade games as well as software related to these games.
The steady growth of the company has given Playtech the name of one of the leading international designers and developers of the digital gaming industry. As of 2020 records, the company made revenues worth 1,078.5 million, with 297.4 million net income. Playtech is operational in over 24 countries, and over 6500 people are working for it. The company has got 170 global licenses for its work.

Playtech
Image source: igamingbrazil.com

Founding Playtech

Teddy Sagi, an Israeli entrepreneur, founded Playtech in 1999 in Tartu, Estonia. People from three industries, i.e., Casino, Software, and Multimedia, came together to form the company, and in 2001, it launched its first product, a casino game. With the launch of its first product only, the company was able to attract customers like William Hill, Ladbrokes, Bet365, etc. In fact, some of the government agencies also gave Playtech some contracts. The company founded iPoker in 2004, which later became the largest poker network in the world.
With the successful beginning, only in six years, in 2006, Playtech valued at approximately US$950 million in the AIM market. The same year, the company acquired Video bet and launched Bingo Broadway. Playtech also established a development center in Bulgaria. By 2010, the company had reached the UK, Spain, and Italy. It also acquired Virtue Fusion, a bingo platform in 2010, and in 2013, the company acquired one of the largest poker communities, PokerStrategy.com. In the further years, the company made acquisitions like Aristocrat Lotteries (2014), YoYo Games (2015), Quickspin (2016), Best Gaming Technology (2016), BetBuddy (2017), etc. The acquisitions helped the company grow even faster and add more products for its customers.
Playtech went public on London Stock Exchange in 2012. In 2014, The company launched its first multi-channel product named Coral Connect, which gained around 160,000 players just in one year. Playtech also opened a new branch in Romania in 2017. The same year, it partnered with Warner Bros to develop slots based on the films like Batman vs Superman and Suicide Squad, etc. In 2018, the company integrated machine learning into its platform to prevent fraudulent attacks. Playtech debuted in the online gambling market through Bet365.

The CEO at Playtech

Mor Weizer is the current CEO of Playtech. He was appointed to the post of CEO in May 2007. Before that, he has worked at various prominent positions at many big names companies. Mor started his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers as an accountant and Financial Consultant. Later, he became a software specialist at Oracle. Mor has also worked as the CEO of Techplay Marketing Ltd, which is the subsidiary company of Playtech.

Progress Software

Progress Software, An American software company founded by a group of MIT graduates.

Progress Software is a publicly-held company founded in 1981 by a group of MIT graduates. The company’s headquarters is based in Massachusetts, US. It has offices in 16 countries and currently has over 1,500 employees. Progress Software is a company in the computer software sector and develops, and sells the same to companies who want to deploy business applications. Josep W. Alsop was one of the MIT graduates who have significant contributions in co-founding Progress Software. The present CEO and President of the company are Yogesh Gupta while Paul Jalbert is the CFO of the company.

About Progress Software

Apart from Josep Alsop, two other important founding members of the company are Charles Clyde and Zierring Kessel. Progress Software is a renowned global supplier of software products for information services organizations not only in the industrial sector but also in government bodies. The company also supplies software tools and add-on components to the companies who are building business applications with Microsoft Corporations’ Visual Basic application development environment. Progress has around 20 subsidiaries helping it to maintain a market for selling products in 60 countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia.

Progress Software
Image source: fxdailyreport.com

Early Days

When the company was incorporated back in 1981, its original name was Data Language Corporation. The company was officially launched after the founders successfully developed its first product, the PROGRESS Application Development Environment (ADE). This environment was designed so that it can be used for the development and deployment of software applications that were scalable, portable, and reconfigurable. In 1984, the company released the first commercial version of the PROGRESS ADE for Unix followed by another version for MS-DOS. 1985 marked the first profitable year of the company and after a few years, the company released the software for computer networks and CTOS/BTOS operating systems.

By the end of the 1980s, the growth of the company was remarkable and is ranked 38th in the Inc magazine’s list of the 500 fastest-growing private American companies. When the company entered a new decade, its main focus was on value-added resellers who used PROGRESS software to build their commercial software products. These middlemen required deployment licenses from the company which significantly increased the revenue of Progress Software. In 1995, Progress was featured in Forbes’s 200 Best Companies in America list and the next year the company attempted to climb the ladder in the internet market.

As the company’s sales rose, it eventually came into the radar of big companies like Oracle, Sybase, and Informix. Big companies like these became the major competition of Progress. One of the biggest advantages of Progress was that its RDBMS could work on most types of computer hardware. With the changing of the market scenarios, the company is expected to benefit from two business trends, the growth of corporate networks and the decentralization of large conglomerates.

Present Status

Stepping into the 21st century, Progress Software acquired a handful of companies starting with eXcelon Corporation in 2002 for $24 million (approximately). Some of the products developed by the company (XML IDE and Stylus Studio) are now marketed by Progress. In 2003, the company acquired DataDirect Technologies followed by Persistent Software in 2004 and Apama in 2005. In 2006, the company acquired Actional Corporation which previously merged with WestBridge Technologies (an XML security company). The acquisitions expanded the customer base of Progress Software as well as product ranges. Although in 2012 the company announced that it will refocus its strategies and concentrate on a narrower product type. So, it decided to either sell or decommission most of its products. It recently acquired Chef Software Inc and Kemp Technologies.

Yogesh Gupta – CEO of Progress Software

Yogesh Gupta has been serving as the CEO and President of Progress Software since October 2016. He is responsible for improving customer relationships and launching new products in these few years. Before joining Progress, he was the CEO and President of Kaseya Inc, and before that FatWire Software and Oracle Corporation.

Zuora

Zuora – A savior for large enterprises to help with their billing systems.

Zuora is an American enterprise software company that develops software for businesses to manage their subscription-based services. When the company was founded, its main goal was to assist large enterprises with a proper billing system. Zuora provides a cloud-based billing platform that is designed to automate several features like recurring billing, collections, revenue recognition, subscription metrics, etc. Zuora is a publicly-traded company that is currently headquartered in Redwood Shores, California. It has more than 1,200 employees working under Tien Tzuo, CEO of the company.

About Zuora

Zuora was founded in 2007 in a small office at Mountain View, California. The founders of the company are K.V. Rao, Cheng Zuo, and Tien Tzuo. They both had industry experience as they spent several years working at WebEx and salesforce.com. Zuora, today, has become a leading company in the subscription economy industry as its cloud-based platform automates all subscription order-to-revenue operations for its clients.

The company went public in 2018 and got listed on New York Stock Exchange. The same year it established a partnership with maximum automobile manufacturing giants. Recently, Zuora was named one of the best workplaces by Glassdoor (2018) and became Innovator of the Year (2019) by the San Mateo County Economic Development Association.

History of the Company

In 2007, the three founders established Zuora to help enterprise companies in the 21st century with their real-time billing platform. Before founding Zuora, Roa and Zou were engineers at WebEx while Tzuo was an executive at Salesforce. They named the company after their surnames (combination of three surnames) and launched their first flagship product in 2008. In 2008 they launched two products, Z-billing and Z-Force. The latter one was the first billing solution of the company fully integrated with Salesforce CRM.

Zuora
Image source: octotelematics.com

Expansion

Zuora attracted investors from the beginning and hence it was able to raise lucrative funding from many famous investors. This helped Zuora expand in international markets in a short time. In 2010, the company expanded to Europe, and the next year it made it into the OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies list. It was also featured in VentureWire’s FASTech 50 list and JMP Hot 100 Best Privately Held Software Companies.

In 2012 the company expanded to the Australian market and the next year it celebrated its 50th consecutive product release. In 2015, Zuora opened eight new offices worldwide and also entered the Japanese market, and became a total team of 500 employees. It also launched subscribed magazine and bagged the best technology innovation award from Ventana Research. 2016 was an eventful year for Zuora as it launched subscribed podcasts, featured on Forbes 100 Best Cloud Companies, Tzuo named E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year, crossed $40 billion invoice transaction volume, etc. This year Zuora also launched the Subscription Economy Index, a product that tracks revenue growth of subscription businesses.

By 2017, Zuora successfully landed 900 customers and released its 100th product since it was launched. Ken Goldman, CFO of Yahoo, joined Zuora’s board and the company also opened a new data center in Germany. Recently, Zuora has brought many experienced new members into the team like Robbie Traube (former Adobe executive) as Chief Revenue Officer and Todd McElhatton (former employee of SAP) as Chief Financial Officer.

Funding

Zuora successfully led its first round of funding (Series A) on the year that it was founded. It raised $6 million in Series A funding and it was led by Benchmark Capital and Marc Benioff. In September 2008, the Series B funding was led by Shasta Ventures where the company raised $15 million followed by $20 million in October 2010. By 2015 Zuora already conducted a Series F funding round and raised a total amount of $250 million. Major investors include Redpoint Ventures, Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, Index Ventures, Vulcan Capital, etc.

Tien Tzuo – Co-founder and CEO of Zuora

Tien Tzuo is a famous American tech entrepreneur who co-founded Zuora. He is currently the CEO of the company and was previously the Chief Strategy Officer of Salesforce. Tzuo was born in Taiwan and moved to Brooklyn when he was very young. He completed his studies at Cornell University and worked at Oracle Corporation for six years.

Altus Group

Altus Group, a software company making ease for the real estate industry.

Software is everywhere today, and we are getting quite habitual of doing most of the important daily works using this software. Companies from almost every industry have raised above the physical ledgers and have started to save and process their data on computers using specialized software. Developers have also taken advantage of this opportunity, and we see new sorts of software coming into the market almost every day. Altus Group is one such company that has made it big in the industry by providing similar software for real estate. Yes, there is software customized for easing out the jobs for the real estate industry too. Altus Group is a resultant group that came out of a merger between three famous real estate consulting companies, and today, it has made it big in the industry by building innovative software for the same industry.

About Altus Group

In 2005, three real estate consulting companies came together to merge and make Altus Group. In the beginning, the company offered the same old consultancy services to people, but eventually, it established its base as a software company as well. The company is only about 16 years old, but with its experienced past, it was able to make big in the industry through its two business segments, i.e., Atlus Analytics and Commercial Real Estate Consulting. Altus Group is a publically held company and trades on Toronto Stock Exchange with ticker AIF. The company headquarters is located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and about 2200 people are working for it. As per the latest records, Altus Group made revenues worth C$567 million for the last financial year (2020). The company has its clients based in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific.

Altus Group
Image source: realestatesindustry.com

Establishment of the Company

Gary Yeoman, a Canadian consultant, came together with two other major Canada-based real estate consultancy companies to build Altus Group. Along with its inception, the company went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and Yeoman became the first CEO of the newly founded company. In 2006, the company also entered the land surveying industry by opening a branch in Western Canada.
The real reason behind the growth of the company in such a small period was the strategic expansion it did through acquisitions. In 2007, Altus Group acquired Edwin Hill, and in 2009 it acquired Page Kirkland 2009, followed by the acquisitions of Brazos Tax in 2010, Complex Property Advisors in 2013, SC&H Group’s State & Local Tax Practice in 2014. The journey of the company as a software developer began with the acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers’s valuation management practice in 2010 and ARGUS Software in 2011. Altus started to trade for its software with the business name ARGUS.
In 2019, Altus as ARGUS launched the cloud-based version of ARGUS Enterprise product, one of the most popular products by the company. Currently, the company is focusing more on data, analytics, and technology solution. Altus made its latest acquisition was in November 2021, where it purchased an American real estate data company Reonomy.

The CEO at Altus Group

Mike Gordon is the current CEO of Altus Group. He is a Northwestern University Alumn, where he received a BS in Industrial Engineering. Gordon has also got an MBA in Finance and Business Economics from the University of Chicago. After working for a few companies at the start of his career, Gordon became the Vice President at Capgemini in 2001. Then he joined FICO and held different positions in a period of 9 years. In November 2014, Gordon switched to Callcredit Information Group and became the group CEO. He left the company to become the Chairman and Board Member at Hometrack. He has also served Fintech and Constructionline as the non-Executive Director. In September 2020, Gordon joined Altus Group and became the CEO of the company.

Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic, Helping companies to get real-time insight into data.

Data is the most important asset today, and it has become essential for every company to safeguard their company as well as client data from any external threat. The maintenance process for data has generated new long queues for the company employees, and it has become quite difficult to properly maintain and analyze the data at the same time. For that, companies like Sumo Logic work and develop software that helps other companies to upkeep the data and analyze it in the most efficient way. The company is about ten years old has been doing great in the industry such that it has been able to bag contacts from big-name companies, like Google and Amazon.

About Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is a software development company that mainly works to build log management and analytics software for companies, helping them to get real-time insight into data. Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen founded Soft Logic in 2010. The company headquarters is based in Redwood City, California, USA. The company is into developing software based on IT operations, security analytics, cloud SIEM, data analytics, etc. It is a publically held company that trades on Nasdaq with ticker SUMO. As per the 2020 records, it made annual revenues worth $155 Million, and over 800 people are employed at Soft Logic.

Sumo Logic
Image source: www.digitalstacks.net

The Back Story

Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen, two of the developers of ArcSight, a cyber security software, founded Sumo Logic in April 2010. The company received its initial funding from names like Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital, Sapphire Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures, etc. The company built its flagship product, a cloud-based elastic petabyte-scale platform that helps companies to collect, manage and analyze their enterprise log data in the most efficient way, saving on time and money. Being a cloud-based product, it provides access to data ion fingertips. In 2012, the company released another software, the Sumo Logic Free, deployed on AWS and Sumo Logic for VMware.
In a Series B round of funding held in January 2012, Sumo Logic raised $15 million, where it also unveiled a new cloud-based log management platform. In June 2015, the company had another, Series E round of funding, where it raised a sum of $160.5 million in venture capital. The next product of the company, a data analytic platform came in 2016, and in 2017, it introduced machine data analytics service. Then in 2018, the company partnered with Google Cloud Platform and also integrated its software with TensorFlow. The same year, it introduced cloud SIEM and added it to its machine data analytics platform. In May 2019, the company had its first IPO, and it went public on Nasdaq.
Sumo Logic has won some awards and recognitions as well. It was named among the ten Most Innovative Companies by RSA in 2012 and won the Audience Choice Awards for Performance Monitoring in the same year. Gartner named the company ‘Cool Vendor’ in 2014, and in 2019, Fortune added the company to its list of 50 Best Workplaces in Technology. Forbes named Sumo Logic one of the 100 Best Enterprise Security Products in the same year.

The CEO at Sumo Logic

Ramin Sayar is the residing CEO at Sumo Logic. He has got a graduate degree in B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara as well as an MBA from San Jose State University. For the past twenty-plus years, Sayar has worked at some prominent positions at various big-name companies. He has held the position of Product Line Marketing Manager at iPlanet and Netscape. He was the Director of Products and Solutions at TIBCO and the Senior Director of Products at Mercury Software. Sayar has also been the Vice President of Products and Strategy at HP Software. He joined VMware for five years leading the Cloud Management Business Unit of the company. After VMware, he joined Sumo Cloud in December 2014 and became the CEO of the company.

Momentive

Momentive, The company that was earlier known for its popular product SurveyMonkey.

Though the word of mouth has been the most effective way of marketing, people before the internet did not have any reliable source to actually get through those experiences based reviews on things, rather going through TV ads or Newspapers. After the internet came into being and computers reached every household, people came with the idea to build websites and software that can help people get through authentic reviews on things and such that those people could make up their mind on what they should buy or leave. Momentive Inc. is a company that works on a similar idea and develops cloud-based experience management software for companies so that these companies can offer their clients genuine reviews on things like market insight, brand insight, company atmosphere for aspirants, and customer experience, etc.

About Momentiv Inc.

Momentive is a 22 years old software development company founded in 1999 by Ryan Finley and Chris Finley. It is a publically traded company that develops software for experience management. The company trades on Nasdaq as MNTV, whereas the headquarters of the company is based in San Mateo, CA, United States. The company has its regional offices set up in locations like San Mateo, Portland, Seattle, Dublin, Ottawa, London, Sydney, etc, and serves its customers worldwide. Momentive provides cloud-based experience management and survey software services, Momentive, GetFeedback, and SurveyMonkey being the most popular products by the company. As of 2020, 1,220 people are employed at various Momentive offices, and it made annual revenues worth US$233.5 million in the same year, with 25,000,000 registered to its services.

Momentive
Image source: prnewswire.com

Founding Story of Momentive

Ryan Finley and Chris Finley founded Momentive Inc. as SurveyMonkey in 1999. The company was one of its kind and launched its first product, a consumer-oriented survey platform. Due to the unique idea of the company, it became successful from day one. The service it provided was free, and many of its services remain free till today.
In the year 2009, Dave Goldberg joined SurveyMonkey as the CEO, who helped the company grow really fast. The same year, Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital took over some of the majority shares in SurveyMonkey. In 2013, the company raised $800 million in debt, and the company became a unicorn with a valuation worth $1.35 billion. The next year, MonekySurvey received $250 million from companies like Google Capital and Morgan Stanley, etc.
In August 2014, SurveyMonkey acquired Fluidware, a competitor survey company based in Canada. This purchase was followed by the acquisitions of TechValidate in 2015, Usabilla, and GetFeedback in 2019. The company also acquired some survey tools, including Precision Polling, Wufoo, and Zoomerang, etc., for the purpose of adding some more features to its existing platforms and other products to its product line.
In June 2021, SurveyMonkey changed its name to Momentive. The news of the acquisition of Momentive by Zendesk Inc. also came in October month of the same year. Though the merger is still to happen, the amount is already decided, and that is nearly $4 billion.

The CEO at Momentive

SurveyMonkey, aka Momentive, had seen the most growth in the leadership of Dave Goldberg as the CEO. But after his death in 2015, Zander Lurie was named the CEO of the company. Lurie is a native American who is also known as one of the leading business executives as well as a board member of GoPro. He has a graduate degree from the University of Washington and an MBA from Emory University. Lurie has worked at companies like GoPro as the Senior Vice President and CBS Interactive as the CFO. He also co-founded CoachArt in 2001. In 2015, he became the chairman of the board of SurveyMonkey 2015, and in 2016, he was named the CEO of the company.