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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.

BMC Software

BMC Software – An American Software Company Founded By Former Shell Oil Employees.

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BMC Software is an American company and it is one of the leading developers and providers of independent system software. The company’s headquarters is based in Houston, Texas, and has several offices both in the state and overseas. BMC Software operates worldwide and some major markets include Tel Aviv, Israel, Germany, France, Indian, and Singapore.

The company mainly offers Software as a Service (SaaS) and on-premise software and services. It has a great impact on today’s cloud computing and IT management and automation sector. BMC Software is a privately held company and it generates annual revenue of more than $2 billion. It has around 6,000 employees and made many significant acquisitions between 1994 and 2000.

The Founding Story of BMC Software

The three founders of BMC Software are Scott Boulette, John Moores, and Dan Cloer. All three co-founders were former employees of Shell Oil when they started working on this new project. They kept the name of the company after the initials of their surname. Moore got the idea of developing a new software when he worked as a programmer with Shell Oil. During those days, the software that dominated the market and business was mainly written for IBM mainframes. Moores wanted to develop a more efficient version of this software that would compress data streams and speed up the compression process.

He was successful in building the software and he named it 3270 Optimizer. This was the first product of BMC Software and to make this a huge success, Moores hired the best software developers and paid them generous packages. But this is also one of the reasons why profit margin was very low for the company. But, Moores brought in a very powerful team and within few years with innovative marketing methods, it started catching the interest of many venture capitalists.

BMC Software
Image source: wikimedia.org

Growth and Expansion

In 1982, a venture capitalist called Jacqueline Morby took interest in the company and gave Moores some direction on how to increase the profit. After four years, BMC started making 20 percent profit of the annual revenue and 30 percent of its total customers were international clients. In 1988, BMC Software announced its IPO and it was listed on NASDAQ. The business became very profitable and by the next year, the sale jumped from $93 million to $139.5 million.

During this time, BMC Software hopped into an acquiring spree and started with Trimar Software Systems Ltd and Trimar Software International Ltd. In 1991, the company acquired Integrity Solutions followed by Patrol Software in 1994. In 1996, it acquired two companies, namely, HawkNet and PEER Networks but the price was not revealed. In 1997, it acquired Data tools and in 1998 bought Boole & Babbage and BGS Systems. It acquired New Dimension Software in 1999 and Optisystems in 2000.

Privatization

In 2013, BMC Software announced that it was selling the company to a group of major private equity investments groups. The deal was closed at $6.9 billion. In September 2013, the process was finally complete and BMC became a privately held company. In 2018, BMC was acquired by a global investment firm, KKR & Co Inc.

John Moores – The Mastermind Behind BMC Software

John Moores is a famous American entrepreneur and philanthropist who is well-known as the founder of BMC Software. He went to Texas A&M University but dropped out and became a programmer at IBM. Later he went to the University of Houston and completed his bachelor’s degree in economics. Apart from co-founding BMC Software, he was also the lead venture capital financier for Peregrine Systems. After Moores founded BMC Software in 1980 he was the CEO of the company till 1987.

Ayman Sayed – CEO

In 2019, Ayman Sayed became the new president and CEO of the company. Before joining BMC Software, Ayman served as the president and CPO at a Fortune 500 company called CA Technologies. He also has prior work experience at Cisco Systems where he was given the position of senior vice president.

DATEV

DATEV – A Data Center That Emerged As A Successful German Registered Cooperative Society.

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DATEV is a German-based registered cooperative society. The primary role of DATEV is in the IT industry as it provides technical information services to the accountants, attorneys, and members of the tax department. Founded in February 1996, DATEV was originally a data center that is now famous in the IT industry. Currently, DATEV is known for developing and delivering software directly to end-users. The company is also known for providing consulting services for these occupations. Though DATEV is a leading technology provider in Germany, its main interest lies in the tax market.

About The Company

DATEV mainly provides software for accounting, tax computation, personnel management, business consulting, and company organization. It was founded in 1966 and currently has more than 400,000 customers. The headquarters of DATEV is based in Nuremberg and apart from that, it has 23 other subsidiaries in Germany. More than 8,000 people work for the company in their main office and subsidiaries.

DATEV is a very popular company in Germany such that around 2 million enterprises in the nation use their software to perform financial accounting. More than 11 million payslips are generated every month using the DATEV software. The company also has a data center that is used by both the members of the company and its clients. Data security is the prime focus of every employee of the company.

DATEV
image source: www.datev.com

History of DATEV

On 14th February 1966, 65 tax consultants from Nuremberg founded DATEV. It was founded as a cooperative self-help organization whose main focus was to facilitate bookkeeping tasks. The main five founding members of the company are Edmund Rudolph, Horst Preißner, Joachim Mattheus, Heinz Sebiger, and Klaus Hartmann. The company initially founded a data center where the accounting data of the members were processed. This was a step up from the primitive punch tape. The DATEV center was opened after the number of members in this organization started increasing rapidly and was finally inaugurated in 1969.

In 1974, Company introduced remote data transmission. First, the data was recorded on magnetic tapes, and then from the employee side, it was transmitted to the DATEV data center via the telephone lines. After a couple of years, the company established its first personal network for transmitting electronic data between tax consultant offices and the DATEV data center. But, the company dismantled the career network in 2002 because by then it was no more an economically viable choice.

Business Growth

In 1972, DATEV formed a joint allegiance with the Japanese company TKC and it was after ten years both the companies document the alliance. TKC is also a data processing service company and the joint partnership aimed to support more tax consultants with electronic data processing. Even today both the companies are tied up through business exchange programs. In the 1990s, Company started establishing its first Information Center starting in Dresden followed by Schwerin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, and Erfurt.

In 1996, one of the founders of DATEV, Dr. Heinz Sebiger retired from the company after 30 years of successfully monitoring the administration. By this time, the company started generated revenue in billions and employed more than 4,000 people. For the next two years, employers and clients in DATEV witnessed the transformation from the DOS system to 32 bit Windows OS.

The 21st century brought several opportunities for DATEV to explore and establish itself in the European market. The company established itself in the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Spain, Italy, and many more. In 2003, the company expanded to Poland as it started a joint venture with Poland-based software manufacturer Matrix. pl S.A. In 2011, the company expanded its data center and included new trending services like cloud computing and data security. In 2021, a new management team was formed at DATEV with Dr. Peter Krug as the new CMO and Prof. Dr. Christian Bär as the new CTO of the company. Dr. Robert Mayr is the present CEO of the company.

Robert Mayr – CEO of Company

Robert Mayr joined DATEV in 2011 as a member of the board of directors as well as head of finances, purchasing, production, and internal data processing. Robert Mayr became the CEO of the company in 2016. Before joining the company, he was the managing partner at Solidaris Revisions GmbH. He also has seven years of working experience at Deloitte, one of the Big Four companies.

Neusoft Corporation

Neusoft Corporation – A Chinese Software Company Founded By The Northeastern University Professors.

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Neusoft Corporation is a famous company in the IT industry known for mainly software development and designing medical equipment and systems. The company was founded in 1991 and back then it was known as Shenyang Neu-Alpine Software Co Ltd. Liu Jiren and Li Huatian are known as the main founders of the company. Both of them were professors at Northeastern University and worked in the Computer Software and Network Engineering Research Laboratory. Since the professor of Northeastern University founded the college, the company was named after it and Neusoft is the acronym of Northeastern University Software.

About Neusoft Corporation

Neusoft Corporation is a very famous company based in China. Its headquarters is located in Shenyang, China. It is a publicly-traded company that is listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The current CEO and Chairman of the company are Liu Jiren, one of the original founders of the company. Last year, the company was the largest enterprise in China for providing IT services.

Neusoft has several subsidiaries spread over various countries. In the US, it has offices in Michigan, Santa Clara, California, North Carolina, etc. In Asia, the company has entered the Japanese market and some of the other subsidiaries are present in Switzerland, Germany, and Romania. In 2012, Neusoft was the biggest IT outsourcing firm in China. Today, the company has approximately 20,000 employees across various continents.

Neusoft Corporation
Image source: www.massdevice.com

History Of The Company

Before officially establishing the company as Neusoft Corporation in 1991, it was first a research laboratory in the campus of Northeastern University. The two founders founded this computer research laboratory in 1988 and initially consisted of only three computers. The company started off with three people including the co-founders working in the lab. After two years, the laboratory expanded and became the NEU Computer Software Research and Development Centre. Next year, the NEU Centre established a joint venture with the Japanese company, Alpine Electronics and it was renamed as Neu-Alpine Software Research Institute.

Expansion

Software outsourcing became one of the main services provided by the company and Alpine became its first customer from overseas. In 1993, the company was renamed as Neu-Alpine Software Co Ltd. From the very beginning, Leu Jiren became the CEO of the company and all these developments took place under his jurisdiction. In the mid-1990s, the development of the Neusoft Park began and it was also entering a new market of the healthcare sector. Neusoft established the NEU Computer Imaging Centre and took interest in CT scanning and other medical technologies.
In 1996, the NEU Software Group Ltd was established. Until then it had only Alpine Electronics as one of its collaborative partners. But after the NEU Software Group was established it started partnering with multiple companies and one of them was Toshiba. The same year, Neusoft filed for an IPO and it became the first software company in China to get listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. In 1998, the company entered into a partnership with Boa Steel which strengthened the investor base of the company.

In early 2000, a new consolidation of investments took place which led to some changes in ownership of the company. The major investors of the company including Alpine Electronics, Bao Steel, and Toshiba became the shareholders of the Neusoft Group. With a strong partnership with multiple companies, Neusoft expanded very rapidly and by 2004 it had a total of 40 offices in China and 6,000 employees working there. The company, though became the largest outsourcing company in China, is still behind Indian giants like the Tata Group and Infosys. The main market of Neusoft is in China and Japan.

About The Founders

Liu Jiren is famous as the CEO and Chairman of the largest software company in China. He is a visionary and his exceptional knowledge about industry transformed a small business founded on a college campus into a multinational conglomerate. In 2019, he received Ernst & Young’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year Alumni Award for Societal Impact.

Li Huatian was an electrical engineer with immense contributions in the computer science fields. He is one of the oldest and earliest computer scientists from China who has significant contributions in the field. He was a professor both at Dalian University of Technology and Northeastern University. He passed away in January 2007.

verint systems

Verint Systems – Story of a New-York Based Analytics Company Founded in 2002.

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As businesses are growing rapidly in the digital era, the demand for software development, IT, and business consulting sectors is also booming. Verint Systems is one of those analytics companies that is known for software development and also for selling hardware products. The company’s headquarters is based in Melville, New York, US. Verint System wasn’t always an independently traded public company as it started off as a Comverse Infosys unit of Comverse Technology.

In 2002, Verint Systems was founded (became a public company) and is currently led by Dan Bodner, President, and CEO of Verint. The company has grown significantly after it became public and currently generates revenue in billions. Verint provides services to more than 150 countries and has over 10,000 clients. So, let’s have a look at the early years of the Company and how it spun off from Comverse Technology.

History of Company

Verint Systems, as a part of Comverse Technology, was founded in 1999. But, this business unit of Comverse Technology was originally incorporated in 1994 in Delaware. Back then it was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company which later became the business unit of Comverse Infosys. Before the company established itself as Verint Systems, its main focus was on the call recording market. The call recording market, back then, grew popular as it was the era when technology from analog tape transformed into digital recorders. In 1999, the company rolled out a service for internet call waiting.

The same year when Verint became the business unit of Comverse Infosys, the company decided to merge another division of Comverse with it. So, Verint was merged with a Comverse unit which was focused on the security and communication interception market. Converse Technology acquired a company called Loronix Information Systems Inc which along with Verint expanded into the video security market in 2001. And next year, Converse Infosys finally renamed itself Verint Systems.

verint systems
Image source: haarets.co.il

Verint Systems as a Public Company

In 2002, Company filed its IPO and became a public company although the majority of its stakes were still owned by Comverse Technology. After starting off as a public company, Verint expanded the range of solutions, entered into various overseas markets, and acquired a bunch of companies.

Some of the companies acquired by Verint Systems are MultiVision Intelligent Surveillance Limited which was a business in the video security sector. It also acquired a UK-based customer management company called CM Insight followed by a company that specialized in interaction recording and performance evaluation. Verint acquired all these companies in a short time span and thus strengthened its existing market and opened up new possibilities. Verint also acquired a data mining company called ViewLinks Euclipse Ltd and a workforce optimization company called Witness Systems Inc. In July 2008, Verint Systems acquired a very young company called Focal Info. Amit Bohensky founded this software company which mainly focused on web data extraction and analytics. Verint Systems acquired the company with an undisclosed monetary amount and the founder was hired back after the acquisition.

An Independent Company

After Verint became a public company in 2002, it was delisted from the NASDAQ stock exchange in 2006 along with Comverse Technology due to a scandal. But, again in 2010, Company was back on the NASDAQ stock exchange list and struck a deal with Comverse Technology to sell its remaining interest in Verint. In 2012, Company became a completely independent company as it bought the remaining stakes from Comverse for $800 million. After the buyout, Company made some major acquisitions which include KANA Software Inc for $514.2 million, Next IT for $30 million upfront cash and $20 million future payments, and a software company called OpinionLab for an undisclosed amount.

Dan Bodner – CEO of Verint Systems

Dan Bodner is serving as the CEO of Verint Systems since the company became a different entity that separated from Comverse Technology. Dan is attached to Comverse Technology when Verint was just a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company. Currently, he is also the Chairman of the Board of Verint Systems. Dan Bodner completed his education at the Israel Institute of Technology.

TIBCO Software

TIBCO Software – A US-based Private Company Pioneering Software Development For Enterprises.

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Vivek Ranadive, an Indian American businessman, founded TIBCO software in 1997. The company is based in Palo Alto, California, US. TIBCO Software has expanded its services and consumer market overseas over time which includes North and South America, Europe, Asia, Middle East, and Africa. The company focuses on building real-time software for other businesses which serves the purpose of business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and business-to-employee data transfer. Some of the leading products of TIBCO used by enterprises around the world are TIBCO ActiveSpaces, TIBCO BusinessEvents, TIBCO Data Virtualization, TIBCO Messaging, and many more. Currently, TIBCO Software is owned by Vista Equity Partners and Dan Streetman is serving as the CEO of the company.

Foundation of TIBCO Software

Vivek Ranadive is also known as the founder of Teknekron Software Systems Inc and it was after he sold this business, TIBCO was founded. In 1997, TIBCO Software was established which was then known as the Information Bus Company. The company was founded as a subsidiary of a new firm called Reuters Holdings which was backed by Cisco Systems. The software developed by TIBCO was used by businesses to make real-time communications within the financial market without any human intervention. This product caught the attention of many big companies like Oracle, SAP, and IBM and they also started using it. The same year, TIBCO became one of the thirteen partners for Microsoft’s “push technology” which was aimed to deliver free internet content to users through web browsers.

In 1999, the company filed for its first IPO and started trading as a public company in July of the same year. On the first day of its trading, the share value of the company doubled, and in early 2000 went even higher. The company became very famous in 2000 as Yahoo! Launched Corporate Yahoo, a platform built using TIBCO’s software. This platform helped companies to establish communications between computers in a customized way which added points to its flexibility. It was only one year after TIBCO became a public company, the economic depression started.

TIBCO Software
Image source: www.tibco.com

Post-dot-com Bubble Scenario

TIBCO Software managed to stay intact during the dot-com bust and even after the boom it was one of the 50 relevant technology companies according to USA Today’s e-Consumer and e-Business Index. The total market capitalization of TIBCO approached $2 billion during the first two quarters of 2001. In 2002, TIBCO Software formed an alliance with an American business company called Verity Inc. Both the companies came together to integrate TIBCO Active Portal 4.0 with Verity K2 Developer technology in order to meet the needs of customers in a better way.

In 2003, a lot of well-established companies like Vodafone and Reliance Communications started using TIBCO’s software. Delta Air Lines used the software as well for organizing its operating system Deutsche Bahn used the software to construct a network of digital integrated train stations. After a few years, Apple also started using the same software to process user requests and facilitate sales in the iPhone division. In 2011, the total annual revenue of the company summed up to $920 million and soon it crossed the $1 billion mark in 2012. In 2014, TIBCO was acquired by the private equity firm called Vista Equity Partners for $4.3 billion and Murray Rode was made the CEO of the company. But, it was again in 2019 that he was replaced by Dan Streetman while Rode took the place of Vice Chairman.

About The Founder

Apart from being an Indian American businessman, Vivek Ranadive is also an engineer by profession, an author, speaker, and philanthropist. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, Vivek was accepted in MIT from where he graduated as an engineer. Later, he went to Harvard Business School and obtained his MBA. Vivek was able to found TIBCO Software with sufficient funding from Reuters and Cisco Systems. A few years ago, he founded a startup investment firm called Bow Capital.