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Pure Storage

Pure Storage – Company Simplifying Data Storage.

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Pure Storage supports innovators by permanently simplifying data storage. The company is revolutionizing the storage process and empowering innovators by making it easier for users to consume and engage with data. With cutting-edge, cloud-ready storage solutions and the highest technological expertise, the company simplifies storage and turns data into effective results.

About The Company

Pure Storage is an American company that offers hardware and software for all-flash data storage. The company is headquartered in California, USA. Pure Storage was established in 2009 and worked stealthily on its products until 2011. After that, the company saw a 50 percent increase in quarterly revenues and raised over $470 million in venture financing. In 2015, the company went public and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. In the starting, Pure Storage used generic flash storage hardware and built the software for storage controllers. In 2015, Pure Storage completed the development of its exclusive flash storage hardware.

Pure Storage
Image source: techherald.in

History

In 2009, John Colgrove and John Hayes launched Pure Storage under the code name Os76 Inc. The business was initially founded inside the offices of the venture capital firm Sutter Hill Ventures, and it was supported with $5 million in seed money. The company raised an additional $20 million in venture money in a series B fundraising round. In August 2011, the company emerged from stealth mode as Pure Storage. EMC filed a lawsuit against the company and 44 former employees in 2013, alleging intellectual property theft.

Additionally, EMC asserted that the company had violated a few of its patents. In a countersuit, It claimed that EMC had illegally acquired a Pure Storage device to perform reverse engineering. In 2016, a jury court decided in favor of EMC and Pure Storage was ordered to pay $14 million to EMC. A judge overturned the verdict and mandated a further trial to determine the legality EMC patent at issue. Following that, a $30 million settlement was reached between Pure Storage and EMC. In August 2015, Pure Storage informed the Securities Exchange Commission of its intention to go public. In 2016, the organization held its first yearly user conference. In 2017, The company achieved its first year of profitability and surpassed $1 billion in revenue.

Acquisitions

In 2018 with the $25 million purchase of StorReduce, a provider of data deduplication software, the company completed its first acquisition. The same year, the company announced a binding deal to buy software-based file storage business Compuverde for an undisclosed sum. In 2020, Pure Storage paid $370 million to acquire Portworx, a Kubernetes-based cloud-native data, and storage management platform, supplier.

Products

Employing consumer-grade solid state drives, Pure Storage creates flash-based storage for data centres. Although more expensive, flash storage is speedier than conventional disc storage. The company creates unique deduplication and compression algorithms to increase the data volume that can be kept on each device. Along with that, it makes its own flash storage technology. FlashBlade, for unstructured data, FlashArray/C, which employs QLC flash, and the more expensive NVMe FlashArray/X are it’s three main product lines. Most of the company’s income comes from IT vendors that sell its solutions to operators of data centres.

Founder – John Colgrove, John Hayes

Pure Storage, which was founded in 2009, entered a market that had been dominated for over 30 years by competitors like EMC and HP. John Colgrove and John Hayes, the company’s co-founders, understood that they would need to construct and operate their storage business differently if they wanted to successfully compete with the established market leaders. Their ideas eventually led to the foundation of Pure Storage.

CEO – Charles Giancarlo

American businessman and investor Charles Giancarlo serves as the CEO and Chairman of Pure Storage. He formerly held top management positions at Silver Lake Partners and Cisco Systems. Charles Giancarlo is the company’s CEO since 2017. Giancarlo has an MBA from Harvard University, a master’s degree from the University of California, and a bachelor’s degree from Brown University.

Absolute Software Corporation

Absolute Software Corporation: The Leader in Endpoint Resilience

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Stealing can be of any type, with the intention to damage or just to make free money. But the person who loses his/her device or data is always at loss. There have been methods applied to track down those thieves, which are not always successful, and we are stuck with the same problem we began with. This same problem had ignited an idea of developing an end-point tracking system in the minds of the founders of Absolute Software Corporation. And today, the company is the only firm-ware-embedded visibility and control platform developer helping companies track and trace the lost products.

About the Company

Founded in 1993, Absolute Software Corporation is the first of its kind. The company develops software products to provide endpoint and zero-trust security to its clients. Absolute Software is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has established two more headquarters in Canada and Austin. Healthcare, government sector, K-12 education, professional services sector, higher education sector, finance are the main areas of service for the company. It operates through device manufacturers, independent software vendors, resellers, and managed service providers, such that it can offer efficient services worldwide effectively.
Absolute Software Corporation is a publically traded company and trades on Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq as ABST. The company is known for its flagship product, Absolute Platform and Persistence technology, a platform protecting devices, data, applications, and users both on and off the corporate network. Today, Absolute Software has over 140 registered patents and more than 13,000 clients rely on the company for their data security purpose.

Absolute Software Corporation
Image source: azureedge.net

The Back Story

Absolute Software Corporation was founded with a unique idea, i.e., to manage, track and secure computers despite their physical location. This was simply the result of a laptop theft that led to data loss as well. Leading to the solution of such a problem, Absolute Software started to work on a track-and-trace software solution, such that even despite the theft or any damage to the device it could be tracked by the owners.

This was only possible with some great partnerships, and at the beginning of the 2000s, Absolute Software started to build ties with device manufacturers, such that the Absolute software was embedded into those devices on the BIOS level. This way, even if the thief wanted to remove the tracking software, he could not find it in the first place.

In the year 2000, Absolute Software went public on Toronto Stock Exchange. The company also started to expand overseas, as it opened its first European in Newbury in 2006. Further expansion included the establishment of offices in the UK, Austin, Malaysia, etc. Absolute Software then partnered with Microsoft and achieved the gold certification as a partner from the latter in the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem. The Absolute Software growth also included some major acquisitions such as LANrev product suite (2009), some assets of LiveTime Software (2012), Palisade Systems (2013), etc. This way, the company was able to enhance the features of its products. The company got listed in the Forbes list of cybersecurity companies in 2020.

The CEO at Absolute Software Corporation

Christy Wyatt is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Absolute Software Corporation. With more than twenty years of experience in the field of cybersecurity and IT, Wyatt has worked in different prominent positions in big-name companies, including Apple, Palm, Sun Microsystems, Motorola, and Citigroup. She also served Dtex Systems as the CEO. Christy was also the Chairman, President, and CEO of Good Technology. In 2019, she was among the Top 50 Women Leaders in SaaS and also got listed in the Top 50 Women Entrepreneurs of America by Inc. Magazine.

Avid Technology

Avid Technology – The Pioneers of Video Editing and Multimedia Software.

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The day people discovered video and film making, that too with audio, was one of the most revolutionary days for humankind. The devices to develop those videos and platforms to run those videos have come a long way and today making videos and editing them according to one needs has become really easy. There are different people behind making those complex works easy, and few include the ones who make that user-friendly editing software for videographers and other multimedia companies. Avid Technology is one such company that has been in the software industry for the last 34 years and developing dedicated software products for the multimedia industry.

About Avid Technology

Bill Warner had founded Avid Technology in August 1987. It is an American software and multimedia company, with its headquarters based in Burlington, Massachusetts, United States. The company is best known for its software and editing products for the multimedia industry, and its key products include Pro Tools, Media Composer, Sibelius, Avid VENUE, Avid NEXIS, MediaCentral, FastServe, etc. Media Composer is the flagship product of Avid Technology. In the past 34 years, Avid Technology has gained the trust of clients from all over the world, and over 1500 people are working for it globally. Aspiring artists, creative professionals, production teams, and media enterprises cover the major part of the Avid client base. As per the 2020 records, the company made annual revenues worth US$360.5 million, and its estimated operating income for 2018 was US$13.684 million.

Avid Technology
Image source: www.avid.com

The Back Story

Bill Warner, the founder of Avid Technology, was working as a marketing manager at Apollo Computer before he founded the company in 1987. After establishing the company, he started to work on the first product of the company, a non-linear editing system named Avid/1 Media Composer. The company presented the very product in April 1988 at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). Avid Technology was the first to launch such a product for video editors. The innovative idea behind the product made it the most loved product of the 90s and replaced many conventional and existing but outdated products. The very product made it way easier for the editors to edit the videos in lesser time and more effectively.
Avid Technology, in almost ten years of its inception, bagged the technical Emmy award for Outstanding Engineering Development for its unique video editing system. In 1994, Avid launched another product named Open Media Framework, and in the next ten years, it launched products like Avid Interplay and Unity Isi, software different from a video editor. Avid Technology also won an Oscar for its revolutionary Avid Film Composer at the 71st Academy Awards in March 1999.
Avid Technology saw steady but rapid growth from the very beginning. Some of the credit of its growth also go to its strategic acquisitions. These acquisitions include names like DiVA Corporation (1993), Digidesign (1994), Basys (1994), Elastic Reality, Inc. (1995), Softimage (1998), NewStar (1998), Pluto Technology (2000), iKnowledge (2002), Rocket Networks (2003), Bomb Factory (@004), Sundance Digital (2006), Blue Order Solutions AG (2010), Rocket Networ (2012), Orad Systems (2015), etc.

The CEO at Avid Technology

With over thirty years of experience, Rosica has served many well-known companies at different prominent positions. He completed his graduation from Sierra College and then went to Sacramento State University for further studies.
In 1991, Rosica joined Philips Electronics and became the Vice President and General Manager of the company’s Digital Video Systems division. Later, in 2002, he became the Senior Vice President of the Strategic and Business Development wing of Thomson. Rosica also served Grass Valley as the Executive Vice president and Chief Sales & Marketing Officer for two years. In January 2013, Rosica joined Avid Technology, and for the past nine years, served the company in various positions, including Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations and Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, etc. In December 2016, he was promoted to be the President of the company, and in February 2018, Rosica became the CEO of Avid Technology.

Progress Software

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

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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.