Your Tech Story

Software Services

persistent systems

Persistent Systems – Providing Full Product Life Cycle Services.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Persistent Systems Limited is a multinational corporation that specializes in software products, services, and technological innovation. The company provides full product life cycle services. The company provides services at all stages of the product life cycle, allowing us to work with a diverse set of customers and create, upgrade, and deploy their software products. In the Deloitte Touché Tohmatsu Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific 2009, the company was recognized as one of the leading technology companies.

About The Company

On May 30, 1990, Persistent Systems Private Limited was formed, then on September 17, 2007, the firm was transformed into a public limited company and its name was changed to Persistent Systems Limited. The organization has extensive experience in telecommunications, life sciences, and infrastructure and systems. The company invested in innovative cloud computing analytics enterprise collaboration and enterprise mobility technologies and frameworks. It is an OPD specialist firm that provides consumers with the advantages of offshore delivery. It generates new applications and increases the functionality of customers’ existing software products while designing, developing, and maintaining software systems and solutions. It provides services at all phases of the product life–cycle, allowing it to collaborate with a diverse set of customers and develop, upgrade, and deploy its software products. It was named one of the top technology businesses in the Asia Pacific Deloitte Touché Tohmatsu Technology Fast 500 in 2009.

persistent systems
Image source: i.ytimg.com

Founding Story

Persistent Systems creates software that powers its clients’ businesses. In 1990, it was incorporated in India as Persistent Systems Private Limited. The founders of Persistent Systems, LLC pioneered the initial R&D into high throughput routing in early 2002 and have been consistently striving to ensure that data moves effectively via the wireless network. Over the next decade, it bought several software competitors and grew globally, creating operations in the United Kingdom, Japan, and the Netherlands. It also created alliances with companies such as Microsoft and M/1M.

It established Persistent Systems, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary situated in the United States, in 2001. Persistent Systems Limited was incorporated as a public limited company in September 2007. The firm’s shares were listed on the National Stock Exchange of India in March 2010. That same year, it bought many companies, including Infospectrum and Paxonix, a MeadWestvaco affiliate.

Fourth S – Software 4.0 – In 2014, Anand noticed that every company was becoming a product company, and there was talk about software consuming the globe.’ Anand met M R Rangaswami, co-founder of Sand Hill Group, who later assisted Persistent in developing its digital transformation narrative.

Key Partners And Resources

The suppliers who supply Persistent Systems with the equipment and services it needs to run its operations, as well as the contractors who provide temporary job services, are significant partners. IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, Appian, and Microsoft are among the company’s partners. The core resources of Persistent Systems are its human resources, which include the engineers who design and develop its software as well as the customer service employees who provide assistance. Persistent Systems’ structure is cost-driven, with the goal of minimizing expenses through extensive automation. Its most expensive variable item is the cost of acquired software licenses.

Anand Deshpande – Founder

Dr. Anand Deshpande has been the Founder, Chairman, and Managing Director of Persistent Systems since its creation, and is responsible for the Company’s overall leadership, strategy, and management. Anand’s talents as a real technology visionary lay in discovering and investing in next-generation technologies, as well as promoting internal entrepreneurship, to guarantee that Persistent Systems remain at the forefront of technological innovation.

Anand has been a driving force in the growth of Persistent Systems from its foundation in 1990 to its current status as a publicly-traded worldwide company. In 2012, he was named a Distinguished Alumnus by IIT Kharagpur, and in 2007, he received the Career Achievement Award from Indiana University’s School of Informatics. Prior to creating Persistent Systems, Anand worked as a Member of Technical Staff at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, from May 1989 until October 1990.

Blackboard

Blackboard Inc: Leading Web-Based Educational Software And Services Supplier.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Blackboard Inc. is the primary provider of web-based educational software and services to American postsecondary schools. The Blackboard Academic Suite and the Blackboard Commerce Suite, the company’s two primary products, enable students, professors, and administrators to connect to the Internet for a range of academic tasks, extracurricular activities, and commercial transactions. Blackboard’s core customers are colleges and universities, but it also serves K–12 schools and other education providers and student-focused merchants and publishers of textbooks. Blackboard’s products are utilized by millions of people at academic institutions in more than 60 countries worldwide, and the company is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with offices in Boston, Phoenix, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Australia, China, and Japan.

About The Company

Matthew Pittinsky and Michael Chasen had previously worked together on a software program that assisted high school students in selecting a college. KPMG saw that schools, particularly colleges and universities, were developing Internet-based learning initiatives. They recognized a lot of potential in the online education industry and decided to start a company that would let colleges offer their classes online. Pittinsky, 24, and Chasen, 25, abandoned their jobs at KPMG and formed Blackboard Inc. in the basement of a Dupont Circle townhouse in June 1997.

Blackboard Learn, the company’s main product, is a full-featured LMS that brings together students, educators, and administrators in a comprehensive digital learning environment. Moodlerooms, Blackboard Collaborate, Bb Student, Bb Grader, Bb Planner, Blackboard Open Content, Blackboard Mass Notifications, Blackboard Transact, and Blackboard Analytics are some other tools available. In addition, Blackboard offers managed hosting, platform consulting, enterprise consulting, online program management, training, and student services. Their job is to enhance the educational experience through the use of Internet-enabled technology that unites students, teachers, researchers, and the community in a developing network of educational environments dedicated to better communication, commerce, collaboration, and content. Every day, all throughout the world, Blackboard’s huge and diverse community of practice supports enhances, and extends services. The Internet has enormous potential for education and educational experiences. While platforms play a vital role, communities of practice produce the finest solutions. The network’s worth is its connectivity. As a result of the link, each Blackboard client makes the solution of every other Blackboard client more valuable.

Blackboard
Image source: www.thesoftwarereport.com

Global Expansion

In May 2002, Blackboard established an association with LearningMate, a branch of Delhi-based Educomp Datamatics Ltd, to offer goods and services in India’s e-learning sector. In July, Company announced another long-term strategic agreement with Bell & Howell Company’s XanEdu. Blackboard Learning System ML, the company’s multilanguage course management system and the industry’s first multilanguage enterprise-class learning system, was released in August. Learning System ML enabled the user interface to show a variety of languages, including Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and English. With a distribution collaboration with Australia-based Harvest Road, Blackboard maintained its push into the worldwide market and connection building in September. The company launched a strategic agreement with Learn-ingMate and World Links, an international non-profit organization, in December to enhance e-learning possibilities for instructors in rural and underserved schools across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. According to Inc. magazine’s annual top 500 rankings, Blackboard’s revenue growth from 1998 to 2002 was 11,047 percent, making it the fastest-growing private education company and the nation’s sixth fastest-growing corporation.

William L. Ballhaus – CEO

Bill serves as the chairman, president, and CEO of Blackboard. Bill is deeply committed to developing an industry-leading suite of solutions and products serving students and educators, as well as innovating on their behalf to expand student reach and improve learning outcomes within the education community, based on his experience leading global technology businesses.

Prior to joining Blackboard, he was President and CEO of SRA International, where he developed an innovative culture that focused on anticipating client demands and expanded the company’s portfolio in agile system development, mobilization, cloud computing, cyber security, and data analytics, and ERP.

Tyler Technologies

Tyler Technologies, the company formed from three government-owned businesses.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Tyler Technologies was originally established as Saturn Industries in 1966. Currently, it is a publicly-traded company based in Plano, Texas and it provides software to the United States public sector. It has a total of 17 offices across the US and one in Toronto, Canada because it has expanded its service there as well. The founder of the company is Joseph F. McKinney and the CEO of the company is H Lynn Moore Jr. Tyler Technologies was initially Tyler Corporation and it changed its name in 1999. Entering the 21st century, the company made plenty of accusations (more than 15 companies).

About Tyler Technologies

Tyler Technologies mainly offers its software to the public sector. There is a total of eight categories of software it offers. They are appraisal and tax services, financial, records and documents, school, courts and justice, data and insights, planning, regulatory, and maintenance, and public safety. In each of these categories, there is much software for varieties of purposes. The company has also received several awards and accolades in the last five decades. Tyler Technologies has been awarded “Best Places to Work” awarded by several magazines like Mississippi Business Journal, Albany Business Reviews, The Washington Post, etc. It was also featured in Forbes and Fortune several times, especially for fast growth and innovation.

Tyler Technologies
Image source: bizj.us

History of Tyler Corporation

Born in 1966 as Saturn Industries, Joseph F. Kinney is the main brain behind this successful enterprise. Tyler Technologies, today, was born out of three government companies, Ling-Temco_Vought. McKinney bought these three companies and then merged them to form Tyler Technologies. The company’s name changed from Saturn Industries to Tyler Corporation after it bought an iron pipes manufacturer, Tyler Pipe. The acquisition took place in 1968 and soon it became the parent company’s main source of annual revenue. Hence it was later renamed Tyler Corporation.

After three years of being in business, Tyler Corporation was already a huge success. Hence in 1969 the company decided to go public and got listed on the New York Stock exchange. The company’s name was officially changed to Tyler Corporation in 1970. It was after almost two decades that Tyler Corporation started developing software for the various government bodies of the US. In the late 1990s, Tyler Corporation started making acquisitions. In 1998, it acquired three companies. They are Business Resources Corporation, Interactive Computer Designs, and The Software Group Inc.

Major Events

The current name of the company, i.e., Tyler Technologies was adopted in 1999 changing it from Tyler Corporation. Tyler Technologies, till 2021, has acquired several companies. After acquiring three companies consecutively in 1998, it acquired a series of companies in 1999. They include Eagle Computer Systems, Micro Arizala Systems, Process Incorporated Computer Center Software, Gemini Systems (a subsidiary of Essex Technology Group), and Cole Layer Trumble Company. After the acquisitions in the late 1990s, the company again started acquiring from 2003. It acquired a Washington-based company called Eden Systems and a Portland-based company called GBF Information Systems in 2003. In 2006, it acquired three companies, namely, MazikUSA Inc, IL, and TACS. The company acquired Versatrans, Olympia Computing Company, PulseMark, Wiznet, Advanced-Data Systems, and more in the next few years.

In recent years, apart from acquiring several companies, Tyler Technologies has also extended its partnership to mane state bodies. In November 2021, it extended a 22-years contract in the State of Utah for digital government and payment solutions. In Troy, Michigan, the company was named a top workplace in 2021 for the fifth consecutive year. In February 2022, it acquired US eDirect.

About the CEO

Lynn Moore Jr is the CEO of Tyler Technologies since 2018. He joined the company in 1998 as a legal in-house counsel and from there, he became secretary of the Board of Directors. He also served in the company as an Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer. The main of the company currently under Moore’s leadership to the transition of the solutions provided the company to the cloud. Moore holds a degree in Economics from Georgetown University.

Virtusa

Virtusa, a company founded by a group of graduated engineer friends.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Founded in 1996 in Sri Lanka, Virtusa is an Information Technology company that mainly provides IT consulting and outsourcing services. Their main clients are software vendors and large enterprises. Virtusa is an American company and its headquarters are based in Massachusetts, United States. Kris Canekeratne, Tushara Canekeratne, John Gillis, and Sandy Gillis are the founders of the company. Virtusa offers services worldwide and has offices in several countries including India, Sri Lanka, the UK, Germany, Australia, Malaysia, UAE, Qatar, etc. The maximum number of offices of Virtusa is in US and India.

About Virtusa

When Virtusa was founded back in 1996, Kris Canekeratne became the CEO of the company whose valuation today has crossed billions. He took the company public in 2007 but currently it is listed as a private company as it was recently acquired by Baring Private Equity Asia for $2 billion. The company currently has more than 30,000 employees and some of its biggest competitors in the IT sector are Wipro, TCS, Infosys, and Cognizant. All these companies have a very strong market in India along with Virtusa and that raises the competition even more. The company is also known for its community support program that focuses mainly on education. In all these years, Company has established partnerships with many famous companies like Adobe, Azure, Google Cloud, PEGA, etc.

Virtusa
Image source: googleusercontent.com

Founding History of Company

The co-founders of Virtusa belonged to a common friends circle and they were all graduated engineers when came up with an idea to found Virtusa. They thought that the IT sector was ready for a radical transformation as the primitive methods and the way IT systems operated were becoming inefficient. So, they decided to come up with something to move the entire system off-premise, i.e., online models. Initially, they invested from their pockets, and after several maxed-out credit cards, they founded Virtusa.

The main goal behind the company was to help big enterprises with their IT legacy systems by adding some real value to them and not just reducing cost. Kris Canekeratne said that while their competitors were invested in cost arbitrage (providing the same services from lower-cost geographies), Virtusa emphasized engineering arbitrage (providing companies with all the sustainable benefits of software engineering and cost reduction as a part of it). The initial days were undoubtedly challenging because Virtusa approached the clients with a new perspective and it took time to educate the market on the business value they are offering.

Recent Events

Virtusa started making good profits and expanded rapidly after the early years and the post-dot-com bubble burst. In 2009, Virtusa made a very big acquisition for $7.3 million as it bought Insource, a technology consulting company focused on the insurance and healthcare sector. In 2010, the company acquired ConVista Consulting, LLC, a very influential company in the finance sector followed by acquiring another financial service consulting firm, Alas Consulting, LLC. Virtusa acquired OSB Consulting LLC in 2013, a company that specialized in financial services and insurance domains. Some of the other companies that Virtusa acquired in recent years are TradeTech Consulting, eTouch Systems Corp, and Apparatus, Inc. In 2015, Company also acquired a 53% stake in Polaris Consulting & Services Limited, India and the deal was closed for $270 million.

Santosh Thomas – CEO of Virtusa

Santosh Thomas became the CEO of Virtusa in 2021 as Kris Canekeratne stepped away. Thomas has very rich experience in managing large enterprises and also helping them grow and expand from the early stages. Thomas has been around for several years and has witnessed how to lay down strategies so that a company can survive during market transformation. Before joining the company, Thomas was a part of Cognizant’s Executive Committee. Thomas was born and raised in India and holds a degree in marketing and finance.

Xero

Xero – A New Zealand-based Cloud Software Platform For SMEs.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Xero is a cloud-based software platform that was founded in 2006. It provides Software as a Service (SaaS) and it is a public company listed in the Australian Securities Exchange. Rod Drury is the founder of the company and Steve Vamos is the present CEO. Xero mainly develops accounting software and it is based in Wellington, New Zealand. Apart from the headquarters in Wellington, the company has two other offices in New Zealand. Xero’s products are sold by subscription and are used in more than 180 countries.

About The Company

In 2006, Rod Drury along with Hamish Edwards founded Xero. When they founded the company, it was originally called Accounting 2.0. With time company has grown beyond New Zealand and it has established offices in Australia, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Africa. In 2017, Xero crossed the mark of having 1 million customers worldwide. It has also landed more than one million subscribers in Australia and New Zealand. From 2006 till 2018, Rod Drury acted as the CEO of the company and he was placed by Steve Vamos in early 2018.

Xero
Image source: wikimedia.org

Origin Of Xero

Before founding the company, Rod Drury explored a lot of other opportunities in the entrepreneurial ground. He tried bespoke software development in Microsoft Access and SQL Server but it was sold off in 1999. Then he started a documentation management startup followed by building an RDBMS for Microsoft Exchange and selling it to Quest Software. Selling the software gave Rod capital for starting Xero. He was also one of the board members of Trade Me that was sold for half a billion US dollars. With the total capital he raised, he was ready to launch Xero.

Xero As a Public Company

The idea of opening a business for cloud-based accounting software clicked in Rod’s mind when he was working at Arthur Young (now part of Ernst & Young). So, eventually, he started planning and raising money to launch the company. In 2007, Xero became a public company and got listed on the New Zealand Exchange (NZD) with a $15 million IPO. For the first few years, the company mainly focused on expanding and strengthening its presence in the New Zealand market and then entered the Australian market and went public there in 2012. In 2018, the company removed its name from NZD and was only listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. After one year, Xero became the third most valuable publicly traded company from New Zealand.

Fundings

In 2009, Xero received funding of $23 million and it was led by Craig Winkler, founder of MYOB. In 2010, it raised $4 million from Valar Ventures, and again in 2012 raised $16.6 million from the same firm. Xero raised $49 million in late 2012 and the major investors were Peter Thiel and Matrix Capital. In May 2013, the valuation of the company became $1.4 billion on the NZE. In October 2013, the two main investors invested another $180 million and with this, the total funding received by company became $230 million. In 2015, a new investor, Accel provided funding of $100 million to Xero. The company bagged the award of the best hybrid deal by Finance Asia in 2018.

After Xero became a public company it acquired a series of businesses. In 2011, Company acquired Paycycle, an Australian online payroll provider, and next year it acquired Spotlight Workpapers. In 2018, Xero established a joint venture with the US payroll platform, Gusto and acquired a data capture solution company called Hubdoc. The company acquired an Australian startup called Waddle that does invoice financing. This year, Xero acquired two companies till now which are Planday and Tickstar AB.

About The Founder

Rod Drury is a famous entrepreneur based in New Zealand. He became famous after founding Xero where he also continued as the CEO till 2018. Rod went to Victoria University of Wellington and started his career with Arthur Young, an accounting firm. Apart from founding Xero, Rod has also co-founded Context Connect and AfterMail.

TietoEVRY

TietoEVRY: One of the Leading Digital Services and Software Company.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

TietoEVRY Oyj aka Tieto is a Finland-based IT and software service company with its headquarters in Helsinki, Finland. The company is over fifty years old, having a company named EVRY added to it in 2019 with a EUR 1.2 Bn deal, hence becoming TietoEVRY. TietoEVRY is a conglomerate and provides services in the field of healthcare, industrial and consumer services, finance, etc. According to the company, it creates a digital advantage for businesses and society.

About The TietoEVRY

TietoEVRY has a history of over 50 years, and with multiple acquisitions, it has reached heights of success. The company is not only a leading software service provider in its home country but has expanded to over 20 other countries on all the continents. Finland, Norway and Sweden are the main markets where TietoEVRY is doing its business. Except that, it has established its offices in Germany, Denmark, Great Britain, Netherlands, Malaysia, India, China, and Poland, etc. Being a software company, it offers services to the banking industry, the insurance industry, telecom industry, automotive, media as well as the healthcare industry.
TietoEVRY trades on NASDAQ OMX Helsinki and Stockholm and has employed over 24000 people globally. As of 2020, the company made revenues worth €2.786 billion.

TietoEVRY
Image source: jobsnet.in

The Back Story

TietoEVRY started its operations as an IT systems development and maintenance company in 1968 in n Espoo, Finland, and went by the name Tietotehdas Oy. The company worked as the provider of computer services and software for the mainframe computers, Union Bank of Finland is one of its first customers. The company despite being a newbie started to grow at a rapid rate in its beginning years. The arrival of minicomputers helped the company grow to a great extent. In the late 70s and early 80s, the company added many customers from different industries.
The decade of the 90s was when TietoEVRY started to make acquisitions and was involved in multiple mergers and partnerships, resulting in even faster growth. In the mid of 90s, TietoEVRY had a name change to TT Tieto, and later in 1998, the company name was again changed to Tieto. This was the same time when the company also started to try new things and entered the Telecom business by acquiring Avancer.

The Growth Years

In 1999, Tieto merged its operations with the Swedish Enator corporation and formed TietoEnator. The partnership went on for about ten years, and in 2008, through a restructuring process, the company became Tieto Corporation, establishing its headquarters in Helsinki. With the all-new revamping of the company, it started to expand overseas, too.
In 2015, Tieto made some of the major acquisitions, to expand its business in the field of digital Customer Experience Management and to support, including Smilehous, one of the biggest Finnish consultants and service providers, Imano AB, and Software Innovation. These acquisitions have helped the company to grow in the field of digital Customer Experience Management, consulting, and digitalization services in paper and forestry industries as well as enterprise content management. In 2019, the company merged the operations of another IT company named Evry and formed TietoEVRY, the current trading name for the company.
DaWinci is one of the most popular management software from TietoEVRY, used by big-name companies from various industries for planning, transportation management, personnel logistics, asset management and reporting, etc. The company serves its customers from the field of banking, insurance, telecom, automotive and media, healthcare, forest, manufacturing, retail, and logistics, public; ICT operation management, etc. Tieto Norway AS (Norway) and Tieto Sweden AB (Sweden) are the major subsidieary of the TietoEVRY.

The CEO at TietoEVRY

Kimmo Alkio is the current CEO and the President of TietoEVRY. He is a native of Finland and was born on 25 October 1963 in Helsinki, Finland. He has got a bachelor’s degree in business from Texas A&M University, USA, and an Executive MBA degree from the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.
Alkio is a renowned Finnish businessman. He is also a former professional Tennis Player and has won doubles titles in Helsinki in the period between 1981 to 1987. In his corporate career, Alkio has worked at companies like Nokia, F-Secure Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Compaq Computer in various management positions. Alkio joined TietoEVRY in 2011 as the CEO and the President.