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Coupa Software

Coupa Software – Helping Companies to Spend Smarter and Safer.

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When there is an idea for a business, it is natural to be conscious about the expenditure as well, as while crafting a new business most of the money is wasted without a spending plan. While some organized businessmen know how to deal with the everyday spending on manufacturing, employment, supply, and other processes, there are several who rely on platforms like business spend management software to take care of all the expenditure on every process of the company. Coupa Software is one of the BSM software developers, most big-name companies rely on for their business spend management solutions. The software by Coupa is cloud-based such that offers maximum flexibility to the business owners to handle their spending with ease and most transparency.

About Coupa Software

Coupa is a sixteen years old company founded in 2006 by Dave Stephens and Noah Eisner. The company headquarters is based in San Mateo, California, U.S., and it provides its services globally. Since the company is operating at a global level, Coupa has established its offices in over 40 countries of Europe, Latin America and the Asia Pacific, and it deals in 140 currencies. Coupa Software develops software in the Business Spend Management category, and its products include spend management software, procurement, invoicing, sourcing, contract management, catalogue management, expense management, etc. As per the 2021 records, over 2500 people are employed by Coupa, and it made approximately US$542 million worth of annual revenues for FY21. Coca-Cola, Nike, Adidas, Amazon, Caterpillar, and Slack are a few of the more than 700 worldwide customers of Coupa.

Coupa Software
Image source: www.nasdaq.com

The Back Story

Dave Stephens and Noah Eisner founded Coupa in 2006 and released its first product, i.e., Coupa Express in the same year. The next year, the company came with Coupa On Demand, a SaaS product, which was dedicatedly made for small and medium, and small size businesses. Coupa’s first spend analysis product named Coupa Spend Optimizer came in the year 2011, and the company also bagged a huge contract from Independent Purchasing Cooperative (IPC) to handle its franchises in 98 countries. By 2014, the company started to expand overseas, opening its first foreign office in Dublin, Ireland. The same year, Coupa Software also introduced the Coupa Inventory and partnered with Net Suite for a strategic partnership.

Coupa also started to acquire other companies to grow its operations. In 2015, it went to acquire the assets of ZenPurchase, InvoiceSmash, and TripScanner. The next year, Coupa acquired Contractually, and in 2020, the company bought LLamasoft. LLamasoft helped the company to integrate AI technology to the supply chain feature in its platform. Coupa went public on Nasdaq in 2016, where it trades as COUP. In the year 2021, Coupa introduced the Sustainable Business Spend Management (BSM) platform.

The CEO at Coupa Software

Rob Bernshteyn is the current CEO at Coupa Software. He is a veteran of the software industry and has handled multiple executive roles at various IT companies in his more than twenty-years-long career.

Rob graduated from the University at Albany with a Bachelor’s of Science in Information System and then went to the Harvard Business School to pursue an MBA in 2000. He started his career at Accenture as the Project Manager of the System Integration Consulting and worked for four years there. Then Rob switched to McKinsey & Company to work as an associate. In June 2001, he joined Siebel Systems as the Director of Product Management, and in June 2004, he became the VP of Global Product Marketing & Management at SuccessFactors. Rob left his last company and switched to Coupa Software, where he held the position of the Chief Executive Officer and the Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Convera Corporation

Convera Corporation – Result Of A Merger That Took Place Between Two Companies.

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We are already familiar with the famous Google and Bing search engines, and we know how amazingly those search engines have changed our lives. From finding out a good institution for studies to finding a chocolate cake recipe in seconds, everything is so easy because of them. Apart from Google and Bing, there are many more that have been consumers’ favourites for a long time, whether it is Baidu, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. But there are some other search engines as well that have been designed to serve a particular purpose. There are companies like Convera Corporation, making such dedicated software products for their clients. Convera Corporation is mainly known for its flagship product, RetrievalWar, which is widely used by Microsoft even after its retirement in 2007.

About Convera Corporation

Convera is a twenty years old technology company, mainly known for its corporate search engine development. The company though is today a part of Firstlight ERA and operates as NTENT today, it has made its name solely through its flagship product RetrievalWare, which the company launched as Convera.
Convera was founded in 2000, with its headquarters established in Vienna, VA, United States. The company was already a result of the merger of Intel’s Interactive Services division and Excalibur Technologies Corporation, and later, it again merged with Firstlight ERA in 2010 to form NTENT. As Convera, the company’s annual revenue for FY2009 was estimated to be 1.3 million USD, and as NTENT, the company is doing equally well.

Convera Corporation
Image source: squarespace-cdn.com

Founding the Company

Convera Corporation was the result of a merger that took place between Intel’s Interactive Services division and Excalibur Technologies Corporation in the year 2000. The latter has been in the search engine industry for a longer time, and this experience was put to good use for Convera Corporation. On the other hand, Intel’s Interactive division’s expertise was also a boon for the company. Convera bagged Intel’s contract with the National Baseball Association for the distribution of the NBA content in the first year of its inception.
In the year 2002, Convera acquired Semantix Inc. that specialized in cross-lingual processing as well as computational linguistics technology, helping the company add more features to its products. The company had started to offer SaasS vertical search services, and its RetrievalWare became the favourite of governments of the UK, the US, Canada, and a few more countries. In fact, Microsoft still uses the same software to date.
Also, Convera’s vertical search service had attracted customers like John Wiley & Sons., Centaur Media, Incisive Media, etc. In February 2010, Convera merged with Firstlight ERA and formed NTENT, a company that still offers the web-scale semantic search for vertical applications, as Convera Corporation did as an independent company. NTENT’s headquarters is based in New York City, New York, United States, and Pat Condo is the CEO of the company, who also led Excalibur Technologies (one of the merging companies to form Convera) and Convera as the CEO.

The CEO at Convera Corporation

Patrick C. Condo was the CEO and President of Convera Corporation. In the 80s, Condo served Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a company that distributed Excalibur Technologies’ products. Excalibur was one the companies that merged to form Convera. In the early 90s, Condo joined Excalibur, and in five years, he became the CEO and President of Excalibur. While developing a SaaS search platform in partnership with Intel, in 2000, Excalibur and Intel’s interactive media division had a merger and Condo became the CEO of the newly formed Convera Corporation. After ten years in the business, Convera then merged with NTENT, and Condo held the CEO position at NTENT as well.

Avaya

Avaya, the world’s number one contact centre and unified communication service provider.

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Businesses are based on communication and establishing relations. Thanks to the companies that are building tools to make online communication easy through their online communication platforms. In times of pandemic, people are able to maintain their business relations and control their work using the internet and these software products. The work-from-home culture is only possible because of the internet connection and the various software that companies are using to communicate with their clients and employees. The most used communication software is from Avaya, an American technology company that specializes in developing unified communication software and service.

About Avaya

Avaya is an over twenty years old technology and software company. The company headquarters is based in Durham, North Carolina, and it basically develops communication software for its clients. The company is publically held and trades on New York Stock Exchange with ticker AVYA. Avaya is a multinational company and has offices in 190 countries. The company is home to 7900 employees. As per the 2020 data, Company made revenues worth US$2.9 billion for the financial year 2020, and it registered US$706 million as its operating income for the financial year 2019. The company’s most popular product is the Avaya OneCloud, which offers UCaaS (unified communications), CCaaS (contact centre), and CPasS services to the customers in one place. The company has also registered over 4000 patents in the same industry under its name.
Avaya is the world’s number one contact centre and unified communication service provider. Apple, AT&T, Comcast, Dell, Standard Chartered Bank, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Disney, Walmart, Lloyds Banking Group, Michigan State University, U.S. House of Representatives, etc. are some of the major and permanent clients that Avaya serve. For its new software products, the company has started to merge AI with them. It has also partnered with companies like Google and Amazon to make the platforms more user-friendly and up-to-date for consumers.

Avaya
Image source: media.bizj.us

The Back Story

Avaya is the result of a spin-off that occurred in 1995. AT&T had a spun-off, and Lucent Technologies was born. The latter then had a restructure and further divided its operations, and one of the spun off from Lucent was Avaya. Avaya was formed in 2000, a publically traded company. The company stayed independent for seven long years, and in October 2007, two partners, TPG Capital and Silver Lake Partners, acquired Avaya for $8.2 billion, and it became a private company.
But in the next few years, Company faced a lot of losses, and in 2017, it decided to become independent and again went public on NYSE. The going public helped the company get back on its foot and experiment with new technologies, resulting in new software launches and more customer reach.
In twenty years of career, Avaya also made some strategic acquisitions that aided the company’s growth. These acquisitions included names like VISTA Information Technologies, VPNet Technologies, Tenovis, Traverse Networks, Sipera, Aurix, Quintus, NimCat Networks, Esnatech, etc. In October 2019, Company launched its most revolutionary product, Avaya Cloud Office, unified communications as a service solution.

The CEO and President at Avaya

Jim Chirico is the current CEO at Avaya. He has got a BS, Marketing degree from Providence College. Chirico has been in the technology industry for more than thirty years. At the beginning of his career, Chirico worked for IBM in various positions. In 1998, he joined Seagate Technology as the Vice President of the Global Operations, Development, and Manufacturing. Chirico started working at Avaya as the COO and Global Sales Leader in 2008. In 2017, he was appointed as the President and the CEO of Avaya.

Pluralsight

Pluralsight, Story of company that started from classroom training to a famous online platform.

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Pluralsight is an online platform that offers video courses and certification to gain knowledge that will help one stay updated in the 21st century. From various courses on software development to gaining creative knowledge, Pluralsight has made everything available. Aaron Skonnard, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams founded Pluralsight in 2004 as a classroom training company. But, to keep up with the time it evolved eventually to an online platform similar to Coursera and Udemy. The company’s headquarters is based in Utah, US and it is owned by Vista Equity Partners.

About Pluralsight

Back when the company was founded, Pluralsight used to send instructors to a business or training event. But today, with the help of an online learning platform, it is making the training courses available for everyone. Pluralsight uses a subscription-based model and focuses mainly on training tech-based professionals like software and security developers, IT professionals, product managers, etc.

Pluralsight has split its training approach into two paths, skills and flow. In the skill path, the platform lets the users learn and adapt new skills, upgrade skills according to needs, etc. In the flow path, a person can compare between old and new codes, fix bugs, use data to measure each team member’s contribution, etc. The minimum cost of the Pluralsight platform starts from $29 per month.

Pluralsight
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Brief history

The company started as a classroom training service in 2004 but after three years shifted its focus to online video training. Pluralsight started making huge profits in 2011 and it is also in the top 20 list of Utah companies. Inc 5000 also named it as one of the fastest-growing private companies and one of the top education companies. In 2012, the company went into a partnership with Microsoft such that the courses of the company were available for the MSDN subscribers. Pluralsight also launched a free programming coding boot camp that focused on offering coding classes to kids who are 10 and above. The company also provided a free one-year subscription to its training library for the Utah K-12 teachers.

In 2017, Pluralsight ranked #20 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list and also made it into the list of Great Place To Work’s 2017 Best Workplaces (for small and medium-sized companies). Next year, Pluralsight filed for its IPO and began trading publicly but in December 2020 it was acquired by a private equity firm called Vista Equity Partners. The deal was closed by $3.5 billion. In the past decade, Pluralsight has successfully landed many corporate clients, and the majority of them are Fortune 500 companies.

Funding

When Pluralsight was started, it was a self-funded venture as each of the four founders contributed $5000. For a very long time, the company didn’t receive any external funding until December 2012 when the Series A funding round was conducted. In the first funding round, Pluralsight raised $27.5 million from Insight Venture Partners and received an additional $2.5 million later. In 2014, Pluralsight raised another $135 million in Series B funding when some new investors like ICONIQ Capital and Sorenson Capital joined in. During that time, Pluralsight became the first Utah-based company ever to receive that much amount of funding. After the Series C funding round in 2016, Pluralsight became a billion-dollar company.

Acquisitions

Pluralsight started acquiring a series of companies from 2013 starting with e-learning and education businesses. It acquired PeepCode in July 2013 followed by TrainSignal and Tekpub in the same year. In 2014, it acquired Digital-Tutors expanding Pluralsight’s training courses to media and design. Later in the same year, it acquired an online skill assessment platform called Smarterer. Some of the other companies it acquired in the last few years are Train Simple, GitPrime, Next Tech, etc.

About Aaron Skonnard – CEO and co-founder

Aaron started to code from a very young age when his father bought him an Apple II computer. He completed his studies in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and worked at various companies like 3M, Intel, and Axiom Technologies. He also published a few books and invested in start-ups that emerged in Utah.

SmartBear Software

SmartBear Software – A Company Originally Founded By Jason Cohen Now A Part Of Bigger Enterprise.

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SmartBear Software is an American-based IT company that went through several folds of acquisitions since 2003. Jason Cohen, a successful entrepreneur and also an author, founded SmartBear and sold the company in 2007. The SmartBear company that we see today is the result of multiple acquisitions that took place between 2007 and 2009. SmartBear Software is known for delivering products for software development and testing, API testing and management, etc. Currently, the company is based in Somerville, Massachusetts, US and it operates under the leadership of CEO, Frank Roe.

About SmartBear Software

SmartBear is an information technology company that focuses on developing quality software for its clients. The products and solutions of SmartBear encompass a wide variety of options from test automation to code collaborator. SmartBear develops its products in such a way that it is not only affordable but also easy to try and integrate into your current system. So, the company makes sure to provide quality solutions at affordable pricing. More than 24,000 organizations have used the products of SmartBear including some famous brands like Adobe, Microsoft, FedEx, etc. The SmartBear tools are used by more than 15 million users in over 194 countries for different purposes.

SmartBear Software
Image source: wikimedia.org

History of Today’s SmartBear Software

Jason Cohen bootstrapped SmartBear for seven years and turned it into a success. The company started generating profit in millions and then he sold the company in 2007. Insight Venture Partners acquired SmartBear Software during that time along with two other companies, namely, AutomatedQA and Pragmatic Software. These three companies became a single entity and operated as AQA Holdings which in 2010 became SmartBear Software.

Automated QA was a software company founded in 1999 in Nevada. The company was well-known for building automated software testing tools. The company, before the acquisition and merger, was featured in the SD Times 100 list in the software development field. Born in 2005, Pragmatic Software became the first Microsoft Certified Partner software company in Albania. As the three companies started working together as a single brand, it acquitted another business called Eviware in 2011. A series of companies was acquired by SmartBear in the next few years including AlertSite, Lucierna, Swagger, and many more. The acquisitions led to some of the founders joining SmartBear which uplifted the quality of the team. In 2017, SmartBear was further acquired (major stake) by Francisco Partners.

SmartBear During the Pandemic

Frank Roe recently became the CEO of the company which was two weeks before the lockdown started due to COVID-19. A situation of sudden shutdown and shifting to a completely online mode of work became a new challenge for each and every company. So, being the new leader of SmartBear, Frank tried to maintain a very strong communication line among the employees, not only meeting but also virtual social gatherings. Most of the employees at SmartBear are very young, so their enthusiasm and curiosity helped the company move swiftly to the WFH environment without such amendments. Frank also believes that one of the most important reasons that SmartBear has successfully stayed strong during COVID-19 is because of the entrepreneurial spirit in the team. As the founders of the business acquired by SmartBear have come on board and joined the team, it has created a diverse team bonded with the same spirit of passion.

Awards and Recognitions

The new SmartBear Software has won many awards in the past years and still continues to thrive. Some of them include becoming the best medium-sized company to work in 2014 which was awarded by Glassdoor. Boston named SmartBear as one of the ‘50 on Fire’ companies in 2019 and the next year it was in the list of 100 Best Places to Work in Boston 2020 by BuiltIn.

Frank Roe – CEO of SmartBear

Frank Roe joined SmartBear with 25 years of rich experience in the business world. He started off his career by working as a strategy consultant and slowly moved up the ladder. Frank worked for multiple companies including Deloitte Consulting, Incentive Systems, Progress, Oracle, RSD, etc. He joined SmartBear as the Chief Revenue Officer in 2018 and became CEO in February 2020.

amdocs

Digital solutions of Amdocs is making communication smarter and faster

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Amdocs is a famous multinational software company providing the digital solution in the sector of communication, media, finance, and many giant digital enterprises. The history of the company dates back to 1982 when this Israeli business was founded by Morris Kahn and Boaz Dotan. Boaz became the first CEO and President of the company. Today, the company is based in Missouri, United States. It has more than 25,000 employees and last year its annual revenue summed up to $4.1 billion.

Let’s delve deeper into the history of Amdocs and have a look at why it is better than other software companies.

About Morris Kahn and Boaz Dotan – Amdocs Founders

Morris Kahn is one of the most famous Israeli entrepreneurs who is also a billionaire. Kahn stepped into the business world and explored different niches of business for a long time. When he was young he established a bicycle company followed by a cattle company. He is also a famous philanthropist who received Bonei Zion Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.

Boaz Dotan received his bachelor’s degree from Tel-Aviv University. Apart from founding the company, Boaz is currently a partner at AfterDox and a board member of Retalix Ltd.

Founding history of Amdocs

The foundation of the company took place as a part of Golden Pages which is the Israeli phone directory company. Morris Khan acquired Golden Pages hence the company which then came under the Aurec Group, a telecom company established by Morris in 1968. Boaz Dotan was the first president of Amdocs who along with Morris developed software for phone directory companies. This led both of them to open a new company, Aurec Information & Directory Systems.

In 1985, a 50% share of this new company was acquired by Southwestern Bell Corporation and the company was renamed as Amdocs. Within the next couple of years, the other assets of Aurec Group were sold to Amdocs as well for $1 billion. The company started gradually expanded to the area of the telecom sector followed by mobile communication. In 1998, the company went public and next year it acquired ITDS thus entering into the reign of management services.

2000-present

Stepping into a new century, the new acquisitions by Amdocs flooded the news headlines. In 2001, the company acquired a software firm, Clarify for $200 million. Amdocs acquired DST Innovis and Cramer Systems in two consecutive years and an Israeli start-up called SigValue in 2007. This was just the beginning and the following years witnessed the acquisition of many more communication and software companies from around the world. Last month, Amdocs acquired Openet Telecom Inc, a world-renowned 5G connection provider.

Why choose Amdocs?

The demand for every business is different depending on the sector of business and type of clients. Amdocs has connectivity solutions for any business and helps gain a faster pace to grow one’s business. Last year, Gartner named Amdocs as a leader for both IRCM and OSS and IT Services Magic Quadrants. Till now, the company has worked with more than 350 service providers in 80 countries. Amdocs also helps in accelerating the network and cutting cost at the same time. And, the most important and valuable service for a client is to received quality solutions cost-effectively. Amdocs is also excelling at providing fraud-management services based on ML and AI. A few months ago Amdocs launched Home Operating System powered by AI and Cloud-Native.

Amdocs’ AI-powered Home Operating System

This year, Amdocs’ revolutionizing home broadband has become a big hit in the market. The name of the product is Amdocs doxiO HomeOS providing better suggestions based on AI, enhanced cybersecurity, working more on basic commands thus adapting the “touch-free” notion and making it easier for everyone in the home to control and use the connected devices.

The consumers can change manually the Wi-Fi settings that getting an insight into how many devices are connected. This is specially designed for the benefit of parents as one receives notifications regarding the usage patterns, media, and gaming consumption. And, alerts and notifications are also sent to the users if anticipated a security breach.

Effect of COVID-19 on Amdocs

Putting forward the safety of employees and partners, Amdocs didn’t attend the MWC Barcelona 2020. The CEO of the company said they appreciate the preventive measures taken up by GSMA, but the health concern of Amdocs’ employees is the first priority for the company. This statement was given by Shuky Sheffer, current president and CEO of the company on 19th February 2020.