The 20 Leading Tech Companies of 2018 by Mirror Review

Unveiling The Business Stories

In the loop Container security & drafting the cloud application for the security

Raj Sabhlok President

The Biggest Disruptor in the IT Management Space

www.mirrorreview.com / July 2018 Issue

Money Talks Future trends of the Fintech industry for 2019

The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018

Editorial Note

n today’s day and age, there is no better word to describe technology than “disruption”. Literally, none of the industries have been left untouched by the havoc and disruption caused by digitization. Right from application of AI strategy for every business to genetic fortune forecasting to generation of zero-carbon natural gas to production of artificial embryo, you name it and technology has already done it. Such is the power of this mind-boggling and fire cracking nature of technology.

We, the team of Mirror Review, are happy to present you our latest edition of magazine, ‘The 20 Leading Tech Companies of 2018’, where we have featured an array of leading technology solution provider companies, along with their stories of triumph and the powerful and dynamic leaders behind them. On the cover, we have ManageEngine, a leading IT management division that crafts comprehensive IT management software for the clients’ entrepreneurial needs. Led by Raj Sabhlok (President of ManageEngine and Zoho.com), ManageEngine has catered to a large number of Fortune 500 companies and other organizations with its impressive and integrated solution offerings. Moreover, we also share some fascinating insights on the transformational companies and their innovative offerings. Featured on the inside pages are Reltio (Cloud Data Management), AndPlus (App Development), Netstairs (Interactive Enterprise and Echo Systems), OmnesLaw (Legal Solutions and Consulting), Zoomdata (Visual Analytics), Impinj (Item Delivery Intelligence), Merixstudio (Creative Software House), ChopDawg (Web & Mobile App Development), Cloverleaf Analytics (Insurance Business Intelligence), Cloud4Wi (Enterprise Grade Product Suite), Spark CRM (Smarter Software For Real Estate), Cleveroad (Web & Mobile App Developer) and PLM Trailer Leasing (Refrigerated Solutions). Other standout and engrossing articles include, Cloud-based container security and drafting applications and top trends of the Fintech industry for 2019. We are fortunate to have the opportunity to showcase all these cutting-edge technology solutions provider companies, along with their intellectual leaders. Mirror Review wishes them for even more success and rapid growth in the upcoming future. We hope you enjoy our latest issue.

Unveiling The Business Stories

The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018

Publisher Archana Ghule Editor-in-Chief Vikram Suryawanshi Managing Editor Anuja Mulmule Editorial Coordinators Bansidhar Tigga Mayur Shewale Head of Distribution and Production Aakash Mahajan Head of Operations Robert Smith Project Manager James Adams Roger Johnson Rahul Vishwakarma Graphic Designers Poonam Magdum Sumit Bonage Art Director Mark Davis Research Analysts James Adams Maria Smith David Thomas Advertising Jacob Thomas

Mirror Reveiw Media & Tech C-506, Wisteriaa Fortune, Opp-Silver Spoon Hotel, Bhumkar Das Gugre Road, Wakad, Pune - 411057 +1(850)564-8517 info@mirrorreview.com www.mirrorreview.com

Unveiling The Business Stories

10 Sean Mahoney AndPlus

12 Calm

14 Joshua Davidson ChopDawg.com.

16 Evgeniy Altynpara Cleveroad

Unveiling The Business Stories

The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018

40 Adam Sledzikowski Merixstudio

38 Dr. Chris Diorio Impinj, Inc.

36 Robert Clark Cloverleaf Analytics,

24 Andrea Calcagno Cloud4Wi Unveiling The Business Stories

44 Ahmad Moradi NETSTAIRS. COM. Inc

46 Gurbans Chatwal OmnesLaw Pvt Ltd.

48 Keith Shipp PLM Trailer Leasing

52 Manish Sood Reltio

58 Simeon Garratt Spark RE Technologies

60 Justin Langseth Zoomdata, Inc.

Unveiling The Business Stories

of 2018 The 20 leading

T ech Companies

Raj Sabhlok

22 Container Security and drafting the cloud application

Unveiling The Business Stories

54 Future trends of the Fintech industry

Impossible Is Nothing

echnological developments and advancements have altered the industrial landscape. Web, Mobile and IoT software are rapidly disrupting and transforming entire industries. Ultimately, updated features, better products and latest hardwares are the end products of the digital revolution. AndPlus is one of the United States’ leading software design & development ﬁrm. Trusted by major enterprises like Bloomberg and ESPN, the software development agency leverages current and emerging technologies such as machine learning and artiﬁcial intelligence to help their customers stay on the cutting edge fo technology. The multidisciplinary team at AndPlus ensures, that clients’ solutions are aligned with their business goals, thereby delighting users and boosting their outcomes. With cross-functional team of strategic, creative, UI/UX and technical virtuosos, the software development company takes the customers’ mission-critical challenges like their own till the end. Research & Development is in the company’s DNA. Along with their knowledgeable leader, the team loves to explore new technologies

and enhance their learning capabilities. AndPlus’s vision is to digitally transform every industry, they touch. The days of ﬁling cabinets and paper are far behind, but many industries are slow to adapt. Allowing AndPlus’s team to implement emerging and established technologies alike can bring any business to the forefront. So many businesses are falling behind their competitors because they are slow to adapt. However, AndPlus is ready to change that medieval scenario. Pragmatic Engineer & Successful Entrepreneur Sean Mahoney is the President and CEO of AndPlus. Sean has the mind of an engineer and the heart of an entrepreneur. He holds degrees from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Since founding AndPlus in 2009, his passion for developing custom software solutions for clients, has fueled the ﬁrm's high quality work and steady growth. Designing and engineering software is not a simple task and most companies are not equipped to handle a rigorous development process. That is where AndPlus comes in. Regardless of the diverse industry, preferred platform or use case, the trained

Unveiling The Business Stories

The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018 “Our passion is helping you accelerate the implementationof the latest technologies across web, mobile, IoT and whatever comes next.” multidisciplinary team is in-house and ready to solve the clients’ problems. Accelerating Innovation At the AndPlus Innovation Lab, the team is continuously exploring emerging technology such as machine learning, artiﬁcial intelligence, augmented reality and blockchain technology. What Sets AndPlus Apart What Sets AndPlus Apart from its competitors are its unique services such as enabling its clients to market faster, completely transparent process allowing customers to track progress in real time and opportunistic open door policy for customers to chip in and personally work with their engineers. ·

User Experience: At AndPlus, the team design products with a sense of how they built products, while keeping in mind their applications. Agile Development: As technology is adaptable, the team of technical architects is trained to diagnose and prescribe the correct tech for each speciﬁc project. From Javascript frameworks to platforms as complex as BACnet, the company assembles the correct stack for the customer’s project. Launch & Support: Lifecycle Sprints are essential for keeping up compatibility and iterating on an already solid

Unveiling The Business Stories

foundation. AndPlus prides itself on releasing thoroughly tested, extensible and well-written software ready to be improved upon when the moment comes. Ongoing Mega Projects Some of AndPlus’s biggest projects are Bloomberg’s Vault, which is a big data management platform for one of the world’s Fintech leaders and the Link by AKC smart collar. These two products really demonstrate their range as software development experts. Mindful & Skilled Team Members AndPlus’s multidisciplinary team ranges from web development experts building custom web dashboards to mobile app engineers creating iOS and Android applications. The software development company has an inhouse mentorship program, that allows designers/engineers with the resources to further their education. The management along with their team regularly conducts internal breakfast meetings called ‘Tech Tuesdays’, which is a way for them to collaborate on new ideas and better their practices as creators. Extraordinary Work Culture at AndPlus

commitment to service excellence and continually incorporating the latest innovations in the field. Every element of every project is conceived and brought to life at the company’s Greater Boston headquarters, in an office, purposebuilt for collaboration all under one roof. At AndPlus, the team considers their clients as a part of their team. Therefore, they work side by side along with their clients to determine pricing and timeline up front, while keeping them in the loop throughout all phases of the project. The software development company follows a strict commitment to transparency. Insightful & Comprehensive Approach The AndPlus culture informs the approach they follow from ideation through product launch and beyond. The company has an impressive 90% client retention rate. The first step is ideation, where a vision for products is defined and strategies are formed as per the requirements of the client. Followed by creating and addressing items, complete review to clients’ and fine-tuning of products through QA, user testing and strong feedback loop. Lastly, iteration through performance measurement and complete customer support is given to help in maximizing the user satisfaction.

Under the guidance of Sean, the company has built a culture designed to bring the best out of their people and deliver impactful solutions for their clients. AndPlus invests in attracting and retaining talent who shares their

Calm Creating a Happy World

n this swamped schedule, nobody has time to calm and foster their mind, body, or soul. People are so much addicted to technology and social media that they scarcely guard their health. Technology has just snapped the whole world. However, there are a few companies that are leveraging the same technology for the betterment of human health, one of the most prominent of them is – Calm. As the name suggests, Calm is an app that helps users to relax in their daily life, nourishing their mind, body and soul. Happiest App, ‘Calm’

subscription gives access to over 100 hours of premium content, including an ever-growing library of advanced meditations, soothing sleep stories, calming nature scenes, a breathing tool and Calm Masterclasses. The heart of Calm is digital but Calm is also taking its noble service ofﬂine in various ways that bring more peace, clarity and perspective into people's busy lives. It has partnered with Penguin to publish a popular book; developed a natural sleep aid called Sleep Mist and has plans to create Calm clothing, home-ware, hotels and more.

Calm is best known as a meditation, sleep and mental wellness app. It creates unique audio content that strengthens mental ﬁtness and tackles some of the biggest mental health challenges of today: Stress, Anxiety, Insomnia and Depression.

Calm was founded by British entrepreneurs Michael Acton Smith OBE and Alex Tew, with a mission to make the world healthier and happier.

This app is available in both the App Store and Google Play Store. It is considered as #1 app for mindfulness and meditation, with over 21 million downloads to date and over 50,000 new users daily. The Calm app is free to download but a premium

When Alex Tew was a teen, he was interested in studying the mind and in particularly, how to improve it. He realized how important mindfulness is for everyone. The world is getting faster and busier. Many of us are overworked and stressed out. It was

Innovators behind the Wellness App

Unveiling The Business Stories

The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018 “We’re a small and mighty team passionate about mental fitness, relaxation and sleep” time to return to the idea of bringing meditation to the world by leveraging the power of the internet so with the help of his close friend Michael Acton Smith he launched Calm in 2012. Michael Acton Smith OBE has long been fascinated by neuroscience, flow states and mental fitness. Learning to meditate had a profound impact on his life and he is passionate about spreading this simple but valuable skill around the world. Michael was also the founder of Mind Candy and creator of Moshi Monsters, the online world for children that grew to 80 Million registered users and expanded offline into books, toys, games, magazines, music and movies. Michael is also the founder of Firebox.com, Ping Pong Fight Club and Berwickstock music festival. In 2014, he was awarded an OBE for services to the Creative Industries. Michael Acton Smith OBE and Alex Tew both of them have faced difficulties in their lives. They saw that by doing meditation one can relax themselves and will also be mentally and physically fit. A Glance at Features of the App Calm provides meditation and relaxation theme service through their app. The most popular feature is a 10-minute meditation called “The Daily Calm” that discusses a new mindful theme and inspiring thought every morning. This meditation app also contains over 90 Bedtime Sleep Stories, Sleep Music, Meditation Lessons, Nature Sounds, Serene Videos, Multi-day Programs and Calm Masterclasses delivered by world experts. The relaxation app Calm also focuses on the wellness of employees. PricewaterhouseCoopers (as PwC) employees are eligible for free Calm Premium access through #bewellworkwell. It helps the employees to be active at work. In March 2018, the deep breath Calm team has launched CalmHealth, a new initiative under which they offer mindfulness, meditation and sleep tools to healthcare practitioners and their clients.

Unveiling The Business Stories

Furthermore, the mediation app has partnered with universities such as Cornell University, Northwestern University, University of Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins University to provide subscription access to the Calm library for all students and faculty during the 2017-2018 school years. The team has also realized that not only adults and teens are facing the dilemma of unconsciousness of mindset as they were unaware of these practices since they were kids. So the calm team decided to begin the sessions for the kids named ‘Calm kids.’ ‘Calm Kids’ sessions include beginner meditations for various age groups up to 18 years old. The full library of content in the app is also appropriate for all ages. Any of the meditations on the Meditate screen that are not a Series or a 7-day or 21-day program will have session options as short as 2-3 minutes, up to 30 minutes in length, so one can select the time length best suited for their classroom. Milestones Achieved by Calm The strenuous of the Calm team has been recognized by numerous media outlets and praised by all the users. It has been renowned by Apple by the title ‘App of the year’ in the 2017. In a major study by Apple, it has been found that around 200,000 iPhone users are using the meditation and relaxation app. Peoples were felling positivity and happiness by using this app, so Calm was titled as ‘The World's Happiest App’ by Apple. On the Google Play, the app has been kept under ‘Editor’s choice’ for the year 2018. On Google Play Store and iTunes, there are more than 200,000 users who have given the Calm app ‘5 star rating’.

How Chopdawg.com is changing the tech agency paradigm

Joshua Davidson CEO

igital technology has never grown at a faster rate than it has right now. For every existing technical entrepreneur and company, there are ten non-technical entrepreneurs and companies who wish to enter this new economy, but lack the knowhow and expertise. This is where ChopDawg.com comes in. ChopDawg.com is one of the most wellrecognized agencies in the world, focused on designing and coding products for non-technical businesses from concept to launch. Since its inception in 2009, they have helped to create over 200+ web and mobile apps for startups, Fortune 500s, growing businesses, and nonprofits around the globe. ChopDawg.com wishes to become the extension of teams from around the world needing technical assistance, helping them mitigate the risks that come with building out the infrastructure. From Google Home apps, to automobile operating systems, to touchscreen POS systems, and everything in-between, ChopDawg.com has a wide-range of capabilities. The app development company also helps with financial resources and making companies more efficient at what they do.

ChopDawg. com is currently working with some of the leading hotel and amusement park brands in the country, innovating the future service industry, healthcare and insurance industry, pharmaceutical industry, disrupting the real estate industry, involved heavily in the cryptocurrency and ﬁn-tech industry, crowdfunding industry, social networking industry, food delivery industry, and more. Intellectual & Dynamic Leader Joshua Davidson is the CEO of ChopDawg.com. He is an entrepreneur, speaker, startup advisor and soon to be a published author. He has been creating companies since he was in high school at the age of sixteen. In a nutshell, Joshua spends most of his days building products and growing companies. He has been personally featured in major publications such as MSNBC, NBC, Fox, CBS, Technically, AOL, Mashable, Startup Grind, Startups.co, Startup Digest, EliteDaily, Hufﬁngton Post, CBS and the Examiner. Since founding the company, Joshua has been on a mission with his team at ChopDawg.com to make a

Unveiling The Business Stories

The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018 “We want to become the stop-gap solution to help you bring your technological vision to life, support it after launch, and help grow it no matter the device or platform.” difference and create an impact on as many entrepreneurs as possible. The noted CEO and his team are doing this by helping their clients in turning their brilliant ideas into beautiful products and powerful brands. The team of ChopDawg strongly believes that by providing both an incredible range of services together with their knowledge and expertise in building startups, they can help those who are most passionate about their ideas to enter their respective markets and generate the type of traction necessary to make their venture a success. To date, they have assisted in launching over 225+ products around the world for the iPhone, Android, Apple Watch and the web. Joshua and his team also help their clients to raise capital, monetize, build traction, grab media attention and scale all under one roof. Other than his role as the CEO, Joshua speaks at conferences, universities, and events across the globe. Joshua has spoken all throughout the United States from New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Boston, Tampa, etc. Being a young entrepreneur, his talks are primarily based on usage of social media to grow brands, building companies in the modern era of social, leveraging technology to rethink the ways that companies operate, and how to provide value in any situation in order to grow a personal (and professional) brand.

machine learning algorithms, and sophisticated chatbots. Lastly, ChopDawg.com has years of expertise in building HIPAA-compliant applications and is already supporting the new EU regulations for GDPR applications with its clients abroad. Team that Works Together, Progresses Together ChopDawg.com has a team of over 25+ people, who are located all across the United States with one aligned mission: to help their clients in achieving their goals and be a team that they can trust for the many years ahead. The team is an incredible mesh of remarkable designers, intelligent developers, creative thinkers, and years of expertise in building new startups, supporting Fortune 500s, and launching companies and new products into the marketplace. Astute Advice from the CEO Advising the younger generation, Joshua says, “If you’re thinking about getting into the technology space, don’t think, just do. The best teacher is experience, and the only way to get experience is to do.”

Cutting Edge Technologies The leading app developing company has profoundly invested in building their mobile apps natively (IE: Swift/Objective-C for iOS, Java for Android) and also React Native as it is beginning to become disruptive in the app development space. Since 2009, ChopDawg.com has supported PHP when it comes to web-based applications, allowing to stay ahead of the curve for new frameworks and exciting possibilities such as supporting Laravel, WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, etc. The team is consistently supporting new developing technologies such as in cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology,

Unveiling The Business Stories

Cleveroad: Developing Technology for New Ideas

Evgeniy Altynpara CEO & Founder

n the fastpaced market, the most successful websites/applications are those that respond quickly and efficiently. Design and software are now heavily based around user experience because as all businesses are becoming more and more consumercentric. If the website takes a few seconds longer to find a specific product as compared to a competitor’s site, the customer tends to search the next product again on the competitor’s site. Oftentimes, users simply visit websites for browsing, it is up to the UI/UX designers to help visitors navigate and increase the conversion rate. The UI/UX and technology developer company Cleveroad deals smartly with the situation, and helps its clients to transform into brands. About the Company Cleveroad is a full-stack development company focusing on delivering world class mobile and web development services. The company cooperates mostly with startups and medium-sized companies. Cleveroad has successfully delivered a large number of software solutions for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Wearable platforms. The technology development company provides custom web

solutions for a wide range of businesses including ecommerce, healthcare, real estate, etc. The team has expertise to develop the website from scratch or be built CMS-based sites, depending on the customers’ requirements. The fully-fledged development company has around 100 professionals working towards building topnotch products and has completed more than 120 projects from diverse industries. Inception of Cleveroad When Evgeniy Altynpara, CEO and Founder of Cleveroad finished his Computer Science Masters degree in 2010, he wanted to put his passion for sustainable development and technological entrepreneurship into practice. Evgeniy sensed the demand for a technology company that could fulfill the increasing expectations of the clients. Furthermore, the Ukrainian tech market was developing rapidly, and companies that could offer top quality products were scarce. “We saw new IT outsourcing companies appearing almost monthly,” recalls Evgeniy “These were, in general, small, with poor management and unfortunately not very good results. I thought: ‘I just

Unveiling The Business Stories

The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018 have to gather the best minds around me, who are already working as freelancers, and jointly concentrate on the quality of products that we delivered.’ And so I did. Steadily, we developed from a start-up to a fully-fledged development company. That’s how Cleveroad was born. Today we have around 100 people working at Cleveroad, around the world. ” Adding Value to the Clients’ Businesses While working with clients, the Cleveroad innovative team tries to contribute to the project not only by building an app, but also by adding value to the client’s business idea. In general, the company offers marketing research services, planning, wireframing, UI/UX design, MVP creation, testing, release and post-release support. Moreover, during development, Cleveroad focuses on project management and ensures the level of flexibility a customer requires. Although the company is just seven years old, Cleveroad understands that the key to success is transparent collaboration and communication. That’s why the company creates a working atmosphere where everyone’s contribution is valued and every team member’s opinion is considered. Furthermore, the team at Cleveroad has learned very valuable lessons through working with numerous projects since its inception. “They are all different and provided us with valuable experience. Some of the projects, like Uber for teaching or corporate HR management app, were rather challenging and required deep involvement of the whole team, which we enjoy the most,” shares Evgeniy. Services Offered by Clevreoad The technology development team is focused on mobile development and web development: Mobile development – Cleveroad has delivered a broad range of mobile development services, including mobile game development for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. The company has also built games using the proven game development engines, such as Unity, and the rich expertise in 3D, 2D and Virtual reality design, GUI, animation, frontend and backend development. Web development – Cleveroad provides services connected with the development using Joomla!, Wordpress, and Drupal. The main benefit of the CMS is that users can manage the website content and overlook without calling or disturbing the programmer. The development team not only creates

Unveiling The Business Stories

“We create clients dream business into reality, supporting them with the website and mobile technology development.” and develops; they help in optimizing the user’s websites. Apart from the development of websites and mobile apps the company also aimed at local usage, the Cleveroad team makes sure that the company could help the clients to improve the client business processes. Aggressive Approach towards Expansion Having experience in bringing ideas into reality, Cleveroad enjoys dealing with technically complex solutions such as live streaming, fintech, face recognition, cryptocurrencies and AR/VR elements. The company has a significant experience in creating farming apps for fishery and agriculture, which requires a comprehensive understanding of the technology in use and the industry itself. The innovative grownup company is on its mark to expand its business all over the globe. Evgeniy and his team want to be a fast-growing company in the field of technology development. However, Evgeniy shares that it’s hard to find the ingenious team. Nonetheless, he is positive that the company can overcome its challenges with the strategic planning and good management systems. Advise to Young Entrepreneurs Founding and leading a technology based company has allowed Evgeniy to gain significant entrepreneurial experience. Pointing towards the struggles young technologists are facing, Evgeniy shares that it’s not that difficult to build a technological business. Evgeniy knows a lot of cases when startups failed and companies were shut down and all of them claim that doing business is hard. He said “If you enjoy what you do, if challenges look attractive to you and you aren’t afraid of them, you will never feel tired and it is the truth for me. So love what you are doing. Think what your goal is and what steps you should undertake to achieve it. And the main thing is never stopping learning: talk to those who have achieved more than you, attend events, read a lot and keep trying.”

The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018 Sr. No

Company Name

Company Info

AndPlus Sean Mahoney, President & CEO

AndPlus is one such leading software design &amp; development ﬁrm, that builds custom applications for businesses. www.andplus.com

Aventura Technologies Marvin Schild, Vice President

Headquartered in New York, USA, Aventura Technologies, Inc. has developed a reputation for being an innovative designer, developer and manufacturer of hardware and software products and peripheral solutions for government, military and enterprise. www.aventurasecurity.com

ChopDawg Joshua Davidson, CEO

ChopDawg.com is one of the most well-recognized agencies in the world, focused on designing and coding products for non-technical businesses from concept to launch. www.chopdawg.com

Cleveroad Evgeniy Altynpara, Founder & CEO

Cleveroad is a full-stack development company focusing on delivering world class mobile and web development services. www.cleveroad.com

Cloud4Wi Andrea Calcagno & David Quadrini, Co-Founder

Cloud4Wi offers a suite of enterprise guest WiFi, location analytics and location-based marketing products. www.cloud4wi.com

Cloverleaf Analytics Robert Clark, CEO

Cloverleaf Analytics is one such prominent company, using the most advanced technologies in the marketplace. www.cloverleafanaly cs.com

Hyperloop OneRob Llyod, CEO

Hyperloop One is reinventing transportation to eliminate barriers of time and distance by using hyperloop transport to move cargo and passengers immediately, safely, efﬁciently, and sustainably.

www.hyperloop-one.com

Impinj Dr. Chris Diorio, Founder & CEO

ManageEngine Raj Sabhlok, President

Merixstudio Adam Śledzikowski, CEO

Impinj (NASDAQ: PI) is a leading provider of RAIN RFID solutions. www.impinj.com

The IT management division of Zoho Corporation , ManageEngine provides ﬂexible and economic software solutions for businesses. www.manageengine.com

Merixstudio is the Poland based software house, focused on providing competencies needed to consult, plan, design and deliver success to clients’ web applications & digital products. www.merixstudio.com

Unveiling The Business Stories

The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018 Sr. No

Company Name

Company Info

NetStairs Ahmad Moradi, Founder

NetStairs Ahmad Moradi, Founder NETSTAIRS. COM. Inc., is a progressive, growing company, delivering innovative and complex video-based solutions. www.netstairs.com

OmnesLaw Gurbans Chatwal, CEO

OmnesLaw Pvt Ltd. is one such cutting-edge company singularly focused on delivering technology solutions coupled with deep legal domain expertise, and operational competence to not just shape the strategy but also execute it with measurable and desired business impact. www.omneslaw.com

PLM Trailer Leasing Keith Shipp, President & CEO

PLM is a technology-enabled, intelligent-asset designed ﬂeet management solutions company, focused solely on the temperature controlled refrigerated trailer asset. www.plmtrailer.com

Reltio Manish Sood, Founder & CEO

The company’s solution, Reltio Cloud, is the only Self-Learning Data Platform to deliver enterprise data-driven applications with reliable master data management (MDM), relevant big data insights and machine learning powered recommended actions, while leveraging multiple clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). www.rel o.com

Saisystems Dr. Ramesh Wadhwani, CEO

Saisystems International began in 1987 as Sai Systems Laboratories, serving as a mail-order house for personal computers and a hardware systems testing laboratory. www.saisystems.com

Spark RE TechnologiesSimeon Garratt, Co-founder & CEO

Spark RE Technologies is an industry-leading platform for new home sales and marketing, and they’re set to transform the real estate development world. www.spark.re

tabGeeks Jesse Nowlin, Founder

tabGeeks was formed to be a community for us IT Heroes. A place to get together, on and ofﬂine, to share war stories, gain professional development and meet others who understand who we are and what we do. www.tabgeeks.com

Tally Solutions Sheela Goenka, CoFounder

Tally is India’s leading business management software solution company, which today enables more than 11 lakh businesses worldwide. www.tallysolu ons.com

Unymira Nicole Pukaka, Management Partner

Unymira is a division of the USU Group, which is a German software company that aims to help improve the customer experience. www.unymira.com

Zoomdata Justin Langseth, Founder

Zoomdata Inc. is the world’s fastest growing platform for big data exploration, visualization, and analytics. www.zoomdata.com

Unveiling The Business Stories

In the loop

CONTAINER SECURITY AND DRAFTING THE CLOUD APPLICATION

ver the years, technologies have improved the ways to build systems, this result in significant evolution of the infrastructure. There are many new technologies had come in the modern era in which legacy has also been included. It doesn’t always mesh well. The new technology solutions have created an illusion between past and future on how things are secured. Organizations are pacing workloads to public cloud platforms, such as Amazon’s AWS, Google Kubernetes, and Microsoft’s Azure, increasing the demand for InfoSec, which must protect these new environments. New architectures like micro services and serverless are increasing complexity. Complexity is the biggest enemy of security. To be effectively aligned with adoption of these technologies, a new approach to security is required that does not depend on shifting infrastructure as the control point. Container security A shipping container is a box that has been designed to carry different types of transport, including ships, trains, and trucks. The intention of an application container is very similar to the shipping container. It’s a way of packaging an application so that it can be moved around and run on different computer systems. Containers are gaining popularity due to its fast and efficiency use. Security is important for virtual machines, which helps in securing containers. Containers run on a shared host and typically use multiple components to deliver a complete solution. Securing the containers without securing the host is like making a strong building on quicksand and vice versa. But leaving them all is like the open door with a big sign out front that says “Please rob me, thank you.” Container IP challenges Server or system administrator has limited control in the cloud interface. Cloud-native technologies are invisible to the traditional security perimeter, it can control such as filtering with IP addresses and ACLs on firewalls which are no longer effective in the modern security solution. The new and dynamic architecture nullify the existing cloud security approach.

Access control list get so complex that it become impossible to manage, it hammers the host performance. Layer 4 is link with the network topology. It lacks in support of agile applications. Network Address Translation (NAT) eliminates end-to-end visibility, which adds the second wrinkle to connections. Therefore, IP identiﬁcation leaves the system administrators blindfolded. Nowadays system and server administration have only two options; either trust the network to do its job without having any control over it or introduce a new approach for resource identiﬁcation and control that is less reliant on IP addresses. Container Automation Security One the most uniqueway of containers development to deployment is speed. The development process is rapid and is divided into multiple, bite-sized components are constantly updated. Frequent updates and ephemeral workloads make it a challenge to lock down any environment. During development, security scanning of container images needs to be automated. The containers may preform different behaviors depending on the application payload and the context in which they operate. Taking a same approach for all containers won’t work. It will not seta static policy at the time the application is launched, because updates will not be taken into account, and frequent updates will be there. It’s

impossible to fully trust on developers to define the security parameters. Developers can neither retain the skills nor the time to do that, certainly not when images are constantly updated. The automated blocking of suspicious activities in the security world in general is moving from detection to automated prevention. With containers this changes is even more critical, knowing that container X has run a privilege-escalation attack and has successfully obtained root privileges on the host is useful only in hindsight. It must prevent before it’s too late to handle. Host Security Containers producing application should be treated in the same way as other deployment when it comes to security. Inside the container is software that may have vulnerabilities; although this might not grant access to the underlying OS of the server, there still may be issues such as denial of service that could disable a container and therefore knock a website offline. It’s also important not to forget the security of the server hosting the containers. The host is the most important part of the container that needs security, since an attacker could easily gain access to everything through it. The container host needs to be properly secured using least access privilege, patching of vulnerabilities, and hardening of the system. As container host which is not secure, makes all the containers running on the host vulnerable to attack from the outside and from each other. Cloud hosting is best security style of container hosting. When things started moving towards the cloud there was a lot of fear related to this new technology, as businesses couldn’t part with the idea of not having their data and storage in-house. Cloud hosting actually has an additional layer of security. The physical security measures to protect the physical datacenter from being hacked, or harmed. Next layer of security is the physical server itself. Finally, with cloud hosting an additional layer of security that protects the virtual network of cloud hosting environment. To hold the benefits of application disaggregation and cloud-native applications must be changed to establish a unique application identity for the resource. This requires both technical and mindset changes. The old way of using the network as a security control point is not only operationally challenging but also a security hazard. The combination of application identity with distributed policy enforcement model creates a security paradigm that efficiently implements uniform security across any infrastructure at scale.

Cloud4Wi: Offering Outstanding Enterprise Grade Product Suites For Better Understanding & Engaging Visitors

Andrea Calcagno Chairman, CEO & Co-founder

he successful journey of Cloud4Wi, Inc. began when its Co-founders, Andrea Calcagno and David Quadrini understood that brick and mortar businesses were missing a huge opportunity to connect with their customers. Most businesses already had the WiFi infrastructure in place and they could have leveraged it to better understand and engage their customers. At the end, the Co-founders were certain that WiFi could play a signiﬁcant role in transforming the customer experience. Owing to this, Cloud4Wi was incepted in 2014, offering a suite of enterprise guest WiFi, location analytics and location-based marketing products. This product suite provides brick and mortar businesses with accurate insights into customers’ in-store behavior, along with powerful, location-based marketing tools to engage them in meaningful ways such as helping in drive on-site revenues, which was not possible before. Top global brands already rely on Cloud4Wi. They include ABSA, Adecco, Armani, Burger King, Carmila, Diamond Internationals, Gruppo FS Italiane, HFE, Illy, Lacoste, McDonald’s, Olive Garden, Prada Group and VTB24. To date, Cloud4Wi’s product suite connects more than 100

million mobile users across 30,000 locations in more than 100 countries, while collecting more than 7.5 billion of location data per month. Cloud4Wi is based in San Francisco, and has ofﬁces in New York, London, Milan, Pisa, Bologna, and Bangkok. Multitalented & Goal-Oriented Leader Chairman, CEO and Co-founder of Cloud4Wi, Andrea Calcagno, has a background in marketing, technology, and economics, with experience in the media-telco industry with a focus on nextgeneration networks and services. Calcagno holds a master’s degree in telecommunications engineering from the University of Pisa. He has led more than 50 projects in this space, and has written many articles and reports about advanced wireless technologies. Calcagno began his career at Telecom Italia Labs in Turin, where he performed advanced research and development activities on mobile access networks, receiving international patents on mobile broadband architectures. Calcagno has also played key roles in several innovative Italian start-ups. In 2003, he founded and served as CEO and EVP of WiTech, working closely

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The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018 “Our mission is to help enterprises across multiple industries retail chains, restaurant chains, shopping centers, transportation and more better understand and engage visitors.”

with Quadrini in Telecom Italia. Telecom Italia had a handful of customers that wanted to implement an easy yet advanced guest Wi-Fi solution, and Telecom Italia saw this opportunity as a new way to enjoy a new stream of revenue. They turned to WiTech to fulﬁll the request of keeping customers happy. After extensive research, WiTech realized that nothing existed on the market that could satisfy the demands of Telecom Italia, so they decided to build a solution themselves.

Building A Dream Team The Co-founders believe that the most valuable employees are the ones who are proactive. Because proactive people do not sit around waiting for answers to appear; rather they stand up, put one foot in front of the other, and ﬁnd the answers on their own. They do not wait for someone to hand them an instruction manual and a box of tools; they are resourceful. Forthcoming Challenges

In 2014, Calcagno and Quadrini raised Series A funding with United Ventures, a European venture capital company, which helped them to develop a powerful and robust guest Wi-Fi platform. In October 2017, Cloud4Wi closed an $11.5 million Series B financing round, bringing the total investment in the company to $15.5 million. The round was co-led by Opus Capital and United Ventures, Gill Cogan, a general partner of Opus Capital, is one of Cloud4Wi’s Board of Directors. With this new funding, Cloud4Wi will invest in product development, boost its sales and marketing efforts, further develop its global channel partner network, and expand its machine learning expertise. Powerful & Influencing Technologies Cloud4Wi offers an AI-driven product suite for location analytics and marketing services. With Cloud4Wi, businesses can collect customer insights through its guest WiFi services or its mobile loyalty app and predict behavior patterns. Empowered with this in-depth knowledge of who customers are and how they behave, businesses in turn can reach their target customers individually and in real-time via text messages, emails or push notifications. Cloud4Wi also offers a smart WiFi and BLE sensor to achieve high-level location analytics. The sensor is plug-and-play and can be installed in selected locations to gather more data, with a minimal impact on IT infrastructure and operations.

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One of the biggest challenges in today’s technologically driven industry is the cut throat competition. Cloud4Wi is trying to stay ahead of the game by offering cutting-edge technologies and, at the same time, working with its customers to boost their success. The leading service provider company is proud that world renowned companies such as Prada has selected Cloud4Wi to transform their in-store customer experience. This ultimately speaks about the excellent services and products offered by Cloud4Wi designed for its elite clientele base. Awards & Accolades Cloud4Wi has been bestowed with numerous awards mentioned as follows. · Cool Vendors in Location Services and

Applications’ reported by Gartner. · In 2017, Cloud4Wi was identiﬁed as a

representative vendor in the Gartner ‘Market Guide for Indoor Location Application Platforms’ report. · Mentioned in the Gartner ‘Magic Quadrant for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure’report.

COVER STORY

The Biggest Disruptor in the IT Management Space

he IT management industry has been historically dominated by very large players such as HP, CA Technologies, IBM, BMC software, etc. The consolidated market allowed minimal space for new players. However, a few new companies identiﬁed market gap and opportunity for disruption. One of the most prominent disruptor—a global leader in IT management space—was ManageEngine. The IT management division of Zoho Corporation, ManageEngine provides ﬂexible and economic software solutions for businesses. ManageEngine crafts comprehensive IT management software with a focus on making the job of IT infrastructure management easier. A portfolio of over 90 products and free tools that the company provides cover everything IT needs. As aforementioned, ManageEngine has penetrated a highly consolidated market scenario through its innovative offerings. The innovator continues to upgrade its services with the most advanced technologies.

Raj Sabhlok President

Solutions Provided by the Company

the needs for any vendors.

Landscape of the IT management industry has completely changed today owing to disruptors like ManageEngine. Legacy providers have moved to become service providers and then software providers. ManageEngine has picked up this slack to build the most comprehensive suite of IT management tools. From exclusively being an on-premise solution, the technology provider moved to Cloud.

The global leader has built all standards around their ground breaking solutions – Service Desk. The solution offers client management technology or endpoint management, where it is signiﬁcantly tasked to manage desktop and mobile premises, covering all the endpoints.

The company was pioneer in offering management solutions on the web, so that customers could download it, try it, and see that if it can solve their problems. Furthermore, for the ﬁrst time in the industry, ManageEngine was the company who made its solutions browser enabled, so that their clients could scale these solutions across the enterprise without having to worry about platforms. The company has also introduced offerings such as agentless monitoring capabilities, so that organizations can relish beneﬁts of IT management solutions without

Along with the ﬂagships such as Desktop Central Offering and MDM Solution the company extends its portfolio to solutions such as IT Operations Management, Network Monitoring Performance Management, and Application Performance Management. Furthermore, the company has a very big active directory management offering which really is comedown to addressing the identity access management as most organizations rely on active directory for their provisioning and user management and privileges. Security being the most crucial concern

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“We have complete and easy solutions for even your most difﬁcult IT management problems, from keeping your business safe, to ensuring high availability, to making your users happy.”

for all organizations, the real-time IT management company presents top-notch security offerings, which include Log Management, Password Management, and Logs of Firewall and Forensic Analysis. From last two years ManageEngine has started delivering IT analytics. It gathers all the IT machine data and presents it through analytics so that companies can make better decisions related to IT. Upcoming Advancements to the Solutions Since the inception, ManageEngine is directionally headed towards providing out-of-the-box utilities to the IT management domain. Currently, there are three main initiatives the whole team is working on: Firstly, the company continues to go deeper and more broadly into IT security space. For obvious reasons, ManageEngine keeps enhancing security features at the top of its priorities. While leveraging the emerging technologies, the IT enabler is sincere about

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strengthening its security domain. The other area, which the ManageEngine team believes will play a role of a game changer to IT management and other inflection points to IT is Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the next few months, ManageEngine will be introducing some intelligent system capabilities, which will be able to make the administrators, technicians, and IT managers more productive—in this case—by enabling them to issue English like commands either through Chatbots or through voice. The company will be utilizing a lot of ZOHO technologies related to AI. ZOHO has recently introduced an intelligent system called Zia Voice, the first conversational AI for sales teams that adds speech and chat capabilities to Zia. ManageEngine is expected to introduce similar advancement to ServiceDesk Plus Offering and the other applications.

Lastly, ManageEngine is striving to utilize all the capabilities Cloud can provide to their solutions. Currently, any organization that is leveraging Public Cloud—either its applications or their own workloads—still has a lot of legacy applications in improvisation that needs to interact with the new technologies. ManageEngine is uniquely positioned to manage capabilities provided by both the infrastructures. President of ManageEngine and a Trailblazer in IT Raj Sabhlok, President of ManageEngine and Zoho.com, has responsibilities across both organizations. Having roots in IT management, Raj has started his career at a company called Santa Cruz Operation. Starting as a developer of Unix and Intel, after a couple of years he moved more into business more around Information Technology and

Infrastructure Technology. Later he moved to TCM software, which is one of the legacy IT management companies. From there, Raj went to Embarcadero Technologies, a company again that was into management space, and ultimately became the CEO of the company. In 2009-10, he received an opportunity to lead the ManageEngine sector of ZOHO, and he was delighted to receive the chance. Raj shares that it has been an incredible journey with ManageEngine. He shares that when he joined the company 9 years ago, it was a small organization and today the ManageEngine division itself employs 2000 people or more. Also, when Raj started with the company, they were serving only small to medium sized businesses, today they serve the largest corporations including Fortune 500. Their product line has grown tremendously as well. “Analysts say that IT management grow around 6 maybe 8 per cent, so it’s

“We’re bringing IT together so you don’t have to.”

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not hyper growth yet we tend to grow at about four times the market growth, so we are creating new markets, and we are growing at 30+ per cent and we have been doing this for 15 years now,” Raj reveals. An Innovative Approach to Human Resource ManageEngine is one of the most successful disruptor in the IT space because breaking the status quos is in its foundation. Not only towards the solutions, but the company also has a unique approach towards the team building process. “We hire people who wouldn't normally work for IBM or Microsoft. In many cases, we hire people that don't have college degrees, and may not have majored in Computer Science or Engineering.” This bold statement from Raj Sabhlok arises two main questions: If not the degrees, what are the qualities that the global leader looks in its employees? And second, how the company is climbing

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the ladder of success with these professionals? Raj shares that the ingredients that they look for are aptitude, perseverance, and persistence. The company looks for the employees that are determined, those who will not give up even after making mistakes. Justifying the second part, Raj shares that these are the employees that stay with the organization for a longer tenure. The experts with degrees from top universities tend to work with companies for a shorter period. Hiring team members based on their qualities instead of their degrees has allowed ManageEngine to retain most of its employees for a signiﬁcantly long timespans. This helps the company to train those members, who in-return stay determined for the company’s welfare.

Advice to Young Technologists Being an idol for software engineers and serving on boards of one of the most reputable brands in the world, it is generic that Raj gets a lot of queries from aspiring technologists. Raj shares, “A lot of time people ask me, I want to get into software but I don't know where to start, I don’t know what I should focus on, what areas, it seems so crowded.” On that, as everyone will, Raj agrees that the industry actually is crowded. There are tens of thousands applications, computing power has become more readily available through platforms such as Amazon, and the cost of development in terms of tools is zero. It is an open source technology with a huge talented pool of developers around the globe. “So what I say to these folks is – Don’t feel like you have to invent a completely new category to get started. In many cases there’s an opportunity to disrupt in existing market, and that’s really how we got started with ManageEngine,” Raj asserts. As mentioned earlier, there were billion-dollar companies that were servicing IT management and ManageEngine had—on the surface—no reason to have a business. These large corporates had thousands of employees, billions of dollars in revenue. However, the team of ManageEngine was able to look at the gap in their business model and exploit them. “We saw that it was expensive, it was complex, we saw that it had a heavy enterprise sale driven offering, where you needed to have a technical and sales staff in every major city, to sell and support the software. We thought that we can sell this online and can strip out a lot of ‘complexity and the cost. So that’s the recommendation. Sometimes you need to evaluate established market and explore the opportunities to disrupt. And don’t wait on the side-lines, or you know a new invention or the next great idea; because it may not come and it may already be existing in an established market.”

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Cloverleaf Analytics: Harnessing The Power Of Data Through Cutting Edge Technology

Robert Clark CEO

urrently, the world is witnessing a ground breaking technological evolution. Cloverleaf Analytics is one such prominent company, using the most advanced technologies in the marketplace. As business intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics continue to change, Cloverleaf Analytics has stayed on the forefront by taking advantage of the ever changing technologies to provide value added services to its target customers. With Cloverleaf Analytics’ end-to-end insurance BI solution, it improves an insurance company’s profitability and reduces risk by consolidating data across the enterprise for real-time analysis and cutting edge visualizations. Along with using revolutionary technologies, the insurtech service provider company has also created one of the most robust insurance data models using industry standards like the Acord Reference Framework. In addition, the leading financial solutions provider company has created a dynamic process for insurance companies to extend its system with additional insurance attributes without any programming or changes to the Cloverleaf Analytics solution. This allows companies to customize their analytics while the insurtech company continues to provide new capabilities that do not interfere with their customization. Acknowledging earlier that there are enormous amounts of data available besides just the insurance policy and claim data, Cloverleaf Analytics has implemented data mashups. Mashups present a visual way for insurance companies, to join outside data sources and providers with their insurance data for additional analysis. Numerous customers have mashed up NOAA weather data for storms, census data for understanding the demographics of insureds and their locations, along with a host of other data that has enriched their analysis. Cloverleaf sets itself apart from other horizontal BI vendors by their extraordinary tooling and functionality along with deep insurance specific content to have an out of the box reporting and analytics environment. Cloverleaf Analytics is the premier provider of BI and Analytics solutions exclusively for the P&C insurance industry. As data and information are becoming more available with further development of AI and analytics, Cloverleaf’s comprehensive solution is positioned to take advantage of these new capabilities. Over the coming years, insurers will use information for better pricing, exposure analysis and serving policyholders like

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The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018 “We have built Cloverleaf Analytics with decades of knowledge and ﬁrst-hand experiences, bringing you hundreds of insurance industry best practices.”

Innovative & Impactful Leader Robert Clark, the CEO of Cloverleaf Analytics, has been working in the insurance industry for over 20 years. He had recognized the power and future potential of data analytics earlier in his career and its use within insurance companies for elevating proﬁtability and minimizing exposures. Robert has created successful insurance software companies in the past and with his latest company, Cloverleaf Analytics, he is raising the bar with some of the most advanced analytics and machine learning applications for the insurance industry.

all management information to help a carrier run their entire operation. Robust Team behind Cloverleaf Analytics The Cloverleaf team is comprised of insurance industry’s seasoned professionals. As the insurtech company has been working in the insurance industry for decades, they have identiﬁed strong individuals who understand the P&C insurance from the inside and out. They not only understand the insurance business, but know how data can be turned into information consequently assist companies in meeting their business needs.

Upcoming Projects Looking Forward to a Bright Future Cloverleaf is currently assisting insurance carriers with many different objectives and requirements. The Cloverleaf tooling and processes, combined with their rich data model are easily enabled to map and create ETL processes to efﬁciently load insurance information from multiple and varied source systems into its solutions. The speed and efﬁciency of these processes, reduce the time and cost for a carrier to get up and live with their solution.

Cloverleaf Analytics continues to grow and is enjoying success with each and every satisﬁed customer. The experienced leader along with his team, continuously monitors their growth so that they maintain a balance between ongoing and upcoming business projects. The team guards their strong reputation and know that it means everything to them in their long-term success. Words of Wisdom

Another carrier has implemented the solution because they had 23 disparate source systems that needed to be brought together and balanced for reporting and analytics. The Cloverleaf data model was able to pull and standardize this data in an efficient manner to assist the carrier in reporting all financial information from their solution. Further, there are carriers using Cloverleaf across the entire organization. The solution has deep subject area expertise for all business executives to explore, ranging from underwriting, claim, actuarial, marketing, finance to the executive branch and operation management. These robust capabilities serve to have one solution that provides

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The well-versed and accomplished CEO lends advice to the young entrepreneurs to be ready to give everything that one can contribute in building their company into a major success. Robert further adds, “Having a passion is great, but having high energy and a willingness to listen to others is important. Surround yourself with experienced individuals that you can leverage to meet the many challenges of young companies. In the beginning, control your spending and don’t try to grow too quickly. Always watch your cash and plan accordingly. Lastly, those who succeed are the ones who continue and push through where others have given up.”

Impinj, Inc.: Leveraging Platform That Connects the Physical & Digital Worlds

Dr. Chris Diorio Founder, CEO & Vice Chairman

ffortlessly donning the hat of a businessman, engineer, and an innovator-in-chief, Dr. Chris Diorio is a multi-dimensional personality, Founder, CEO & Vice Chairman of Impinj, Inc. Impinj (NASDAQ: PI) is a leading provider of RAIN RFID solutions. It wirelessly connects billions of everyday items such as apparel, medical supplies, and automobile parts to the consumer and business applications such as inventory management, patient safety, and asset tracking. So far, Impinj has enabled over 25 billion items to be connected to the internet, and further plans to continue on improving and expanding their platform. With a far-sighted visionary founder, the company is driving towards their vision of digital life for trillions of everyday items and extending the reach of the internet by a factor of 1,000. The leading IoT service provider offers business applications with information about an item’s identity, location, or authenticity to help companies improve efﬁciencies, increase sales, and delight customers. It is, undoubtedly a front running

company with over 25 billion items connected, trusted partner in 60 countries and more than 200 patents issued. An Erudite Professor & Perceptive Entrepreneur Passionate about technology, Dr. Chris Diorio is a leading pioneer of RAIN RFID. He is an Afﬁliate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and a Director of the RAIN RFID Alliance. Impinj began while Chris was teaching at the University of Washington, where his research led him to develop a self-adaptive silicon chip that could change and react to its environment after its fabrication. This meant that chips could deliver dynamic information and responses in real-time; a powerful asset for those operating at the dawn of the digital world. Chris thought that these cheap, tiny chips could be used to “tag” any physical item and connect it to the internet for unprecedented, unparalleled visibility into the product movement.

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T ech Companies of 2018 “We believe that by expanding the reach of the Internet to items such as apparel, medical supplies, luggage, automotive parts—nearly everything— we can improve people's lives.” Recognizing the potential of these tiny chips to irrevocably change business operations, Chris founded Impinj in 2000. Chris has more than 150 issued patents, 69 scholarly publications, and has received numerous awards, including EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Pacific Northwest, EE Times/EDN Innovator of the Year, AIM Global Ted Williams Award, RFID Journal Special Achievement Award, and the IEEE Paul Rappaport Award. He has also received Packard, Sloan, Presidential, and ONR fellowships. Chris earned his Ph.D. from Caltech and has over 30 years’ experience in computer and radio engineering. Wide Range of Capitalizing Technology The technology driven company recognizes that RAIN is one of many item-to-cloud connectivity technologies. Yet, firmly believes that RAIN’s capabilities—unique identifiers, wireless and batteryfree, low cost, long range, 1,000 reads per second, essentially unlimited life, and cryptographic authentication—are unmatched by any other technology, and enable RAIN to coexist with those other technologies. By providing the potential to connect almost any physical item to the internet, the opportunities and applications for RAIN RFID are endless.

Impinj Elite Team The Impinj management team brings together pioneering minds in RAIN RFID and enterprise solutions to make digital life for everyday items a reality. The overall team members are innovative, passionate, curious, and constantly pushing ideas forward. The company celebrates the employees’ unique talents and personalities who drive Impinj’s culture forward to a place that is inspiring, collaborative, hard-working, and fun! While hiring, Chris along with the management looks for people who are respectful, objective, and self-critical, as well as full of spirit, and willing to work as a team. Employees are encouraged to lead by an example, collaborate, learn from each other, and approach challenges with an open mind. Prospective Challenges As businesses have increasingly recognized the potential of RAIN RFID products to change their operations, it has become clear that mass adoption requires universal RAIN RFID standards. Chris has helped to develop the RAIN RFID, which has given the industry a launching point for mass commercial adoption, and advanced its technological capabilities for continued future gains. The technology service provider envisions to further drive the adoption of this standard.

Trivia About Current Projects

Power Packed Success Mantras

Presently, Impinj is investing in their integrated platform, with a focus on supporting the needs of the retail, logistics, and healthcare industries, correspondingly supporting partners who are driving their platform’s adoption in other verticals such as airlines, laundry, and automotive. In the coming years, the technology solutions provider company plans on linking physical items with cloud-based twins that include the item’s history, ownership, and available services. Additionally, the company is working on operating system that will include some of the services, including those essential for developers to link business and people with items.

Dr. Chris Diorio advises the young generation to exercise patience. As, the path forward is likely to have more twists and turns than one can ever expect, Chris shares following three leadership tips. · Lead by an example – It is the little things one does that people notice. · Empower people – It is important to tell people where to go, not how to get there. · Always listen – One should be humble enough to listen to others and their opinions.

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Merixstudio The State Of The Art Creative Software House

Adam Śledzikowski CEO

ncepted in 1999, Merixstudio is the Poland based software house, focused on providing competencies needed to consult, plan, design, develop, and deliver success to clients’ web applications & digital products. The tech solutions provider uses proven technologies mixed with optimized, agile development processes to shorten the time needed to check the results. Over the years, Merixstudio has successfully completed numerous projects in various industries and proved that they are the experts in Django, Javascript, AngularJS, React, HTML5 Games, and much more. The entire team loves working with startups and have actively collaborated with international ﬁrms such as Toshiba, HSBC, The Independent, KLM, Virgin, M&S, Volkswagen, The Juilliard School, and other agencies, who did not have the in-house development teams to help them in bringing their creative ideas to life.

Python/PHP developers, UI/UX designers, testers and project managers, who largely concentrate on reaching the clients’ targets and help them in the continuous growth. Merixstudio has a future vision to transform the technological world by setting a model example. By working with companies around the world, the tech company wants to prove that borders and different time zones are irrelevant when it comes to working in the IT industry. In addition, Poland has one of the best web developers with extraordinary software options. Further, Merixstudio wants to create the baseline of partnership between software houses and their business partners, which starts with detailed workshops and focuses on cooperation. Innovator & Leading Light

Adam Śledzikowski is the CEO of Merixstudio. With such a big group, it is necessary to create an environment which ensures that everyone has a In 2017, Merixstudio was recognized by the chance to express their opinions and be heard. Clutch.io as the ‘Top Python & Django Developers Keeping this in mind, Adam has appointed asset of Of The Year’, as well as the ‘Polish Top Developers team leaders, who not only take care of the Of The Year’. The team of Merixstudio has 70+ information ﬂow between the CEO and employees, high-skilled specialists, mainly front-end developers, but also have vast, inside knowledge of what is

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“We want to promote great web development solutions

”

and create websites that are well thought-out and accessible to everyone.

happening in their respective departments.

Current Projects

With such a precise setting, Adam knows what type of changes are to be made and what kind of working aspects the employees ﬁnd appealing at Merixstudio. It is all about reacting to everything in real time, which ensures easy maintenance of great working conditions. With regular meetings, both with each team leader and in a group setting, Adam stays updated without any negative impact on his other duties.

Merixstudio is currently working on a plethora of interesting projects mentioned as follows.

Commenting on maintaining a healthy working environment with clients’ and employees, Adam asserts, “Due to our focus on maintaining relaxed, friendly atmosphere, we organize regular company outings, which allow us to integrate with not only individual teams, but also between employees and management. For us, this division is only based on responsibilities, not privileges or statuses.”

· ·

Up your egame: It is a Rect app for the gaming community, in which Merixstudio is responsible for design, user experience, and both front-end and back-end developments. BrandSync: It is a cloud-based solution dedicated to big companies that produce and sell physical products. BrandSyncs is a custom application project with ongoing development and growing market share. Sportswise: It is an application for arranging training and team matches for school teams. Merixstudio is responsible for React Native, Django development and functionalities such as player proﬁles, calendars, or information about matches and training.

Range of Leveraging Technologies

Future Strategies

When it comes to back-end development, the leading tech company prides itself on its Django projects. It is an open source framework written in Python, known for being fast, fully loaded, and totally secure. The team has created a community surrounding Django and regularly organizes Django Hotspot meetings, during which developers can share their knowledge of technology resulting in brainstorming sessions of ideas and experiences.

Over the years, Merixstudio has been working nonstop to target and collaborate with ace professionals from all over the world. In the future, Merixstudio strives to achieve the leading position on the Polish software house market. Due to its clients distributed globally, Adam, along with his team, is creating a brand with an international reach that is known for working with the latest technologies. Words of Wisdom

With front-end development, Merixstudio mainly develops modern HTML5 web apps with the use of React and Angular. Due to their easy accessibility, these technologies are a great basis for creating advanced, single-paged apps, meeting even the most complex needs. Along with Adam, the tech team also believes that no project can be successful without UX being properly taken care of. And that is why, they continue to put emphasis on conducting workshops (in-house or online), during which the team talks with their clients and discuss their needs and business goals.

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Adam advices the young entrepreneurs to keep updating their knowledge if they want to excel in the IT industry by attending workshops, reading articles, and overall learning. To achieve success in the web development world, one needs to really love what they do.

NETSTAIRS Bringing Real-Time Communications To Life

Ahmad Moradi Founder

he whole industry is going through rapid expansion and transformation. When it comes to fast moving global market, historical data and the predictive market trends have indicated, that live streaming has become a pinnacle source of online broadcasting. Over the last few years, the world has witnessed the biggest transformation in video demand coming from migration of Adobe Flash codec into HTML5 compliant formats as well as integration of IoE and WebRTC connectivity serving Smart Cities projects. There is an insatiable thirst for increased bandwidth and higher quality for RealTime video codec serving industries such as elearning, telehealth, and corporate enterprise.

with the primary and virtual presence in Europe, U.S., Asia, and Latin America. Think Piece & Innovator

Ahmad Moradi is the Founder of NETSTAIRS. COM. Inc. Since childhood, Ahmad was amazed and mesmerized by movies, TV and films. He was so passionate about video and its working mechanism, that at the ripe age of seven, he started building his first projector. The captivating digital beauty still drives Ahmad and his company to make new discoveries. Throughout his technology career, he was blessed to work in the industries, building NETSTAIRS. COM. Inc., is a progressive, growing multimedia object codes as well as successful in company, delivering innovative and complex video- bringing imaging, capturing, sequencing, encoding, player, streaming, and building complex video based solutions. It specializes in digital media algorithms, with a highly proficient team of scientists delivery, cloud infrastructure, platforms, and around the globe, primarily focusing on video software as a service. Since, real-time communication is the genesis of an insightful digital compression and decompression methodologies. transformation to a digital economy, NETSTAIRS connects creative minds, machine intelligence, AI, & In the late 90’s, while Ahmad was commuting and working in the Silicon Valley, he was also multi-tier cloud integration, to serve the real-time needs of human diversity around the world. Incepted collaborating with the UNLV professors and in 2000, the company is operating in four continents designated MBS students to develop and partner with

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The 20 leading

T ech Companies of 2018 “Our 18+ years of track record, sound management, innovative team of engineers, happy clients, and our valued shareholders enjoy our high moral, with trusted services that rank us amongst the top end companies.” several mathematicians, delivering visually lossless imaging algorithms. Therefore, after working on discrete cosine transformation theories and the infusion of Wavelet theories, he returned to South Florida and started NETSTAIRS. Since then, under Ahmad’s guidance and vision, NETSTAIRS became the springboard to bring several innovations into the market. The well seasoned and experienced entrepreneur advices the younger generation to focus on their passion, utilize time efﬁciently, stay honest and never give up in times of failures.

CTV and PIXEL by NETSTAIRS is a highly ﬂexible service with no API. The digital media solutions provider also makes client service integration under HTTPS and HTML5 compliant seamless. Another key feature is adaptive settings where rooms may be set up as open-house, private session, closed room with passkey, broadcast mode and more. The subscribers can implement and write own HTML5 codes inside each DMR, thus making the job work ﬂow seamless.

Progress of NETSTAIRS over the Years

The team at NETSTAIRS believe, regardless of the state of the digital economy, everything will require some form of real-time or on-demand video communications, collaboration and broadcasting in future. With iCPT, the company wishes to build a real-time publishing engine under IAB compliance, that will deliver guaranteed eyeball, time spent, and content sharing. At the infrastructure level, the company aims to make iCDN completely AI elastic. The company’s goals and milestones are to strive for greater quality of video user experience. With nearly 7 years of development, NETSTAIRS have bet their future on integrated collaboration, RTC, broadcasting and 3rd party service integration.

Millennium 2000: Incepted, pioneered and introduced Cybermercial® video email, a desktop video email utility program. 2002: Invented iV8®, the world’s ﬁrst intelligent media middleware delivery system. 2006: Established technological leadership with live media streaming to mobile devices. 2008 -2012: Introduced “Interactive” as the company’s new “Game Changer” theme. 2016-2017: Click-To-Video launched 2018: Introduction of PIXEL

Upcoming Challenges & Milestones

Team Hunt Awards & Accomplishments People from all walks of cultural diversity and background makes the team uniquely qualiﬁed based on similar passion for work. The team at NETSTAIRS collaboratively strives to ﬁnd out ways for enhancing the user experience. The collective knowledge and working experience of NETSTAIRS team is based on mutual trust, friendship, delivering astounding results while excelling in their own territory. Major Technology Offerings In the last ten years, NETSTAIRS has embraced open source as the way of bringing value to their customers without restricting their integration strategies. Today, the company’s main focus remains on Cloud, infrastructure, platform, and SaaS via delivering AWS, GCP, and IBM cloud containers packed with AI and Machine Learning services.

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NETSTAIRS had the pleasure of collaborating with select global brands, major ad agencies, TV networks, Telecoms, MVN, Enterprises, Politicians, and industry-leading CDN service providers. Along the digital journey, the company has published patents and received a few awards as mentioned below. Ÿ Recognized as one among the “20 Most

Promising Content Delivery Network Solution Providers 2016” by CIOReview. Ÿ 2016 Technology Innovation Award (UK and US) by CV Magazine. Ÿ Most Innovative Digital Media Infrastructure Company - USA & UK - Best Interactive Loyalty Card: iCPT Ÿ Hottest Florida Company Awarded by Lead411

OmnesLaw: Decoding Today’s Digital Complexity

Gurbans Chatwal, CEO

here is no longer denying that the 21 century is hooked on to modern technology and its offerings. The dynamite combination of information technology and predictive analytic tools are making an impact on careers at personal, national and international levels. Digital technologies are delivering multiple applications in every sector, right from education, healthcare to administration and planning of rural and urban policies. Lately, the legal industry is becoming one of the most suitable application domains. High powered law firms are now spending a significant part of their budget for technology. OmnesLaw Pvt Ltd. is one such cutting-edge company singularly focused on delivering technology solutions coupled with deep legal domain expertise, and operational competence to not just shape the strategy but also execute it with measurable and desired business impact. Established in 2017, OmnesLaw is a powerhouse of technology working closely with law firms and legal departments to facilitate strategy shaping, bringing insight on new technology while simplifying and making them competitive.

Mentor & Guide Gurbans Chatwal is the CEO of OmnesLaw Pvt Ltd. Gurbans has earned his Master’s degree in Business Administration from IIT Delhi and completed M.Sc in Computer Science from J. K Institute of Applied Physics and Technology. With 25+ years of executive and technology consulting experience, Gurbans has been instrumental in steering numerous transformational programs. He has also led the delivery organization for Legal Support Services and a large and complex portfolio of projects in IT consulting. At OmnesLaw, he leads strategic initiatives to drive short & long-term performance growth, custom design engagements, and architect product and AI roadmap from conceptualization to implementation. The recent upsurge in computing and text analytics applications has opened up possibilities in sectors that deal more with text and reasoning than just numbers and trends. Whereas other professional services such as medicine, manufacturing, and ﬁnancial services have seen a surge in technology implementation; legal practice seemed to be the

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T ech Companies of 2018 “We guarantee to help you in making your investments relevant and successful over the next decade.” laggard but awaiting the opportunity. The founding team has relevant and rich experience in outsourcing technology (Anurag G), big data analytics (Kuldeep D), and legal subject matter and process consulting (Suchorita M and Vijayta S) space. Gurbans Chatwal advises the young technologydriven entrepreneurs to remain authentic to oneself, their team and respective clientele base. He further adds that to be successful, one must get paid for making the target client’s lives easier and comfortable with proposed solutions. Every successful entrepreneur begins with a start-up that has the potential to grow into a mega-empire where the time range from small to large establishment depends on the dedication and hard work of the founder. Last but never the least, with the right blend of expert, skilled, capable and passionate team members, the company can achieve its dreams.

consulting services presented to clients and product development. Ÿ Xillium is the company’s flagship product, offered through SaaS on cloud model for endto-end contract lifecycle management. Ÿ SALIS is the second product, which has helped Legal Research tremendously, built over the company’s core AI engine, thereby allowing its users to scan public websites or local databases to pull information, sift it for relevancy and provide rich and focused content. Ÿ As part of an upfront consulting assignment, OmnesLaw has helped clients streamline and standardize processes for better visibility, accessibility, and increased efficiency. Ÿ In pure advisory capacity, the tech company has assisted one of the large law firms to reengineer processes of one of their high volume, high risk, but low priced practice area.

Employing a Balanced Team Future Challenges Competition, technology, clients, and investors pull and push the organization and people within to deﬁne, reﬁne, and chart unplanned course many times. In this scenario, OmnesLaw looks for qualities such as honesty, ability to work under pressure, positive attitude with tons of energy, accepting and adapting to constant changes along with a passion and zeal for the work.

The founding team and members at OmnesLaw are planning to continuously scan and search for new technologies, manage ‘resistance to change’ and stay alert to evaluate the appetite for new-technology risks. The tech company’s plans include keeping their ears open to hear the global and local expectations from technology and a keen eye to investing in new initiatives and transformation programs.

Leveraging Technologies Making an Impact, Transforming the World Even before the company was formally incorporated, the current founding team had rallied around applying AI, NLP, and Analytics to the legal practice. The tech company’s products have been built on Microsoft technologies and are now available in the Azure cloud as SaaS framework. OmnesLaw has successfully leveraged open source libraries of Python, an OWL framework for legal ontologies, and referenced Legal libraries such as LKIF-core available on Github. Current Projects Since products are the DNA of the company, the following are some of its customized solutions and

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Due to complexities and sometimes ambiguity of legal language and its applicability across various domains and scenarios, the ontological approach to information organization and AI has become increasingly important in law (like in other disciplines). OmnesLaw is currently working on cutting-edge cognitive computing models to converge legal, and tech domains. The core purpose of the company is to transform legal practice by simplifying and automating through intelligent applications and software agents, thereby delivering real business results.

PLM Trailer Leasing: Dedicated Exclusively to Leasing, Rental and Maintenance Services of Refrigerated Trailers

Keith Shipp President & CEO

rom the board room executive to the soccer parent, we all validate the importance of mobile technology to manage our professional and personal lives. “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again,” Justin Trudeau quoted at the 2018 World Economic Forum. In today’s cold supply chain, the need to understand the role of technology and its application with respect to business and regulatory disrupters in the marketplace is important. PLM is a pioneer of the connected asset for temperature-controlled transport to drive real-time actionable data that allows the user to actively participate in the distribution journey. PLM is a technology-enabled, intelligent-asset designed ﬂeet management solutions company, focused solely on the temperature controlled refrigerated trailer asset. The company provides the latest two-way communication telematics with robust analytical reporting augmented by on-site maintenance, customized application and temperature-controlled designed equipment. Additionally, the ﬂeet solutions provider offers the largest selection of multi-temp, single-temp, and ecofriendly electric hybrid trailers from

28’ to 53’ in length. Established in 1972 in the

leasing industry, PLM has been exclusively maintaining refrigeration units for over 10 years and has successfully acquired tremendous industry knowledge and proficiency. Astute Leader & Visionary Keith Shipp is the President & CEO of PLM Trailer Leasing. When Keith joined PLM in 2011 he expanded the lease portfolio by offering comprehensive fleet management solutions. Having been in the equipment-leasing sector throughout his career, his portfolio development was based on the philosophy of saving the customer time and money. Keith broke down PLM’s value proposition into eight core areas of focus – fleet planning, application & design, maintenance, reports & analysis, safety & compliance, rental equipment, disposition, and financial policy - which ultimately work together to provide a comprehensive solution for life cycle and fleet management. Using this approach, PLM can start a relationship with one or few of the core areas and expand into other valueadded solutions to meet customer needs as they grow.

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T ech Companies of 2018 “Our company mission is to be the cold supply chain leader by utilizing cutting edge technology to provide actionable data driven ﬂeet management solutions, dedicated to superior customer service and value creation for our customers, employees, owners and the community.”

PLM’s Premium Range of Technologies PLM, recognized as a top Technology Provider in 2017 by Food Logistics magazine, was one of the first adopters of cold chain telematics solution through its ColdLink® two-way transport refrigeration real-time control and management system. ColdLink can be an integral tool to meet compliance and can reduce customer resources by allowing them to respond appropriately to create personalized business rules and manage by exception in real-time. What sets PLM apart in this space is its policy that doesn’t focus on selling telematics hardware to the user like other competitive companies. Customers lease the telematics hardware to avoid the costs of ownership and software updates as well as the risk that thirdparty suppliers can’t support the platform. It is PLM’s business and market insights which combine the technology with customer requirements to maximize benefits to save time and money within the business operating margins. PLM’s Current Projects The fleet management company is currently developing cloud-based technology solutions to improve customer service levels via Artificial Intelligence. At its core, the company provides industry-leading fleet management solutions, improving lifecycle operating costs and customer productivity through data analytics, process simplification, outsourcing and technology solutions. PLM is implementing various sensors to transmit information about the performance of the refrigeration unit, key trailer components, content details and trailer temperature. It also offers realtime, fleet information to customers, which prompts changes to their operations and results in lower costs and greater efficiencies.

customers to meet regulatory compliance, company specific training requirements and proof of training sessions. To keep pace with advancing technology, the fleet management company is actively developing new costumer solutions. The digital convergence of Internet of Things to the ledger of the Blockchain technology aids transportation services between trusted cold chain industry business partners. Criteria for Hiring an Employee As the company continues to grow, it looks for individuals who are agile and flexible, ready to take on new tasks and start working. In addition to embracing PLM’s core values and mission, ideal candidates for employment must be team players who are self-motivated and willing to think outside the box. Future employees will be helping PLM enable a safe, consistent and more transparent cold supply chain by securing PLM’s position as an industry thought leader in application development by utilizing current and future technology within the cold supply chain. Exceeding Customers Expectations into The Future PLM embraces a technology think tank culture within the walls of the company and continues to develop new products and services based on the changing industry disturbances. Business disruptors by industry and government regulations require speed of change to keep pace. Over the coming years, the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Process Automation and Blockchain will require PLM to become more flexible and nimble, pulling in the talent to exceed customer expectations.

PLM plans to offer cloud based driver-training through mobile digital technology as a tool for its

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Reltio: Helping Companies To Become Self-Learning Enterprises

Manish Sood CEO & Founder

eltio was founded in 2011 on a single premise: Companies that learn faster grow faster. Enabling companies to ‘Be Right Faster,’ the company’s solution, Reltio Cloud, is the only Self-Learning Data Platform to deliver enterprise data-driven applications with reliable master data management (MDM), relevant big data insights and machine learning powered recommended actions, while leveraging multiple clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Successful Leader & Far-Sighted Entrepreneur CEO & Founder, Manish Sood had previously helped build the ﬁrst generation of MDM solutions, but the inspiration to create Reltio came as he saw the limitations becoming more apparent. Despite the success and gradual maturation of the $1B-plus MDM market, there were clearly multiple challenges. First, the commercial availability of big data technologies and elastic cloud computing showed how traditional heavyweight, on-premise, ERP-class data management is inefﬁcient and costly. Second, time-to-value never really aligned with the expectations of frontline business users, who were

pouring billions of dollars into self-service ad-hoc business intelligence or analytics tools. Thanks to his own background in the market and a lifetime passion for innovation, Manish recognized the need and the opportunity. He set out to build Reltio with a clear vision: to create a simple way for companies to become self-learning. So Manish left his job, invested his own money and launched Reltio, and the company was soon getting the attention of VC ﬁrms for its breakthrough approach. In 2015, Reltio raised $10.4M in Series A funding from Crosslink Capital and . 406 Ventures. It then went on to raise an additional $22M in Series B in 2016 and $40M in Series C in 2017. As a leader, Manish continually challenges conventional thinking and encourages innovation. He expects results, prefers progress over perfection and uses systematic analysis in the face of adversity. Reltio is an innovative technology company nurturing and grooming the next generation of technology leaders while solving complex enterprise problems. With high value placed on people and culture, all employees are empowered to take on any challenges they see, regardless of their role.

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T ech Companies of 2018

“Reltio organizes enterprise data for continuous self-learning” With persistence and passion, Manish has won over Fortune 500, billion-dollar conglomerates, beating out longtime incumbents. In fact, many Global 2,000 organizations and companies of all sizes and industries rely on Reltio to become Self-Learning Enterprises. Manish’s internal financial discipline also keeps Reltio focused on driving value. All investments are calculated risks, which has enabled the company to grow rapidly. He’s focused on making the company successful for customers, employees and investors alike. Today, the Reltio Self-Learning Data Platform, developed natively in the cloud, organizes enterprise data for continuous self-learning. With Reltio, all enterprises can manage data as easily as the leading digital companies, leveraging continuous data organization and recommended actions to measure and improve operations. Reltio organizes data across all domains and formats from internal, external, thirdparty and social media sources, creating a unified data set with unlimited personalized views for users across every discipline: sales, marketing, compliance and more. As a core component of its platform, the Reltio SelfLearning Graph works under the covers to combine, relate and store an infinite number of attributes and relationships to rapidly deliver any data-driven application for any business need. Reltio leverages machine learning (ML) to continuously improve data consistency, accuracy, and manageability for better data quality. ML capabilities help uncover patterns, detect anomalies and assist users (such as data stewards) do their jobs more efficiently. ML also enables a seamless foundation for the generation of relevant insights and contextual recommended actions, which can be operationalized through datadriven applications. The Reltio Self-Learning Data Platform scales horizontally to deliver elastic performance, providing on-demand scale up and scale down capacity provisioned based on workloads and supporting the throughput that companies need at any time. Unlike hosted/managed services non-multitenant cloud, where capacity is limited by the hardware originally sized and dedicated to each customer, Reltio Cloud’s true multi-cloud, multimodel, multi-tenant architecture provides burst

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capacity to handle any data access or load scenarios which may have spikes in real-time operational business usage. Accolades & Awards Less than a year after Reltio launched, it was named leader and “most visionary” in the Forrester MDM wave. The data management innovator also ranked #153 in the 2017 Inc. 5000, with a three-year growth rate of 2,568%. Reltio's work culture has also won recognition and awards: Fortune named Reltio one of the “Top 30 Workplaces in Technology in 2017 and #1 among ‘Best Small & Medium Workplaces.’ Team Players At Reltio, Manish makes sure that HR is accountable to diversity goals for employee recruitment and retention. Married employees in same-sex or heterosexual relationships receive the same benefits. Reltio also believes in encouraging women in STEM fields, and the company has named its conference rooms after famous female scientists. Some of the leading Reltio engineers and data scientists, including Chief Architect Anastasia Zamyshlyaeva, are women. Tech Industry Through CEO’s Vision Manish believes that “we no longer have the luxury of waiting five to ten years for the next iteration of technology solutions. Business executives must embrace this pace of change and build continuous self-learning into their DNA.” Manish recommends creating a supportive environment, where all ideas are welcome, and employees put themselves in the customer’s shoes. This mandates cross-functional teams, which may even include partners and customers as catalysts. Reltio is changing the way companies gain value from data, arguably one of the most valuable business assets today. Through innovative thinking and a breakthrough solution, Reltio is allowing organizations to ‘Be Right Faster,’ and it’s on track to become the next billion-dollar company.

Money Talks

Future trends of the Fintech industry

oday’s era is moving towards digitalization, mobile connections and service automations. There are similar examples within the payments, mortgages, and financial industry at large. Digitalization helps in reduction of the use of paper, which reduces the environment degradation. Real estate industries and escrow industries who are involved in property transaction have also started using digitized documents, so both the parties could see and sign the forms online. The blockchain particularly, facilitalities with paperless environment, with its smart contracts environment, where documents are encrypted in smart contracts and are witnessed by the stakeholders on the online platform. A document has its own geo-time-stamped digital signature that makes it more secure, so that it can't be hacked, as everyone has their individual digital key to get access. In this instance, the entire experience is moved from online to a decentralized environment, resulting in drastically improved costs, transparency, and improved execution, among other benefits. Banks are also encouraging, empowering and educating their customers to go paperless; offering online statements to reduce printing and mailing costs. However, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, only one-fourth of credit card holders choose to receive their monthly statements electronically. Banks were not showing interest in fintech companies. Nowadays, they are partners that are pairing up to take the challenges of a digital-era. Following are the Fintech Industry Trends that will be transforming the Finance Industry

compliance and fraud prevention. As the RegTech technologies AI, data analytics and data visualisation develop, we can increasingly expect products that provide greater levels of analysis, not only of risk, but of performance, using existing information to extrapolate ever further into the future. Products used to provide scenario analysis, forecasting and modelling and to complete required ‘stress tests’ will be further developed to produce faster and more detailed results. Data analytics will also increasingly be used in a predictive context for targeted risk analysis in relation to and more broadly for internal modelling to be used to develop strategy and report to regulators.

Ÿ Rise of InsurTech – The digitalisation not only gripped the banking sector but also it has gripped over the insurance sector. It’s good that the insurance companies are indeed heading down the path of disruptive innovation, whether it is the effect of an external factor, such as the rise of the sharing economy, the ability to improve operations using artiﬁcial intelligence. It makes the insurance companies easier to serve the customer, as the customer can get the insurance from any part of the world.

Ÿ Removing Friction from the Customer Journey – opening an account or processing any transaction in the bank took a long time. Customers had to go to the bank and do all the transactions, it took time for any of the transaction. With the digitalisation of the banking sector, these transitions are being done within a seconds, which reduce the time of the customer and make the work of the customer straightforward.

Ÿ Rise of RegTech – The initial phase of RegTech solutions had focused on regulatory

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Ÿ PSD2 (Revised Payment Service Directive) – In post days while doing the online payment there is a middle man between the customer and the Bank, but PSD2 removes these middlemen through the creation of yet another pesky acronym: PISPs (Payment Initiation Service Providers). These let the merchant and the bank communicate with each other directly – a more straight-forward system with reduced costs for merchants and (ultimately) customers. In near future PSD2 is looking that the charging fees would not be detected by the bank and make the customer more efﬁcient to book the ﬂight, train or any public transport.

Ÿ Chatbots, Machine Learning, AI – In order to stay competitive banking sector should keep track of the emerging trends and be able to capitalize on them before their competitors do. Artiﬁcial intelligence is currently among the most promising ﬁntech trends. It helps the customers to get connected with the bank in the absence of the banks employees. It also helps in ease the jobs of the bank employees, as they don’t need to be active all the time for replying the queries of the customers.

T ech Companies of 2018

is happing so quickly, it is possible to argue that social media platforms may be the banks of the future. The future of the bank services industry is to fully integrate banking with social media. Those companies that fail to adapt the changing of the ﬁntech to the market preferences will have difﬁculties retaining their customers.

Ÿ Blockchain Technology – This technology was originally developed as a way of securing cryptocurrency transactions. It essentially allows for safe and secure trading of anything, such as money, estate, royalties, ideas, and even copyrights. Blockchain is a public ledger, but equally has heavily encrypted access keys built in for the stakeholder. Its advanced security features, many ﬁnancial services companies are looking for methods to implement this technology within their institutions.

Ÿ Fintech gets Integrated with Social Media – Social media is transforming banking relationships in very signiﬁcant ways, from improving customer service to allowing users to send money to others via online platforms. New ﬁnancial technology companies are using social media data to help people get access to credit or even simply open a bank account.

In conclusion, Fintech companies will continue to grow and increase their business in this digital world. The ﬁntech companies are helping the banks to grow much faster than the early decades. Banks are becoming more advanced and will also become more advanced by using those trends.

The social media has also helped the ﬁnance technologies to market their company to the global market. Social media can even impact your ability to get a loan. Integration Unveiling The Business Stories

Smart Software Designed to Sell, Market & Manage New Development Real Estate

eal estate is one of the longest standing brick and mortar industries, but also typically one of the slowest to adopt new technology. Spark RE Technologies is an industry-leading platform for new home sales and marketing, and they’re set to transform the real estate development world. Spark is specifically designed to power the entire process of selling and marketing new real estate. It’s a single platform that incorporates a back-end CRM with custom sales reporting, inventory management, digital contract generation and mass email marketing. With Spark, developers can access a whole realm of data, access and transparency. Developers from all over North America have streamlined their sales processes using Spark. The robust platform allows users to manage all of their projects from a single dashboard, giving them immediate access to custom reporting across their entire portfolio. At the same time, they can customize the platform to their requirements, giving each development project the ability to have its own processes and workflows for better efficiency.

Inspiration behind Spark Simeon Garratt is a Co-founder and CEO of Spark RE Technologies. Spark grew from the founders’ passion for selling and marketing developments around the world, and their frustration at the available tools. Founders Simeon Garratt, Cody Curley, and Ryan Ilg originally teamed up in 2012. Spark was released in its current form in 2015, and has steadily evolved since then. “Excel spreadsheets, pen and paper, all those low tech processes are currently what is being used to get more real estate deals done,” Garratt explained, “I was one of the people affected by it, and that led me to try to solve that problem, because I knew I wasn’t the only one. It sounds cheesy, but I knew there had to be a better way.” “Our clients build skylines. Using the Spark platform, they’re able to ﬁll them with people and create communities,” Garratt said. He cites the physical impact of Spark as one of the

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T ech Companies of 2018 “Spark aims to transform new development real estate through the application of technology, digitally powering every new transaction and thus opening up a realm of data, access, and transparency.” major reasons he loves leading the company. “We’re at the forefront of real estate, development, and technology. Spark has a rare ability to see the digital translated into the physical realm.”

development sales and marketing. Spark’s team of industry experts gives them reliable expertise in the real estate development industry, which in turn brings value to their clients.

Power Packed Technologies

Upcoming Challenges

Two technologies that Spark is excited to incorporate are blockchain and digitization capabilities such as DocuSign. Spark’s partnership with DocuSign has allowed for a greater degree of digitization, removing manual pen and paper from contract and signature transactions. The team is also investigating blockchain as a potential way to approach some of Spark’s data transactions and security protocols.

Two of Spark’s biggest challenges are communicating their vision to the real estate industry, and translating it to markets around the world. Spark is currently working in over 80 cities around the world, and are looking to grow into more. They need to educate people on the value of technology in a ﬁeld as old as real estate. To do this, Spark has to overcome the belief that technology isn’t necessary, by demonstrating that their platform has the power to make their clients’ day to day work more successful and efﬁcient.

Latest Projects The biggest project for Spark is building the software ecosystem around new development and real estate. Currently, there is no centralized hub where people can access technology efﬁciently. Spark is willing and able to take on the task of building an infrastructure that will allow people to do that. Once the ecosystem is established, users will need data to support them in making informed and potential decisions for their businesses. Another project that Spark is working on is the organization and aggregation of this data. The current state of real estate data is vague and inaccurate, and Spark’s initiatives in turn will bring insight and clarity to the market.

Words of Wisdom Simeon Garratt’s advice to young entrepreneurs is to be patient. It’s important to gain experience in multiple ﬁelds. Beyond that, entrepreneurs need to make sure to keep themselves interested and engaged in what they do. Surrounding themselves with good people, to share passions and ideas, is a good way to do that. But in the long run, it’s important to look for new ways to stay engaged, keeping their interests fresh and their work seeming new.

The Spark Team The team at Spark is passionate about real estate and technology. Not only because it is the industry they work in, but because of the real effects that they can make in the world. The founders have surrounded themselves with a talented, tightly knit team. This includes Ryan Ilg, CTO, who returned to the company a few years after being part of the original conceptualization of Spark, and Sales and Marketing Director Jessica Radziszewska, a veteran in new

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Zoomdata: Unlocking the Insights from Big Data

Justin Langseth Founder

oday, the world is evolving at a rapid pace with advancement in technology. Accessibility of the World Wide Web has become effortless resulting in massive rise of internet users. Digitization has revolutionized the concept of advertising through e-commerce, mobile applications, and social media platforms generating large amount of structured and unstructured data. The only possible solution to unlock the worth, pattern and meaning of the stored data is Big Data Analytics. Sectors and industries like IT, automobile, manufacturing, retail, ﬁnance, banking, and e-commerce have realized that generated data is an asset with a surmounting market price in the global business. Zoomdata Inc. is the world’s fastest growing platform for big data exploration, visualization, and analytics. Incepted in 2012, the big data solutions provider company has centers across California, Virginia, Australia, Singapore and Japan. Zoomdata provides a simple, intuitive, and collaborative way to visually interact with the data to solve business problems from billions of rows of data to real time streams in less than a second. The Big Data solutions provider company is an

open platform that provides visualization solutions for big and fast data. Natively architected for cloud and on-premise deployments, its modern architecture delivers interactive visual analysis of big or fast streaming data at the speed-of-thought. Recently, Zoomdata won the Hottest Big Data and Analytics Innovation in the region’s best entrepreneurial technology companies category awarded by Northern Virginia Technology Council at the 15th annual NVTC Hot Ticket Awards. It has also earned a ﬁrst ranking in Dresner Advisory’s Big Data Analytics Market study. Guiding Star of the Company Justin Langseth is the Founder of Zoomdata, Inc. and serves as its Chief Executive Ofﬁcer and President. He is a graduate in Management of Information Technology from the Sloan School of Management, MIT. Under his able leadership and guidance, companies like Clarabridge, Inc., Claraview Inc. and Strategy.com (MicroStrategy subsidiary) have been formed. Justin has been in the Business Intelligence (BI) space since the mid 90's and encountered its progression from simple analysis of sales transactions to real-time analysis of trillions of rows a day. Justin realized that the

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T ech Companies of 2018 “Zoomdata is on a mission: to change how the world accesses, interacts with, and consumes data.” existing tools would simply not work on big, progression from simple analysis of sales transactions to real-time analysis of trillions of rows a day. Justin realized that the existing tools would simply not work on big, real-time and new forms of data, which would become important to all business decision-makings in the future. Owing to this, he executed and built a standalone analytics company specializing on the Big Data platform. Words of wisdom from the founder Justin advices the Gen Next entrepreneurs to focus on set of two core skills namely, coding/hacking and selling/presenting. He suggests that if one can deliver both the codes as well as present the concept, it becomes much easier to start a company with clarity. Further, he stresses to start a business ﬁrst, where one can experience real time trials and tribulations rather than attending a business school. Employment Essentials Zoomdata engages skilled professionals with creative minds who can explore the hidden treasures of the Big Data landscape. In return, the company provides access to the best tools and technologies enabling the team to deliver outstanding results, solutions and services. Zoomdata’s Leveraging Technologies ● ● ●

● ●

Scalable microservices based platform deployable on-premise, cloud, or hybrid. Uses a built-in or external Apache Spark engine for data caching and manipulation. Implements data source connectors built on the native APIs of the source to optimize performance and expose full capabilities of the data source. Connects to Hadoop, Search, NoSQL, Streaming, Data warehouse, RDBMS. Implements data sharpening, live incremental updates, lazy load of results, query windowing functions, query cancellation, clean up and multiplexed caching.

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Partners in Innovation When it comes to big data, no company has all the answers. Hence, Zoomdata has aligned itself with the most innovative companies in the rapidly changing big data and visual analytics marketplace. It has partnered with over 48 companies specializing in Cloud, system integration, technology and applications ﬁelds. Cloudera, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud platform and SAP are its featured partners. On-going Customer Oriented Projects ·

Global Pharma Company: Managers, data analysts and data scientists are supplied with analytics solutions that can fuse together clinical data enabling greater efﬁciency and new insights across its R&D processes and bring new drugs to market quickly and less expensively to assist patients. Mobile Network Monitoring Company: Zoomdata uses the next generation modern BI front-end platform that provides network monitoring, diagnostic and analytics services for mobile and broadband networks for global telecommunications companies. Global Marketing Company: The Big Data solutions provider company delivers power agile data discovery, enabling ad hoc, interactive, drillable analysis of big data for digital marketing campaigns.

Future Obstacles and Counter Attacking Strategies Zoomdata is committed to not only keeping pace with, but also leveraging the latest and greatest technologies. Streaming data and IoT analytics offers a lot of promise, but the adoption is early and technology is still nascent. There are also many new players in the market, requiring a constant assessment of partners and competition. It is both exciting as well as a very complex segment of the market.

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