Abhinav Agarwal: Silicon Valley

Showing posts with label Silicon Valley. Show all posts

Sunday, July 14, 2013

WebEx 2002 - Sands of Silicon Valley

Companies on the sands of Silicon Valley: Webex
This is another from the several photos I took while in the Bay Area in the summer of 2002. WebEx was started in 1996, and acquired by Cisco in ~~1997~~ 2007 in a multi-billion dollar deal. Cisco has continued to preserve the separate brand identity of WebEx, and has allowed WebEx to grow into a leader in web conferencing, despite the presence of several competitors.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

BEA 2002 - Sands of Silicon Valley

Companies from the sands of Silicon Valley: BEA
BEA was perhaps best known for its Tuxedo and WebLogic products. WebLogic had been a leading middleware suite in BEA's portfolio, and the company itself had bought WebLogic the company in 1998 for $192 million in stock (CNet, Sep 1998). WebLogic was perhaps the first J2EE application server, and BEA's name itself was an acronym, derived from the first names of the company's founders.

Oracle acquired BEA Systems in April 2008 after closing a deal in January 2008 to acquire it for $8.5 billion. Oracle then made WebLogic Server the application server of choice across its suite of products, including business intelligence and Fusion applications.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/Acquisitions/bea/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEA_Systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuxedo_(software)

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Macromedia

Companies in the sands of Silicon Valley - Macromedia.
I had taken this photo in 2002, while in the San Francisco Bay Area for a business trip to my employer, Oracle. On a weekend, when I had time and a camera in hand, I went for a short drive and took some photos. One such photo was of a company called Macromedia, which was the maker of the highly popular Flash and Dreamweaver line of products, among others. In 2005 it was acquired by Adobe, primarily for its Flash and Flex line of products and technology. Unknown to me, or perhaps forgotten, was the fact that Microsoft executive, Stephen Elop, now CEO of Nokia, had been the CEO of Macromedia at the time of its acquisition by Adobe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia). In 2002 Macromedia introduced Flash MX, which was to quickly become Flex, and became the catalyst for Adobe's acquisition of the company. One of the reasons cited by Adobe's CEO at the time was the fact that Macromedia had, in Flash, a runtime whose distribution required less than 2MB of space. This was a huge consideration then, especially with companies starting to think on how to distribute rich interactive experiences to users on phones. Adobe tried to take the Flash/Flex platform to the next level, of making it a computing platform with the introduction of Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), codenamed "Apollo", in 2007. This ambitious goal never quite fructified for Adobe, was exacerbated by the introduction of the Apple iPhone in 2007, the move of the web towards HTML5, Adobe's own inability to bring out a Flash runtime that could run performantly on smartphones, and finally saw Adobe donating Flex to the Apache Foundation in 2011 (http://www.techworld.com.au/article/407714/adobe_donates_flex_apache, http://blogs.apache.org/flex/) and moving its own efforts more towards development tools for building HTML5-based applications.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Oracle - Redwood Shores

CNet had an article on Google titled Can Google beat the new-office curse. It seems that the surest and quickest way of getting page hits is to mention Google in an article (heck! even I am doing the same, amn't I???). It has an accompanying photo essay titled Silicon Valley's office jinx . It lists examples of Exodus, Excite@Home, SGI, Novell, Siebel, and Oracle - all very well known companies at some point in time or other, that ran into troubles, in some cases terminal trouble, after moving into swanky new office premises. Oracle is a surprising inclusion, till you read that the reference is to its financial problems in the early 1990s when it had to restate earnings and lay off many employees. As for Excite and Exodus, these two companies fell to the dot-com bust that came in 2001.

Oracle's office in Redwood Shores: building 100 is now not visible. One of the problems of not having a wide enough lens. So the next best alternative to me is to use 'photo-stitching'.

This photo is a combination of four separate photographs. Can't really tell where one photo has merged with the other. Technology is wonderful!

Everytime I visit Oracle's HQ at Redwood Shores, I cannot help gaze at the buildings. Very distinctive, and very different from many of the other cookie cutter hi-tech companys' buildings that you see in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. A clear day always makes for some lovely photographs, and this particular angle happens to be the one shot the most frequently. The buildings themselves have a cylindrical front and a cuboid back. The building with the words 'Oracle' is building 300, and the building you see furthest to the right is building 500, which is also Oracle's address: 500 Oracle Parkway. Building 600 is further to the right, and not in the photo.

Building 600 is now visible in this photo. But, building 100 is not.

More on Oracle's campus at Redwood Shores. This photo illustrates why I guess the buildings, especially the first three - 100, 200, and 300 - are in ascending order of height. 100 is the shortest one, 200 is taller, and 300 is taller than 200. If you approach the Oracle Parkway signal, this is how the buildings looks like: stacked on top of another almost.

And this is the shot from the intersection itself. If you travel up the same road a mile or so you will meet up with Oracle Parkway again, as it loops behind the Oracle campus and meets with this road up ahead.

At first sight these buildings may appear to be small. But small they certainly aren't. Each building seats on average more than a thousand people, and this shot from the back brings out the size quite nicely. The white grilled structure in the foreground is one of the many parking garages.

A long line of cars, all making their way to the different Oracle offices. You would suspect that the 'nicer' cars, the Audis, BMWs, Lexuses, Mercs... were bought when Oracle's stock was trading at a price that had sent its market cap to over $200 billion and Larry Ellison richer than Bill Gates :-)

This is building 400 from behind.

This is the long path in front of the five cylindrical buildings. A favourite track for people who take a short walk after lunch.

December meant that most of the trees had shed their leaves, leaving behind a very stark looking picture.

Not only humans, but birds also frequent the campus.

Particularly pensive looking egret (let's call it a white-bird-with-a-long neck in case it's not an egret)

If you walk down the path, and towards building 600, you would see that the buildings are not so closely spaced as may appear at first glance.

This shot didn't come through as nicely as I thought it could. This is basically a very very wide photo, taken by stitching together five or six different photos. I think I should moved a bit more to the right before taking these shots. Well... maybe next time.