By Cassandra Balentine
The software industry is always changing. As we enter the dawn of a new century, it’s interesting to note the similarities between the overall top ten companies of Software Magazine’s annual ranking haven’t changed much even in the last ten years. IBM and Microsoft consistently rank number one and two, respectively. The third slot has been primarily maintained by HP, followed by Oracle, and Accenture. Other top software companies throughout the years include Apple, Ericsson, Tata Consulting, NTT Data, Hitachi, Capgmeni, Computer Sciences Company, and Dell.
In the past, our annual software ranking was known as the Software 500 and ranked 500 software companies globally by software and software services revenue. However, clear market consolidation and fewer private companies willing to divulge revenue data made us reconsider the approach. Today, we debut a more competitive ranking of the top 100 companies by software and software services revenue.
Top Company Breakdown
Here are highlights from this year’s top performing companies.
IBM
IBM manages several brands, including Watson, Cloud, Services, Security, Research, and IT Infrastructure. One of the most interesting going-ons at IBM is Watson, which is an artificial intelligence (AI) tool used to help predict and shape outcomes, automate processes, and optimize time.
Most recently, the company touted Watson as a solution to help manage the global COVID-19 pandemic. IBM offered IBM Watson Assistant for Citizens on the IBM public cloud online or by phone. The solution brought together Watson Assistant, natural language processing capabilities from IBM research, and enterprise AI search capabilities with Watson Discovery to help understand and respond to common COVID-19 questions.
Watson Assistant for Citizens leverages current data available from external sources, including guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) and local sources such as links to school closings, news, and documents on a state website. IBM delivers this service across the U.S., as well as engaging with organizations globally including Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, and U.K.
Microsoft
Microsoft holds the number two spot for top software and software services revenue. According to the company, it enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge.
Microsoft partners with a variety of organizations, including the National Football League (NFL). The company announced an expanded partnership with the organization in early March to accelerate digital transformation across the league. The multi-year expansion aims to help the entire NFL, including its coaches and players, be more efficient through enhanced communication and collaboration via Microsoft Surface devices and Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork in Office 365.
Accenture
Coming in at number three in 2020, Accenture is a global professional services company that provides a range of services in strategy and consulting, interactive, technology, and operations, with digital capabilities across all of these services. It combines its experience and specialized solutions across more than 40 industries to bring continuous innovation to help clients improve their performance and create lasting value.
Accenture recently announced the acquisition of Yesler, a business to business (B2B) marketing services agency that helps many of the world’s leading brands run their global marketing programs and operations at speed and scale. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
The acquisition strengthens and scales Accenture’s B2B marketing services, adding depth in offerings such as account-based marketing, customer advocacy, sales enablement, and marketing automation.
Apple
Fourth on this year’s ranking, Apple revolutionizes personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms—iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS—provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and iCloud.
Late last year, Apple unveiled its redesigned Everyone Can Code curriculum to help introduce more elementary and middle school students to the world of coding. Now available, the new curriculum includes more resources for teachers, a new guide for students, and updated Swift Coding Club materials.
The new Everyone Can Code curriculum builds on existing interactive puzzles, guides, and activities to make learning to code more approachable and connected to students’ everyday lives.
Everyone Can Code Puzzles is a new student guide to Swift Playgrounds where each chapter helps students build on what they already know, experiment with new coding concepts, and creatively communicate how coding impacts their lives. A companion teacher guide supports educators in bringing coding into their classrooms with helpful ways to facilitate, deepen, and assess student learning. Designed to support all students, the new curriculum is optimized for VoiceOver and includes closed-captioned videos and audio descriptions as well as videos in American Sign Language.
General Dynamics
The fifth top company is General Dynamics, a company that supports the full enterprise IT lifecycle—designing, integrating, operating, maintaining, and modernizing complex data, voice, and multimedia networks. Working closely with customers, it ensures their network infrastructures are secure, efficient, scalable, and cost effective.
The company has extensive experience in consolidating, building, and operating data centers. It is at the forefront of agile development, big data analytics, and cloud and virtualization technologies and services—providing solutions that meet multiple federal government and military compliance requirements.
General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) recently announced it will provide mission support to the U.S. Army’s Department of Defense Information Network through their Cybersecurity and Network Operations Mission Support (ADCNOMS) contract.
GDIT plans to provide broad IT and cybersecurity support to Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM), Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER), and Chief Information Officer/G-6 out of Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, AZ. The single-award Alliant 2 task order holds a total estimated value of $118 million. It includes a five-month base period with four, 12-month option periods and one six-month extension.
Army NETCOM faced a two-fold challenge with ADCNOMS support: securing highly specialized staff at Fort Huachuca and addressing enterprise issues globally. GDIT’s capabilities lie at the intersection of these requirements.
Top Growth
Traditionally, we sort the ranking by revenue, so the highest grossing companies are on the top. But another interesting way to review the data is by looking at those with impressive growth—often falling at the lower end of the ranking.
SS&C Technologies
SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc., number 28, features growth of 104 percent. The company is s a global provider of services and software for the financial services and healthcare industries. Founded in 1986, SS&C is headquartered in Windsor, CT, and has offices around the world. Some 18,000 financial services and healthcare organizations, from the world’s largest companies to small and mid-market firms, rely on SS&C for expertise, scale, and technology.
The company recently announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Innovest Systems for a total consideration of $120 million. NY-based Innovest builds systems for trust accounting, payments, and unique asset servicing on modern, web-based technology. The purchase price consists of $100 million in cash and $20 million in SS&C stock, with the value of the stock portion based on the trading price between April 20, 2020 and the date of the closing. The parties expect that the transaction will close in Q2 2020.
Innovest’s flagship product, InnoTrust. offers solutions to support the accounting and reporting needs of trust companies, banks, private banks, retirement plan administrators, and others. InnoTrust meets customer needs to control, account for and report on assets held in trust, wealth, and retirement accounts. Complementary solutions in Innovest’s suite include custody, payments, unique assets, trade execution, and other related solutions and managed services.
Catasys
Catasys comes in at number 88, featuring 97 percent growth. An AI-powered and telehealth-enabled virtualized outpatient healthcare treatment company, it recently announced the expansion of its OnTrak solution with a leading national health plan into IN, WI, KC, and AK. This expansion ensures that eligible commercial and Medicare Advantage members of the health plan in these four states will have access to critical behavioral healthcare to help them better manage chronic disease. With the expansions into Indiana and Arkansas, OnTrak is now available in 30 states, as well as the nation’s capital. Additional OnTrak expansions are expected in the remainder of 2020.
OnTrak is a critical component of the Catasys Predict-Recommend-Engage platform that predicts people whose chronic disease will improve with behavior change, recommends care pathways that are effective and that people will follow, and engages people who aren’t getting the care they need. OnTrak is an integrated solution that incorporates evidence-based psychosocial and medical interventions delivered either in-person or via telehealth, along with care coaching and in-market Community Care Coordinators who address the social and environmental determinants of health. OnTrak improves member health and delivers validated cost savings of more than 50 percent for enrolled members.
Veritone, Inc.
Veritone is number 85 on today’s list featuring growth of 88 percent. It provides AI technology and solutions, including its proprietary operating system, aiWARE, which powers a diverse set of AI applications and intelligent process automation solutions that are transforming both commercial and government organizations. aiWARE orchestrates an expanding ecosystem of machine learning models to transform audio, video, and other data sources into actionable intelligence. The company’s AI developer tools enable its customers and partners to easily develop and deploy custom applications that leverage the power of AI to dramatically improve operational efficiency and unlock untapped opportunities. Veritone is headquartered in Costa Mesa, CA.
Recently the company announced that the Pemberton, NJ, Township Police Department has selected Veritone and its AI-enabled redaction software, Veritone Redact, to provide transparency of officer interactions with the public, while accelerating the timely release of video and audio evidence requests by the public and other agencies.
After securing a grant to purchase body cameras for all of its officers, the department knew it would also need advanced redaction software. The department planned to use its new body camera footage to share information with the public about crimes under investigation, without tipping their hands to show all of the information they had on a case, or revealing the identities of victims or bystanders. That meant the Pemberton Township Police Department needed to choose carefully: its caseload demanded an easy-to-use, efficient solution that could handle redaction of both video and audio evidence.
The Pemberton Township Police Department deployed its new body cams––and Veritone Redact––in early March 2020. And they are already being put to good use. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, officers are among those on the front lines. Where they go, so do their body-worn cameras.
As the volume of video footage collected by law enforcement and disclosed to defendants and in public information requests continues to increase, Veritone Redact ensures the privacy of innocent people isn’t compromised in the process. Redact automates the process of obscuring both sensitive imagery and audio in video evidence, reducing the time required to redact these files by up to 90 percent compared with existing manual, frame-by-frame evidence redaction workflows.
With automated head detection, as well as automatic tracking of manually selected sensitive imagery, Veritone Redact tackles massive volumes of audio and video content at incredible speed and efficiency—freeing up resources and helping agencies comply with privacy and disclosure laws quickly and efficiently.
Ribbon Communications
Ribbon Communications, Inc. is number 54 on this year’s ranking. The company experienced 75 percent growth from 2017 to 2018. The company recently merged with ECI Telecom Group and delivers global communications software and network solutions to service providers, enterprises, and critical infrastructure sectors.
The company’s goal is to engage deeply with customers, helping them modernize their networks for improved competitive positioning and business outcomes in today’s smart, always-on, and data-hungry world. Its innovative, end-to-end solutions portfolio delivers unparalleled scale, performance, and agility, including core to edge IP solutions, UCaaS/CPaaS cloud offerings, software security and analytics tools, as well as packet and optical networking leveraging ECI’s Elastic Network technology.
The company recently announced that it is delivering free cloud-based Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) technology on the IBM public cloud to support IBM enterprise clients’ remote staff. The offering, available to new subscribers, enables IBM clients to rapidly adopt Ribbon’s carrier-grade Kandy Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offering, via the IBM public cloud, to work from anywhere.
Through this new endevor, IBM enterprise clients can now leverage Ribbon’s Smart Office Collaboration rooms as part of this free trial through June 30, 2020.
Smart Office provides a full suite of collaboration and communications tools to enable employees to productively work without having to physically be in the same location. Employees can conduct face-to-face meetings in high definition video, screen share, and chat with colleagues.
Ribbon is part of the IBM Public Cloud Ecosystem, a new initiative to support global system integrators and independent software vendors to help clients modernize and transform mission-critical workloads on the IBM public cloud.
Asure
Asure Software comes in at number 77 with 63 percent growth. The company sees Human Capital Management (HCM) through the lens of entrepreneurs and executives with an owner’s mentality. It helps more than 60,000 small and mid-sized businesses develop their human capital to get to the next level, stay compliant, and allocate their time, money, and technology toward growth. Asure HCM solution includes Asure Payroll & Tax, Asure HR, and Asure Time and Attendance. Its Asure HRServices offering ranges from online compliance tools to a fully outsourced human resources (HR) department.
The company recently announced its COVID-19 Resource Center, which focuses on helping small and medium-sized businesses survive and rebound in the aftermath of the pandemic. The resource center includes the latest tools and information for navigating new state and federal legislation.
Asure’s COVID-19 resource center includes disaster-proof payroll with paycards, free emergency HR services, and learning resources.
Experts from Asure HRServices have been fielding COVID-19 related HR calls since February and compiled the top-ten most frequently asked questions into a webinar. Because the response was so overwhelming, Asure created a follow-up webinar to break down the Families First Coronavirus Response Act—also known as FFCRA—and answer the top ten unanswered questions in the Q&A session. Businesses can find out more about this educational resource on the company’s website.
Continued Evolution
The software industry continues to evolve and adapt to the latest business and consumer needs. The Software Magazine ranking provides a glimpse into the magnitude of the industry, including the scope of vertical markets. SW
Find the annual ranking in the Spring Digital Edition – http://rcppubs.com/3D/SWM/2020/Spring/
May2020, Software Magazine
