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Services and consulting

Outsourcing, consulting, managed operations. They sell people and process rather than product, which is a harder thing to explain to a market and a harder thing to scale.

17 companies

1847 - presentSiemens - the 1847 telegraph startupWerner von Siemens built the Indo-European telegraph line; the conglomerate's communications bloodline runs through EWSD, the Nokia JV, and Unify.vendor

1886 - presentUnisys - computing's oldest bloodlinesBurroughs (1886) plus Sperry's UNIVAC - the ENIAC creators' company - merged in 1986: the deepest lineage in this section, still running ClearPath descendants today.vendor

1887 - presentGetronicsA Dutch electrical firm from the 1880s that ended up owning what was left of Wang Laboratories.vendor

1899 - presentNEC - Japan's first joint ventureFounded 1899 with Western Electric capital; NEAX switched the world's calls, the PC-98 owned Japan's PC market, and the C&C vision named the convergence everyone now lives in.vendor

1910 - presentHitachi - the industrial giant that stores the worldFrom a mine's five-horsepower motor in 1910 to VSP arrays, HGST drives, and Britain's express trains - the conglomerate whose storage lineage runs through every SAN.vendor

1911 - presentIBM - the century companyPunched cards to System/360 to the PC to Red Hat: the company the rest of the industry defined itself against.vendor

1931 - presentBull - Europe's computing championPunch-card wars against IBM in the 1930s, the prophetic Gamma 60, nationalization and privatization - and a final act building Europe's first exascale supercomputer.vendor

1935 - presentFujitsu - Japan's computing standard-bearerBorn from a 1935 Fuji Electric spin-off (itself a Furukawa-Siemens venture), Fujitsu fought IBM with Amdahl, absorbed ICL, and built the K and Fugaku supercomputers.vendor

1962 - 2008Electronic Data Systems (EDS)Invented the idea that a company could hand its computing to somebody else entirely.

1976 - presentHCLTechStarted because IBM left India, and forty-one years later bought IBM's software.vendor · training

1987 - presentStefaniniA teacher started it in a spare room, and teaching is what won the first work.training

1989 - presentAccentureSpent years fighting to keep a name, lost, and it was the luckiest defeat in consulting.

1998 - presentAkamai TechnologiesAnswered a question Tim Berners-Lee posed about congestion, and the answer became most of how the web is delivered.vendor

2005 - presentTIVITA professional tennis player, a nightclub, and a company built by merging two others somebody already owned.data centre

2006 - presentAmazon Web ServicesThe cloud platform that defined the category.vendor · data centre

2009 - presentCloudflareBegan as a project asking where spam came from, and became infrastructure after users asked it to stop the spam instead.vendor

2021 - presentKyndrylThe largest technology spin-off by headcount, and independence was the point rather than the price.

All companies, in order