Diskeeper Corporation

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Diskeeper Corporation is the name of a software company based in Burbank, California, founded in 1981.[1] The company's current name is derived from its flagship product, Diskeeper, a file system defragmentation software package for Microsoft Windows and VAX. The company was formerly known as Executive Software International, Inc., and was founded on July 22, 1981 in Burbank, California by Craig Jensen.

The company has placed on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing companies in multiple years.[2] It was listed in Software Magazine's Top 100 Independent Software Companies in the World. Strategic partners include Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Microsoft Corp.

Its competitors in the defragmentation software market include Raxco Software, O&O Software, Symantec (via Speed Disk in its Norton Utilities and Norton Systemworks product families).

Contents

[edit] Products

The company sells and supports three software products. Diskeeper is a file system defragmentation program for Microsoft Windows systems, and the company's namesake. Sitekeeper aims at simplifying systems management for IT professionals. Undelete offers protection from and recovery of accidentally deleted files.

[edit] Company history

The company was founded to serve open VMS platforms. Because the product allowed companies to defragment without shutting their systems down, its original customer base was Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, government agencies, air traffic control, NASA and others with mission critical systems or systems that needed to be running 24/7. In the early 1990s, Diskeeper was the best-selling third party software product for Digital Equipment Corporation business computers.[citation needed] The company, then named Executive Software, placed on Software magazine’s list of the Top 100 Independent Software Companies.[citation needed] It also placed on the Inc 500 Fastest Growing Companies four years in a row.[citation needed]

In 1995 they were asked by Microsoft to develop products for their Windows NT system before it was released. One of Microsoft's original source code licensees, they broke into the Windows market with the resulting defrag product for Windows NT.[3]

[edit] Founder

While studying electrical engineering at Northwestern University in 1968, Craig Jensen took a night job as a computer operator to learn the computer. He went on to become a developer of advanced operating systems for early technology pioneer Applied Data Research, and in 1974 moved to Data General Corporation. He founded Executive Software in 1981 "with an early personal computer and a box of file folders in his kitchen in Hollywood".

He is the author of "The Craft of Computer Programming". (New York: Warner Books, 1985)

[edit] Scientology and Diskeeper

The corporation's CEO, Craig Jensen, is a member of the Church of Scientology and has stated that his employees are schooled in the principles of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard.[4], saying "I attribute [our] success directly to the management technology developed by L. Ron Hubbard. Simply put, I couldn't have done it without his help." [5] In 1991, Executive Software denied Ciba-Geigy technical support for the VAX version of Diskeeper after learning that Ciba-Geigy makes Ritalin, a drug opposed by scientologists.[6] (see also Scientology and psychiatry).

In 2000, the inclusion of the functionality of the Home version of Diskeeper in Microsoft Windows 2000's Disk Defragmenter was the subject of an investigation by the German Federal Office of Security in Information Technology (BSI), which looked into whether Diskeeper poses a security threat to users by spying on users. [7]. In Germany the law bars state and federal governments from doing business with a member of the Church of Scientology, a government policy that has been criticized by the US State Department in 1999 and in a 1998 UN Report as discriminatory and government-condoned harassment. [4] A Microsoft spokesman stated that Microsoft had extensively tested Diskeeper for security breaches and found the tool had no ability to store and transmit data on users, and there was no data transfer involved in its processes.[4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ CEO Craig Jensen's web site
  2. ^ Inc 500, Inc Magazine
  3. ^ The Wall Street Transcript, Kathy Wattman
  4. ^ a b c Wired article: Scientology in the Machine
  5. ^ Prosperity Magazine, Craig Jensen
  6. ^ Diskeeper User Stunned by Denial of Tech Support. holysmoke.org (2000-08-04).
  7. ^ Catholics distrust Scientology software

[edit] External links