Diskeeper Corporation

Diskeeper Corporation

Type	Privately held company
Industry	Computer software
Founded	Glendale, California, U.S. (March 1, 1981 (1981-03-01))
Founder(s)	Craig Jensen
Headquarters	7590 N. Glenoaks Blvd,[1]Burbank, California, U.S.
Area served	Worldwide
Products	Diskeeper V-locity Undelete HyperFast HyperBoot Invisitasking
Website	www.Diskeeper.com

Diskeeper Corporation is the name of a software company based in Burbank, California, founded in 1981.^[2] 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.^[3] 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 the free open source JkDefrag, Raxco Software, O&O Software, and Symantec (via Speed Disk in its Norton Utilities and Norton Systemworks product families).

Products

The company sells and supports three software products: Diskeeper, the company's namesake, which prevents fragmentation before it happens; V-locity Virtual Machine, a platform disk optimizer designed to eliminate virtual disk I/O bottlenecks, maximize virtual server speeds, and free up Hard Drive space; and Undelete, which offers protection from and recovery of accidentally-deleted files.

The company also has several technologies such as HyperFast, a solid state drive optimizer, HyperBoot, a boot-time optimization technology, and InvisiTasking, which enables any process to run completely invisibly in the background.

Company history

The company was founded to serve VAX/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.^[4]

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) ISBN 9780446381475.

Scientology and Diskeeper

The corporation's CEO, Craig Jensen, is a member of the Church of Scientology and a member of the World Institute of Scientology Enterprises (WISE), an international membership organization whose members use the management technology of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. He has stated that his employees are schooled in Hubbard's management technology,^[5] with courses that include Effective Leadership, Executives and Ethics, Executive Basics and Management by Statistics.^[6]

Jensen attributes much of his success in business to the use of this technology, 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." ^[6]

In 1991, the company (back then 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^[7] (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.^[8] 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.^[5] 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,^[5] but bowed to pressure, allowing users the option to remove it.^[9]

On November 5, 2008, Diskeeper's former CIO, Alexander Godelman, and Automation Planning Officer Marc Le Shay jointly filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court for improper dismissal. In the complaint they allege that the company required training in Hubbard Management courses, which are based on the management technology of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, as a condition of employment, and that failure to comply was cause for their dismissal. The plaintiffs cited this as a violation of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act and requested an injunction against the delivery of the courses at Diskeeper.^[10] On January 27, 2009, Diskeeper filed a motion to strike the proposed injunction, citing, without conceding that Hubbard Management Technology is religious in nature, legal precedence of religious based practices in business being protected by the First Amendment.^[11] On February 18, 2009 the motion to strike was granted and the proposed injunction removed from the case. On June 24, 2009 the case was dismissed in its entirety.^[11]

References

1. ^ Diskeeper - Contact Information, Retrieved 2010-09-03.
2. ^ CEO Craig Jensen's web site
3. ^ Inc 500, Inc Magazine
4. ^ The Wall Street Transcript, Kathy Wattman
5. ^ ^{a b c} Yackley, Ayla Jean (2000-03-19). "Scientology in the Machine". Wired. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/35054. Retrieved 2008-12-07. 
6. ^ ^{a b} Prosperity Magazine, Craig Jensen
7. ^ Kelly, Nancy (4 February 1991). "Diskeeper User Stunned by Denial of Tech Support". Digital News. http://www.holysmoke.org/cos/dis-keeper.htm. Retrieved 24 May 2011. 
8. ^ Catholics distrust Scientology software
9. ^ "Scientologist software CEO lashes out against Germany". Reuters. CNN. 2000-11-06. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/11/06/germany.scientology.reut/. Retrieved 2008-12-07. 
10. ^ http://realitybasedcommunity.net/archive/2008/12/former_cio_sues.php
11. ^ ^{a b} "case number BC374449". http://www.lasuperiorcourt.org/civilcasesummary/index.asp. 

External links

• Official site
• Diskeeper Corporation European Site
• Diskeeper Blog
• Press Releases
• Microsoft article on Diskeeper