Meet Sachin 'Sunny' Gupta, the man behind the $4.6 billion IBM deal

Gupta, a serial entreprenuer, had launched and sold three companies before he co-founded Apptio in 2007.

Chandigarh-born Sachin "Sunny" Gupta was always intrigued by the world of entrepreneurs as it allowed one to control their own destiny. Gupta followed his curiosity and founded spend-management platform Apptio in Seattle in 2007 but little did he know that it would allow him to strike a mega deal with IBM, the company where he started his career.

On Monday (June 26), IBM announced that it will acquire Apptio from Vista Equity Partners for $4.6 billion in cash in the latest deal to bolster its capabilities in cloud and automation.

Apptio, which was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in a $2 billion deal in 2019, helps companies manage and understand their spending on cloud services and offers functionalities such as IT budgeting, forecasting and financial analyses.

In an interview to The New York Times, Gupta said that growing up he used to often hear people say that 'in the US, you can start from nothing and create something'. My dad couldn’t afford my education in the US, so he said, "All I can give you is $2,000 and a plane ticket," he recollected, according to a report by The Economic Times. That was the start of his journey as an entrepreneur.

Gupta got only a partial scholarship for pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science at the University of South Carolina and he worked as a mover and cleaned dishes to make ends meet. He later earned a full scholarship through his hard work.

The son of a bureaucrat landed his first job as a software developer at IBM. After he switched to another company the entrepreneurial itch within him grew substantially.

"I said to myself, "This is going too slow." It was not even really about the money. It was just too slow. I felt like I was more talented than the pace at which my career was moving," he told The New York Times. And then he decided to start his own company.

Gupta became a serial entrepreneur in the next few years. He launched his first startup, Vigor Technology, in 1996, and sold it in 1998. The second company that he started in 2005 was again acquired. He built and sold another company before he co-founded Apptio in 2007.

He co-founded Apptio in 2007 with a customer obsession that led him to uncover significant untapped demand for pioneering a new software category (Technology Business Management or TBM) – an analytics-based business management system for CIOs. Gupta led Apptio to an Initial Public Offering in September 2016 as well as its acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in January 2019 for $1.94 billion. After going private with Vista, he led four acquisitions, significantly expanded the customer base, forayed into international markets and increased innovation, according to the company's website.

Sunny was recognised as the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of The Year 2012, for Pacific Northwest. He was also named in the prestigious Puget Sound Business Journal Power 100 list for 2020 and 2021.