Three days before Hurricane Irene arrived, Raj Jalan’s client learned that its safer data center had a roof problem. The facility with enough generator power to run for two days might take on water. Its backup site could last only two hours. To preserve a 100 percent uptime commitment, the team reached for a modest emergency plan: build another data center from scratch before the storm made landfall.
They found hardware, provisioned servers and storage, installed operating systems, and rebuilt applications. The cutover happened with two hours left on the clock. Then half the applications failed to come up. The machines they knew about were present. The missing ingredient was knowledge. Some applications had never been documented; other records had expired while the software kept changing.
It is a wonderfully enterprise sort of calamity. The generators worked. The people worked. The spreadsheet, serene and out of date, did not.
Jalan had already seen versions of the problem throughout his consulting career. He helped companies move their technology stacks to newer platforms, but the migration was rarely the first task. Before moving anything, he had to determine what existed, where it lived, and what depended on it. He has estimated that discovery and documentation consumed 60 to 70 percent of project time. The prelude kept swallowing the performance.
The hurricane cutover made the cost unusually vivid. Jalan wanted a record that would not wait for a human to remember it. It should discover the data center, update itself, and connect the application at the top to the physical and virtual machinery underneath. Unable to find a consolidated product spanning servers, networks, storage, and applications, he began writing one.
“I started to create Device42 to scratch my own itch.”Raj Jalan, on the company’s origin
The two-person loop
Jalan’s path to the problem had been practical rather than ceremonial. Public career histories place him in technical support at VSNL, customer support engineering at Wipro, systems engineering at Nutech Information Systems, and then more than a decade of consulting. He studied electronics and communications at Regional Engineering College, now NIT Jalandhar, and accumulated storage and virtualization certifications. Device42 came from years spent close to racks, migrations, and the awkward Monday after a weekend change.
He met Steve Shwartz after making a deliberate effort to build the network he did not have. Jalan attended startup weekends and local gatherings, sometimes traveling to New York and Boston. Shwartz became his co-founder. For the next two years, the pair wrote code and sold the result themselves.
That arrangement created a short and unforgiving information circuit. A customer objected; one of the builders heard it. A feature confused someone; the people selling it could revise the software. There was no department in which reality could be safely misplaced.
By late 2014, the customer list included large technology companies such as Cisco, Western Digital, and Fujitsu. Device42 had about 80 customers and roughly half a million dollars in recurring revenue. The pair had begun with an unlovely category of work and found buyers with expensive reasons to care.
Jalan was not new to starting. He has spoken about an earlier startup that failed after he concentrated too heavily on the technology. Device42 would be different. He learned online marketing. He treated sales and support as product disciplines. His later advice to technical founders was to release early enough to collect feedback, solve a problem already being felt, and remain close to customers. Perfection, in this telling, is occasionally a polite costume for hiding from the market.
A map that kept getting wider
The first non-beta Device42 release arrived in July 2011 as an integrated data-center infrastructure management and IP-address management product. Automated discovery followed. Application dependency mapping arrived in 2012, so an operator could see which applications ran on which servers and how devices related. Password management, power monitoring, mobile rack layouts, QR-code inventory, cloud discovery, service discovery, software licensing, and integrations accumulated release by release.
Meanwhile, the thing being mapped refused to sit still. Physical servers gave ground to virtualization. Cloud platforms arrived, followed by containers and Kubernetes. Older mainframes remained stubbornly important. Device42 expanded in both directions, presenting its breadth with the phrase “mainframes to Kubernetes.” The phrase is tidy. The underlying estate rarely is.
This widening map explains why Device42 could move beyond inventory. If a system knows that an application touches a service, which runs on a virtual machine, which consumes a host and storage, the same relationships can help plan migrations, diagnose incidents, prepare audits, and count licenses. Jalan described one customer that used the platform to compare purchased Microsoft licenses with actual usage and saved more than $200,000.
The company also connected application data to infrastructure power and carbon calculations. Instead of discussing only a data center’s total electricity bill, an organization could begin asking what a particular application contributed. Later, InsightsAI let users ask questions about configuration data in ordinary language, turning prompts into queries and reports. The interface changed; the premise remained clean data before clever answers.
The deal, then the work
Growth brought institutional recognition. Device42 appeared on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 in 2019 and 2020. Its customers spread across more than 70 countries. Private backing allowed the business to expand product development, leadership, and direct sales while maintaining a partner-led route to market.
On April 30, 2024, Freshworks signed an agreement to buy Device42 for an aggregate $230 million. The disclosed structure included $215 million in cash and a $15 million equity rollover by Jalan and affiliated holders. The transaction closed in June. Device42 became Freshworks’ first acquisition since the latter’s 2021 public listing.
Jalan’s public response concentrated on the team, co-founder Shwartz, advisers, investors, customers, and partners. In a later interview, he chose team development as his favorite memory: watching people attack difficult problems and grow while doing it. For a founder whose product records dependencies, the gratitude list was appropriately relational.
“Our goal is to drive automation within IT.”Raj Jalan, on Device42’s direction inside Freshworks
The acquisition did not retire the original problem. It enlarged its context. Device42 would sit closer to Freshworks’ service-management products, where accurate asset data can help operators predict the blast radius of a change, identify the cause of an incident, and automate the routine portions of remediation. Six months after the deal, Freshworks said Device42 had recorded its biggest quarter as a subsidiary.
In 2025, Jalan was writing publicly as SVP and GM at Device42 about operational resilience. His example was a European power outage that left many data centers running while connectivity failed around them. The lesson returned, neatly, to dependencies. A server can be healthy while the service it supports is useless. A backup can be present while the path to it is absent. Availability lives in the relationships.
The founder’s useful obsession
There is a temptation to tell founder stories backward from the transaction. The purchase price becomes destiny, and every earlier frustration obligingly points toward it. Jalan’s record is more useful read forward. He found a task that consumed an unreasonable share of his week. A storm revealed the stakes. He wrote code. He sought a co-founder. Together they sold before they had the luxury of separate departments. They followed infrastructure as it mutated.
The personal details that appear in public bios fit the pattern with almost comic precision. Jalan enjoys photography, a practice of noticing what the frame contains. He likes Settlers of Catan, a game of resources, roads, and dependencies. A company history even reports that he finds tracing cables relaxing. Somewhere, Oscar Wilde’s ghost has just asked for a labeling gun.
Device42’s story offers a plain piece of entrepreneurial theft: do not ignore the work before the work. Look at the repeated investigation, reconciliation, cleanup, or handoff that everyone treats as unavoidable. Measure how much time it consumes. Notice what fails when it is rushed. Then ask whether the record could update itself.
Jalan built around that question for more than a decade. The racks became clouds, the maps became queries, and the independent company became a Freshworks business. Yet the ambition still sounds like the consultant standing in front of an incomplete inventory: know what is there, know how it connects, and make the next change with fewer surprises.