MSA memories — the basics
When I became a software analyst in 1981, MSA (Management Science America) was generally regarded as the leading cross-industry financial software vendor. Its CEO was the colorful John Imlay, best known for a variety of showman stunts, such as bringing animals to sales meetings. (He also was known as “the man who killed the keypunch” from his hardware days, when he took a sledgehammer on stage to a keypunch machine in a presentation introducing key-to-disk technology.) The president was Bill Graves, the most agile 300 poundish guy I’ve ever seen off of a football field, and still the only person at whose house I’ve held hands during the saying of Grace.
MSA software ran only on IBM mainframes. There were a limited number of modules. I specifically recall an ad campaign for the “Big Eight,” because they had eight modules, and the “Big Eight” were the public accounting firms in those days. The eight included payroll, human resources, and six financial modules, which were general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, purchasing, fixed assets, and probably inventory. That’s all, versus the hundreds of modules successor companies have today.
MSA obviously modeled its “persona” on IBM. Indeed, the MSA logo consisted of the three letters in a font that consisted of thin parallel horizontal lines, exactly like IBM’s of that day did. Another major slogan was “People are the key,” with little key lapel pins given to five- and ten-year employees.
MSA struggled with the technological move from batch to real-time packages, and lost ground to M&D (McCormack & Dodge) over those struggles, but made it in time to survive. Eventually, MSA was acquired by Dun & Bradstreet, which had already bought M&D, and the two arch-rivals merged into D&B Software. The whole thing stagnated – most mainframe software was doing badly by the late 1980s — and eventually was spun out to Geac, which recently has been LBOed, and another reshuffling is now underway.
MSA eventually diversified into industry-specific vertical market software. In particular, it bought MRP vendor Comserv. It also bought Information Associates, which sold software mainly to universities and other non-profit organizations.
MSA actually had a large collection of the software industry’s notable executives and characters. The head of development was Dennis Vohs, who most people thought might be better suited to be a sales guy. The head of sales was Don House, who most people thought might be better suited to be a development guy. Vohs’ chief lieutenants included Larry Smart and Pat Tinley, both of whom went on to be software company CEOs. Vohs, Tinley, and Joe Southworth (perhaps MSA’s brightest development exec) went on to run Ross Systems. Doug MacIntyre, later CEO of a couple of companies, was MSA’s first VP of marketing. Fran Tarkenton, the ex-football player, was allegedly an exec. So far as I could tell, this amounted mainly to their conference room being called “Fran Tarkenton’s office,” with some of his trophies kept there. Apparently, people liked being in Fran Tarkenton’s office, and this helped sales. Tarkenton later went on to found CASE vendor Tarkenton Software, which merged into James Martin’s pet CASE company Knowledgeware. MSA’s obligatory bankruptcy staving-off story is John Arnold (later Northeast region sales chief) making a sale that was contingent on a financial stability reference, then hanging out in a phone booth to take a call and fake the reference himself. Well, actually the early days of the company were a mess, which is why Imlay was brought in to fix it, but that’s so far back in the late 60s and/or early 70s that I never really knew the details. But at one time MSA stood for “Management Science Atlanta.”
The executive team Imlay replaced included Jim Edenfield and Tom Newberry, who went on to found American Software. Other notable ex-MSAers include Rick Page and other principals of his sales training company. And MSA also owned Peachtree Software for a while, which was a leading microcomputer accounting software vendor in its day.
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[...] MSA (Management Science America). This section got so long I’m breaking it out as a separate post just about MSA. [...]
Dear sir,
I am trying to track down a fellow who used to work for MSA
and then started with Cullinet. He was the Regional Sales Manager
for Cullinet in the late 80’s and went on to Data Cable from there.
We would like to make contact with him if at all possible. His name
was Christopher R. Malcolm. His wife was Charlotte, and they lived
in Europe for a while when he was with the company. If you have some
info please let me know. It involves some family he is unaware of
and would like to find him.
I enjoyed this brief write up, but would tell the story much differently. I was there in what I think of as the golden era of 1978-1988. What made MSA work then was that Imlay made the company right for the time. It was a time, when service and sales prowess could make a software company successful. At that time, we had all the tools to be the leader. There was no great emphasis on development because the competitive landscape did not demand it. It did demand great selling and great support and that is what we delivered. By the late 80s companies like Oracle and SAP (I worked for both later) made technology the key. But in the golden era, “people were the key”. This was the highlight of my career and the best times of my life. I have thanked John Imlay for what he did for me, other and the customer. He was and is a true leader.
Hmm. I’m not sure I can accept the claim that technology had fundamentally different levels of importance at different points in time.
Xerox Computer Services was a $100 million enterprise, with sales training so good that a lot of the other companies’ sales folks got their starts there. Yet it fizzled. If MSA had more thoroughly flubbed the move from batch to real time, it would have gone away years earlier. And so on.
Obviously, platform technology was much less of an issue in the character-based, pre-relational era than it was later on. A larger fraction of app vendors died from the switch to client-server/RDBMS than died in any platform shift before or after. But I think you overstated the case by far.
Or am I missing the gist of what you said?
But no matter what, thanks for posting!! I want to collect as many thoughts and impressions at this site as I can. There’s a lot of history that shouldn’t be lost.
CAM
Hi Gary - I also enjoyed the article here. I got here by
searching for John Imlay as I was telling folks I work with about what
a great place MSA was to work. One correction that I would make was that
we didn’t get pins after five or ten years but shortly after we joined the
company. It made you feel like part of a valuable group right away. I
feel John was a pioneer in how to treat people who work for you. When Microsoft
first started and some of the silicon valley start ups tried a similar
approach. Now with overseas outsourcing and constant reductions in force
people have been lost in the shuffle. I remember my time working for MSA
very fondly as well. Diane
Hi Diane!
I thought you got nicer pins — silver, gold, whatever — after longer tenure.
Best,
CAM
I’m sure it’s a real long shot, but several of the posters seem likely to have great knowledge about MSA. I am desperately trying to find some manuals/information regarding how to control security to the MSA Accounts Payable package (screens smm –> sem). Is there still such documentation/information available out there? Would it be the “Data Processing Guide”? I have the “Operator’s Guide”, but it doesn’t really discuss security. I would really appreciate any help. Thank you.
I started my software career in MSA back in 1981 in the UK. A couple of things
about John Imaly. I remember a HR Director at a Imlay Lunch in London saying
“John how do balance managing MSA and speaking around the world?”, John’s
response was “Look around the room you will see a number of my team here, I am leading from the front and
pulling my company with me, have you ever tried to push a rope?”
With regard to the key on your first day MSA gave you a silver key from Tiffanys, and your spouse,
and it was upgraded to gold after 5 years, after 10 diamonds were added to the ladies brooch . In the UK we still have reunions, the next is planed for early November, they are named
‘The Broken Key Club’ and we can still get 40+ ex MSA employees and I am not sure that any other software company of that era can boast the same.
Like most people I have fond memories of my 8 years at MSA and when you look
around the software industry today many of the leaders are still influency these new technologies
I worked at MSA (incidentally, it was Management Science America - not Atlanta) as a very young, entry level administrative support staff member in the early to mid-eighties. I, too, loved working there and maintain contact with a few of my former co-workers. I remember the company as an action-packed, moving and shaking leader in the software industry that was just so incredibly exciting to be a part of.
John Imlay was larger than life and Bill Graves was larger than that. The collective talent and brilliance of the upper management team was amazing to watch and learn from.
Hi, Rebecca!
About that name thing — I stand by my story. The switch from “Atlanta” to “America” was long before I covered the company or you worked there. If I had to guess, it was somewhere in the 1971-3 timeframe.
My name is Ed O’Neill and i am proud to have been a small part of MSA in the early ’80s. John Imlay, Larry Smart were inovator then and the fact the “company” landed w/detriment. That is a story i dont have time for now. What i want to do is find my old fthje Omni and looking friends Steve Carter, Chris Malcolm, Danny Abadin, Bob Layson. It has been 25 years and i am coming down for the Final Four, staying at the Omni.
Ed, Steve Carter is at a company in Atlanta named North Highland Consulting. He’s
been there several years and reachable. See this site above or here: http://www.northhighland.com/locations/Atlanta.html.
Kevin Ashworth
http://www.northhighland.com/locations/Atlanta.html.
I too worked at MSA during the glory days, through the merger with M&D, and the buyout by Geac, overall
a total of 15 years. Things started going downhill when Imlay sold out and left the company. When he left
the focus changed from the employees to the business.
Looking back, and having worked as a consultant in numerous IT shops since then, the
thing that made MSA successful was they truly practiced what they preached with the phrase “People are the
key”. They hired smart agressive people and rewarded them for their hard work and effort.
People would come into work at all hours of the day and night and enjoy it. MSA trained their employees and
taught them the proper way to design and build software. That produced results. It wasn’t perfect,
but I truly believe if more companies treated their IT staff the way MSA treated their employees,
there would be a lot more happy IT people in Atlanta. MSA was the Google of the 80’s.
Actually, Mike, and this doesn’t at all contradict what you said, MSA had a big emphasis on stealing employees from firms that had good entry-level training themselves. Developers tended to come from EDS. (Including Bill Graves himself?) Salesmen tended to be former ADP sales managers.
A small correction, Curt. MSA didn’t steal employees from EDS…they stole EDS’ entire training curriculum instead. In the early to mid-1980s, they had something called the “Career Development Program” (CDP) which recruited heavily from colleges. It was essentially modeled after the EDS “boot camp” to the point where new hires into the CDP program had userids that were prefixed with “EDS”.
They went from having one CDP class per year, to two a year, and rapidly ramped up to almost bimonthly class starts. 10 to 20 neophyte programmers in each class. Many of the CDP grads were fanatically loyal to the company: I can name a half dozen or so CDP graduates from the 1980s still working for the latest version of MSA (MSA –> Dun and Bradstreet —> Geac —> Extensity —> Infor Global Solutions). They’ve all been with the company for 20+ years now and have never worked anywhere else. You don’t see that kind of loyalty to a corporation in America nowadays, especially in the IT field!
MSA truly had the “best and the brightest” throughout the 1980s. It was a young, hard working, hard partying camraderie. The yearly “Kick off” meetings were the highlight of the year, often held at Atlanta’s Fox Theater where no expense was spared.
Oh, and that last module you referenced in your initial post wasn’t “inventory”, it was the late unlamented “Forecasting and Modeling” module, the balkiest, most unforgiving piece of mainframe software ever developed.
Ah, the good old days. I was with MSA from 83-87 and left just prior to the D&B buyout. From what I heard I was glad I did. Several of my friends remained and said the company just wasn’t the same anymore.
To this day, I felt it was the best person oriented company I had ever worked for. As mentioned, the kick-off meeting/extravaganza, the Friday afternoon theme parties on the front lawn, softball teams, bowling teams, etc. Everyone worked hard and played hard. They definitely did their homework before hiring someone. Not only did they have to be technically proficient, they had to be “compatible” with others. I went through a 9 hour “interview” process, meeting with several different managers, HR, technical people, etc. They definitely treated their employee’s right. I remember the CDP program. They cranked out brainwashed MSA bots I think every 13 or 18 weeks, something like that. I don’t mean brainwashed in a bad way. They just took raw students, programmed in the MSA way, then let them loose with the rest of us. Seemed to work quite well.
One of my favorite times was going on the all expense paid trip to Hilton Head as a result of winning the Olympian Award…. and I do mean “All expense paid”. You got there, they handed you a card, and said you can basically go anywhere except buying gifts and it’s on the company. It was awesome.
I really wish I had kept in touch with my friends there, but It’s been a LONG TIME now. If your out there, drop me a line. Since this post probably monitors patterns in text, I’ll just say my email address is kcanniff at gmail.com.
I started at MSA and ended at DBS from 1989 - 1993.
I wish I had kept in touch with all the friends I made at the company, I still talk about my days at the company what a good time we had. It was truly the best company to work for and I am proud to have been apart of such a company, if only I could find another company like it.
What seems to be missed in all the preceding dialog, is the story of the “incredible shrinking software company”. This DBS merger, driven internally and secretively by Bain, turned MSA and M&D, these innovative and very competitive companies into dust.
On paper, a half billion dollar company, newly minted as Dung (pun intended) and Bradstreet Software was laid open to the US market entry of a German firm, SAP. M&D (we knew how to beat them), and likely, MSA were learning how to compete with this upstart entree, SAP.
Just at this moment, Bain (yes, the same sleeeeazy company Mitt Romney was part of) suggests the timing of this merger is brilliant. So M&D and MSA energies are diverted to merger while SAP usurps the US market at precisely the most inappropriate time.
End of story - MSA and M&D, hand the market to SAP and, as DBS, reach a combined market value of zero, thus, the incredible sucking sound of lost American enterprise in the name of greed.
M&D was a great company with marvelous, creative and innovative people. I loved working there. Same goes for MSA. We enjoyed competing with each other.
Bain turned it to dust.
Those were the days - I worked at MSA/Chicago in the late 80’s. It was a great place to work and what a learning experience. The travel was a lot of fun and the clients were the best. I have nothing but the best memories - Great friends, management, and company (until they sold out.)
I left soon after D&B took over and went to work for a small Software consulting firm in Western New York.
Dennis Vohs is my uncle. Yep.
How fun to read these posts. It was indeed an exciting place to work.
I was sales support in the Toronto, Canada office in the late 70’s and early
eighties. Remember User Groups? I went on the sales trips to Hilton Head
and Maui and User Group meetings in San Franciso and I think it was Portland,
Maine.
MSA people sure know how to have a good time. We said MSA stood for money, sex and
adventure.
I went to Cullinet, then called Cullinane. Like John Imlay, John Cullinane was
a giant.
I am now living in The Bahamas, a refugee from Canadian winters.
I never worked for MSA, but instead was the U.S. Vice President for a Japanese software services/marketing company (Fuyo Information Systems). Fuyo was the sales partner in Japan for Applied Data Research (ADR), based in Princeton, NJ (Roscoe,Vollie,Ideal,Datacom DB). John Imlay was close with the ADR President, Marty Goetz, and was a guest speaker at the big bashes that ADR held. John was known for his great jokes and sense of humor.
Those years during the 1980’s were truly the “Golden Age” of mainframe software. Lavish spending, international meetings in exotic locations, and pleasant work environments. Little did we realize that some dark clouds were on the horizon: Personal computers and the imminent recession of the 1990’s!!!
All good things come to an early end. Budgets tightened, good companies swallowed by larger greedy companies, cubicles instead of offices with windows, glass windows replaced by Microsoft Windows, slow decline of mainframe software, etc. ADR was bought by Computer Associates, and most ADR people were immediately laid off. Office environments became less friendly, benefits reduced, and more internal competition among employees at most companies. Loyalty became extinct, and mainframe software programmers were put on the “endangered species list.” The Golden Age is over, and now we can only reminisce.
Alan Dash (ex-Computer Sciences Corp. and Fuyo)
“No amount of planning will ever replace dumb luck and good salesmanship.”
That was the ‘key’ learning experience I gained from my tenure at MSA.
I now live on Maui and owe it all to the software industry experience of the 70’s and 80’s
What ever happened to Andy Walton? Beth Hunt - ru out there somewhere?
Aloha
I worked at MSA in the early ’80s, also in the Toronto office. I knew when I found this thread, there’d be someone I knew. Liz, how are you?
I kept in touch with a few MSA-ers - Brian Rooney, Dorothy (Bunny) Brandt (don’t know if she went back to her maiden name). Now not so much. Have lost touch with Gari (nee) Burrows snce the early ’90s.
It was absolutely the best place to work. Work hard/play hard was virtually defined by them. We’d do training classes ending on Fridays. After the sessions, we’d open the bar and employees & customer/students would sit around drinking till all hours.
My MSA years were from 1980 to 1990, based in the UK and Sweden.
The MSA approach was great - hire bright people, give them training and opportunity and, most importantly, give them more responsibility if they could handle it, irrespective of age, connections, sex etc.
What a shame the Bainite’s and other managed to turn 2 500 million dollar companies into one 300 million dollar comapny in the space of a year or 2. Still, our own fault for hiring the idiots in the first place.
Imlay was a true leader and front man. He also made sure he had a detail guy (Graves) close behind him and that is a lesson we all can learn.
I am still in touch with many ex-MSA’ers. The UK IT sector is littered with them. If only we had a secret handshake.
To this day Imlay is the only guy I purposefully lost to at golf!
The MSA division that I worked for was the folks that bought Arista Manufacturing Systems from Xerox Computer Services. They were far from happy-go-lucky.
They had no clue about production and inventory control software and essentially ruined the business.
They were acutely paranoid people that freaked out when E-Systems informed me that they would not be calling anymore until the recording device was removed from the phone system. They were recording the first 10 seconds of every phone call, looking for headhunters calling “their” people.
On the other hand, we had an MSA critter calling programmers all day, every day, trying to recruit then from other companies. I was told that he was a “recruiter”, not a “headhunter”.
If they found out that you were job hunting, you were immmediately fired.
Although they knew almost nothing about production and inventory control systems and even less about selling them, they made it very clear that if they wanted any help or information that they would ask.
Obviously, you cannot get creative with general ledger software, but manufacturing software is highly custom, and Arista had an entire department devoted to doing custom modifications for our customers. MSA decided that modifying a standard software product was stupid and that our customers should learn to adapt to the “standard” product. That angered the customer base and surprised the MSA folks.
Arista and Comserv were strong rivals and sold hard against each other for years. So, MSA bought Comserv. If you found a manufacturing software prospect, what would you sell him? Another really dopey move on their part.
Basically, MSA took a company that was the #1 provider of manufacturing software to Fortune 500 companies and tanked it on their watch.
I’m grateful to MSA because the showed me that I just didn’t have the DNA to tolerate stupid corporate bullshit any more, so I became an entrepreneur.
I agree that John Imlay was a really funny guy, but he wasn’t the force behind MSA then, just the face of it.
MSA was indeed the place to be in the 80’s. I enjoyed the opportunity that was presented to the employees. I had the opportunity to work with a lot of very good people. With all the CDP teaching I did in my spare time I learned far more than I taught. I continue to run into a lot of this group throughout the country and every MSA’er I meet again brightens my day.
The internal project “Screen Paint” was much like what SAP is. The idea of RIO’s(relational input output) and REM’s(Record Edit Modules) to handle editing and data integrity was ahead of its time. It was just a struggle to deliver it on time. I still remember installing it at HBO in NYC and Society National Bank before they pulled the plug. Somewhere I still have a VHS copy of the Mission Impossible tape made to celebrate the project.
Thanks to all the MSA’ers that have remind me of the incredible time we had at MSA. The Olympian celebrations, the annual banquet at the FOX and all the Interacts were some of the best times I have ever had. Thanks for the memories.
[...] nothing new here. Back in the 1980s, we used to joke that MSA made 10% of its annual revenue and 100% of its profits between the 32nd and 40th of [...]
I worked for M&D from 1987 until 1993, when I was laid off due to the “merger”. Actually, it was more of a takeover. Another factor, and a sizable one, in the demise of the combine D&B Software was the rivalry. It was an unfortunate choice to make MSA the controlling part. Most of the employees at MSA hated us. Instead of mergering to become a better company, the goal was to remove as much of M&D as possible. I was a senior-level programmer. I met with such terrible enmity when I demonstrated the Millennium platform, which they were eventually forced to use to build a new Customer Information Database, which M&D had just completed prior to the takeover, but was deemed completely useless.
The beginning of the end was the dismissal of Frank Dodge. Then, corporate management shifted from Framingham, MA, to Atlanta. MSA management kept pulling to Atlanta all of the Framingham functions, laying off mostly just M&Ders. It was a horrible time.
It seemed to me that the plan was to rid the world of everything M&D, not because the products or services were bad, but because it belonged to M&D. After the takeover, the atmosphere was one of hostility, sneakiness, and discontent. The company would probably still be around today in some form if the takeover had not happened, and Frank Dodge had remained in charge. I loved working at M&D. It was a great experience. What a shame…