Even today, a significant amount of marketing and sales is done at vendor-run seminars in medium-quality hotels. But in those days, before the internet and hence in particular before webinars, a huge fraction of all sales cycles passed through a physical seminar-attendance step. So if you could disrupt your competitors’ seminars, you could disrupt their whole sales cycles. So M&D and MSA salespeople did just that, routinely calling hotels to outright cancel competitors’ reservations and events. If I had to name offenders’ names, I’d start with Mary Kohler at McCormack & Dodge and Roe Henson at MSA, but I’m pretty sure the men were even “worse.”*

*Truth be told, I think the whole thing was pretty funny, or else I wouldn’t be sharing it. Further, I emphatically think Mary and Roe should be admired for succeeding in what was then an extremely male world.

That story has been confirmed multiple times, with minor variations (biggest disagreement = which side started doing it first). More dramatic stories are less confirmed. My favorite of those is MSA arranging for a McCormack & Dodge contract signing to be disrupted by the M&D salesman’s arrest for delinquent child support. (Ouch!) Other confirmed examples I can think of are tame by comparison, like the blow-up dolphins the MySQL folks decorated the Sun campus with after their acquisition closed.* E.g., sending trucks with hiring or marketing messages outside your competitors’ conferences or office buildings is not very imaginative, and actually happens in lots of industries.

*Sun apparently had a major tradition of MIT-style April Fool’s pranks, one of which featured Scott McNealy’s car being stranded in – or rather on – the middle of a pond. But that’s a little outside my purview.

But one I’ve always loved is the tradition of witty product code names. Some of my favorites were from the days of the Borland/Lotus spreadsheet competition, including:

• Conan, because Borland CEO Philippe Kahn prided himself on Borland being “barbarians”
• Crom, the god Conan prayed to (quite so – I’ve read the books)
• Buddha, because Borland wanted to assume “the Lotus position” (one of my favorite puns ever)

Another pair comes from when John Landry, then McCormack & Dodge’s R&D chief, was developing a proprietary programming language, which he planned both to use for in-house development and to expose to users for their own customizations. (I.e., it was a forerunner of SAP’s ABAP and PeopleSoft’s PeopleTools.) The first codename was GLOP (General Language for Ordinary People). That was eventually replaced by SLOB (Simple Language for Ordinary Bozos). To the best of my knowledge, those code names never made it into any actual product documentation.

I think I’ll stop there. I do have other stories of wise-assery I could add, but I think I’ll hold them back until I’m ready to take the time to wrap them in a bit of context …

Edit: Maybe I’ll add more here as I think of them.

• Larry Ellison, Mitchell Kertzman, and David Roux did a hilarious site spoofing the dotcom bubble. Unfortunately, it only persists in incomplete Internet Archive form, but that’s enough to show the key point.

• Most early packaged software companies were hybrids, offering both packaged products and professional services (including services unrelated to the packaged products).
• Applied Data Research, led by Martin “Marty” Goetz, is the clear innovator in third-party packaged software. Not only is ADR’s Autoflow the generally acknowledged first packaged software product from an independent company (”independent” as opposed to, say, IBM), but ADR was a leader in legal and political anti-trust action to gain market space to sell against IBM.
• If you use the term “application” narrowly — so that anything whose main function was to help manage IT shops and activities is “system software” rather than “application” — there’s no way Cullinane was an early leader. Think instead of American Software, MSA, McCormack & Dodge, or several specialists in regulated verticals such as banking and insurance. But if you use the term “application” loosely, ADR gets priority as noted above.
• The credit Cullinane usually gets for leading the way in software company success (e.g., first IPO of a product company) is absolutely justified.

Who was the original fictitious Rob Carpenter?

M & D (McCormack & Dodge). M & D was MSA’s archrival in mainframe financial software. They had various claims to product superiority, based on having “more CPAs on staff” than MSA and also on being first to market with realtime applications. However, M  & D sold out early to Dun & Bradstreet, and lost its edge as key managers left.

M & D seems to have been a lively company. Many stories about drugs or sex emerged (I don’t actually recall any drugs-and-sex-combined stories, for whatever reasons). Key players included: Frank Dodge, a former schoolteacher who founded another not terribly successful apps company (The Dodge Group) afterwards; Jim McCormack, who happily retired from software into real estate, but sadly died a few years later; development chief John Landry, who’s been a prominent industry figure ever since, and sales/marketing chief Bob Weiler, ditto. Landry and Weiler went together to Distribution Management Systems, Cullinet (after it bought DMS), and Lotus, before going their separate ways.

M & D’s venture into manufacturing applications seemed later and more half-hearted than Comserv’s or Cullinet’s. But they eventually did wind up with a version of (and may even have bought control of) the Rath & Strong technology.

Cullinet. Cullinet was better known as a DBMS vendor. But in a precursor of what became the Oracle strategy, it pursued financial and manufacturing applications as well. The financial applications were originally licensed from M & D. The manufacturing apps were originally licensed from Rath & Strong, as were M & D’s.

One negative consequence was that the industry teamed up against Cullinet. For example, ADR in DBMS and MSA in apps formed a close marketing relationship. To general industry agreement at the time, I dubbed this the ABC (Anybody But Cullinet) strategy.

Cincom. DBMS vendor Cincom pursued a Cullinet-like apps strategy. Not many people cared.

J. D. Edwards. If I recall correctly, JDE’s main platform was the IBM System 38, the predecessor to the AS/400. Anyhow, JDE was a Denver-based financial software company. Its main claim to fame, other than the platform that it ran on, was a superb order entry system. Rob Kelley, referring to his days at Arthur Andersen, once told me that Andersen’s order entry system had had 45,000 lines of code, JDE’s had had 5,000 lines, and JDE’s had been better.

SAP. I’ve already written up what I recall about SAP in the 1980s.

This initial list leaves a lot of companies out, of course. Other than the MRP companies — ASK, NCA, XCS, and so on — the biggest omission may be Walker Interactive. But also missing are Global Software, Data Design, a whole lot of human resources specialists and so on.

Also missing are other vertical market groups, most notably in banking software, which is where general ledger products (the first major financial application) first succeeded in a big way.

I hope to get around to writing about these subjects before too long.

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.

I first heard of SAP in the 1980s. It was a smaller company than the then-leading mainframe application software vendors. Peter Zencke told me earlier this week that when he joined in 1983, the company had around 100 employees. From memory about MSA’s figures, I’d guess SAP’s revenue was somewhere in the $150-250,000 range. Also from memory, I’d guess that MSA and M&D (McCormack & Dodge) were meaningfully bigger than SAP at that time. I also think that SAP combined financial and manufacturing applications earlier than the other mainframe vendors did, and hence probably got more revenue per client from a small number of clients. (MSA didn’t get into manufacturing apps until they bought Comserv, which if I recall correctly never broke the $20 million revenue mark on its own.)

SAP was almost unique among significant software vendors in being based outside the US, Software AG being the other obvious big example. There was no Business Objects then, of course. I don’t think that any of the UK companies that eventually made a modest impact — MicroFocus, LBMS, and much more recently Autonomy — were even active then. So it was pretty much off of people’s radar screens …

Indeed, at one point in the early 1990s I wrote to the effect of “Hey! There really are some important European software companies!” And spurred by that, my clients at Fidelity Investments invested in SAP. Too bad they were perennially stingy about compensation for good investment ideas …

Anyhow, the word on SAP from its competitors was that in the US at least, SAP focused tremendous sales effort on a small number of prospects, and in those accounts they were very hard to beat. These accounts seemed to be centered on the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, presumably because those industries were particularly strong in SAP’s home German market. Not coincidentally, SAP’s US operations were headquartered in Pennsylvania, near the New Jersey stronghold of those industries in the US. It’s natural to conjecture that SAP had superior functionality for process manufacturing industries, something that was pretty primitive in those days, but I don’t recall any direct mentions of this.

I learned more in the early 1990s when Jeremy Coote called up and introduced himself. He was the CFO of SAP’s US operations (he later went on to a big job at Siebel). It turned out that SAP had some contractual reason only to invest limited resources in the US. But that would change soon; one of the directors was coming over to run things in the US personally; and so on. Obviously, they lived up to that much more than I could possibly have envisioned at the time.

The story of how SAP’s rise dovetailed with the growth of the public accounting firms’ consulting practices is better known; I’ll leave the telling of that to another time.