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.

The company was originally started by John Cullinane and Larry English in 1968 as Cullinane Corporation. Their idea was to sell pre-packaged software to mainframe users, which was at that time a new concept in an era when enterprises only used internally developed applications or the software that came bundled with the hardware.

Actually, Applied Data Research got there first.

Rather than write its own products, Cullinane approached IT departments of major enterprises, particularly banks, to identify internally developed applications that he felt had potential to be productized and licensed to others. However, it proved difficult to sell these applications because most weren’t generalized and supportable systems. As a result, the company had to create its own utility packages. The first was a tape based source code management system, TMS, that competed with Pansophic’s (PanDA) and UCC’s products (UCC-1) in the space. TMS had the handicap of being “tape” and not “disk” based so it was never successful. The first breakthrough product was a report writer named Culprit, actually developed in-house by Gil Curtice and Anna Marie Thron, who had built the PHI payroll system. The product competed with Mark IV from Informatics but was perceived as a late entry in the report writer category.

I don’t know about those details one way or the other, actually.

The company struggled with financial stability until it branded a variation of Culprit, EDP Auditor, which was nothing more than a second name for the same product with a collection of predefined reports, but more importantly, special services aimed at the new discipline of EDP Auditing including the first EDP Auditors User, special support to give auditors independence of data processing which was very important to them. What was remarkable is that many corporations licensed essentially identical products. This led to serendipitous prosperity for Cullinane. As EDP auditors developed knowledge about business systems and computers, they could invariably produce reports faster than slower-moving internal IT departments. As a result, MIS departments would feel compelled to buy the Culprit version for their own use — to compete.

Also not unreasonable, and also before my time.

As the company prospered in the early ’70s it was approached by a consultant to BFGoodrich, Naomi O. Seligman, to consider taking over development of a Honeywell database management system called IDS that had been modified to operate on IBM and IBM compatible (RCA) mainframes. Actually IDS was originally developed by General Electric, and a Bill Curtis had supposedly gotten the rights to convert the system to run on IBM equipment.

First I heard of those individuals’ involvement.

The decision was made in early 1973 — primarily by John Cullinane, Jim Baker and Tom Muerer — to bet the company on the effort. Several executives joined the effort over the next three years, including Andrew Filipowski, Robert Goldman, Jon Nackerud, Ron McKinney, William Casey, Bob Davis, Bill Linn, and Ray Nawara.

Shortly after I became an analyst in 1981, the Cullinane folks bragged to me about their low turnover. John Maguire of Software AG promptly put me on the phone with a Cullinane ex-pat named Grant Osasa, who in turn told me of four VPs who left around the time of Cullinane’s IPO — Flip Filipowski, Jon Nackerud, Tom Muerer, and I think Bill Casey. Flip went on to found DBMS, Inc. with Ray Nawara, which led to a bitter breakup of their partnership. Of course, he bounced back amazingly successfully with Platinum Software. Flip’s version of his departure from Cullinane — not really contradicted by anything John Cullinane told me — is that he rose from being the first salesman to EVP, and was essentially running the company while John was out doing the IPO. When John returned to to more hands-on management, it was time for Flip to leave.

IDMS was to be a great bet for the company as it became the leader among many capable and popular products of the mainframe era. It competed with Cincom’s Total, Software AG’s ADABAS, Applied Data Research’s DATACOM/DB, Computer Corporation of America’s Model 204, MRI (later Intel’s) System 2000 and IBM’s IMS & DL/1.^[2]

Good list.

John Cullinane mentored a series of future entrepreneurs and software industry executives. One of the early executives was Andrew ‘Flip’ Filipowski, who later founded Platinum Technology, Inc.. Another was Robert Goldman who became the CEO of several public software companies including AICorp.

I don’t recall Bob Goldman having actually been CEO of natural language pioneer Artificial Intelligence Corporation, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. He definitely was CEO of Trinzic, the company formed by merging AICorp and expert-system shell vendor Aion. He also ran Object Design, which merged into Excelon in a financial play; Excelon was eventually bought by Progress Software.

Jon Nackerud was a co-founder of Relational Technology, Inc., formed to commercialize the Ingres database management system. Prior to becoming a public company in 1978 the company’s name was changed to Cullinane Database Systems, Inc. The company changed its name again to Cullinet Software in 1983, partly because John Cullinane wanted to distance his name from the personal connection to the business when he turned the company over to Bob Goldman, and also in a nod to the importance of computer networking. Joe McNay, a board member, was particularly important regarding the company’s IPO, the first ever in the software products industry. Of note is that Greylock purchased some shares from John Cullinane in 1977 less than a year before the company was to go public. It was to be the early foundation on which their Greylock’s software technology investment prowess rested. It was Greylock’s first investment in a software company.

Just to be clear, Joe McNay was at an outfit called Essex. He wasn’t affiliated with Greylock, where the key guy was Henry McCance.

Cullinane’s public offering was of note as it was the first successful offering of a pure software products company ever and the first software company Hambrecht & Quist ever took public. Cullinet was also the first software company to have a billion dollar valuation, and the first to do a Super Bowl ad. Specifically, Cullinane Database Systems, Inc., went public in 1978. On April 27, 1982 the company became the first computer software firm to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and later, the first to become a component stock of the S&P 500 Index.

There always are definitional debates, but those claims are not unrealistic. On the other hand — the way it was executed, that Super Bowl ad was not exactly anything to be proud of …

However, two quarters after the company went public IBM introduced its 4300 series. Its salesmen told all mutual clients that IDMS didn’t run on the 4300 series and that all IBM software of the future would be built with IMS/DL1. This caused a major problem as every IDMS customer went ballistic and every prospect went on hold. The company only had three months to solve this marketing problem, and technical problem, and remarkably, they did. Technically, it only required the modification of one instruction to get IDMS running on a 4300.

Obviously hyperbolic.

The solution to the company’s revenue problem turned out to be its new Integrated Data Dictionary. By moving very fast, the company used it to put IBM on the defensive and made its numbers, no small accomplishment. It then went from winning one out five competitions to winning four out five and this fueled its growth.

Beginning in 1979, in an attempt to promote less dependence on the database sales alone, Cullinane fully integrated financial and manufacturing applications with IDMS and decision support systems, another first. The company acquired financial applications from McCormick and Dodge, and completely rewrote them using IDMS. They also acquired an MRP system from Rath & Strong and completely rewrote it using IDMS. Thus, Cullinet had a suite of integrated financial and manufacturing systems, the first on-line database driven applications, and was a major competitor in what is now called ERP. The company had become a software power house. Eventually, it acquired a small Boston-based company called Computer Pictures whose graphics-focused decision support system had already been integrated with IDMS and was very successful. This team developed Goldengate, a Lotus Symphony-like PC product.

Lots of inaccuracies there. If memory serves, IDD was earlier than suggested in that passage, and the apps were later. Computer Pictures hadn’t sold much of anything before Cullinane acquired them.

Goldengate was a part of Cullinet’s flawed ICMS (Information Center Management System). The promise of ICMS was the ability to move data between the mainframe and PC desktop. Apple Computer was supposed to do the same for the Apple Lisa, but never delivered. ICMS was unveiled in 1983 as part of a splashy 20+ city closed circuit TV broadcast that focused on IDMS/R and fueled the market for Cullinet for the next two years, but it was obvious that it was getting harder to maintain its unbroken string of quarters with sales and earnings in excess of 50%.

IBM had introduced the term “Information Center.” The idea was pretty much the same as that of today’s data warehouses — keep two copies of the data, one for transactional update and one for analytics. But IDMS’ CODASYL/network/linked-list architecture wasn’t at all well-suited for analytics, so this wasn’t an area of strength.

That said, Steve Jobs did do a cool video for them in connection with the partnership, banging on a washing machine-sized disk drive to show his frustration at the difficulty of getting data out.

Goldengate was a mistake. The company should have developed PC based IDMS development tools, instead. Ironically, it had the technology under development which was later to become the foundation of PowerBuilder at Powersoft. In fairness many failures mark the landscape in that space and era including the infamous Ovation product introduced with great fanfare by Ovation Corporation in a race with Lotus’s Symphony suite attempting to create the early office suites now dominated by Microsoft Corp. Goldengate’s other flaw was that it was built pre-Windows which was expensive for Cullinet because of all the permutations and combinations of PC hardware and memory configurations.

That’s pretty confused. For example, Powerbuilder was an inherently Windows-based, client/server product. But it is true that the Powerbuilder team started out at Cullinet, before finding a home at Mitchell Kertzman’s company.

In 1983 John Cullinane, after 25 years in the software business, handed over the helm of Cullinet to Bob Goldman while he began to pursue other interests. Things continued to go well but eventually the company ran into trouble and Cullinane brought in a recent acquaintance, David Chapman, as CEO of the company. At the time, Cullinet had some $50,000,000 in cash reserves. David Chapman, a veteran IBM and Data General executive, started an aggressive campaign to acquire technology from other companies. The reason for bringing in Chapman was that the company had got hung up on the open architecture and relational issues. In other words, a company with an unparalleled record of outpositioning competition every two years, for sixteen years, including IBM, allowed itself to get outpositioned by IBM, and others, with the help of E. F. Codd and C.J. Date. This was the company’s fault, not theirs.

In 1986-87, David Chapman attempted to move the company to the more and more powerful minicomputers such as Digital Equipment Corporation’s VAX line of computers. In the process, Cullinet acquired some very questionable VAX companies but one had an outstanding relational DBMS but by then it was too late, the company’s $50 million nest egg had been burned.

In 1988, John Cullinane returned to Cullinet, fired David Chapman, and tried to salvage the company. By repositioning the company’s product line with a new product called Enterprise Generator, he solved the open architecture problem and the company was able to return to profitability by the fourth quarter. This made it possible to negotiate a deal with Charles Wang and Computer Associates.

In 1989, Charles bought the company for $330,000,000 in stock. It was a good deal for investors because the CA shares increased in value ten times.

Actually, Cullinet was already losing share to ADR (and others, but especially ADR) due to pre-relational product architecture issues. (Most of the competitors had inverted-list architectures, and these were more flexible than Cullinet’s network structure.) That said, Cullinet was still holding its own until IBM introduced DB2, and Computerworld ran Codd’s criteria for defining a relational DBMS. At that point, the bottom dropped out of all the independent mainframe DBMS vendors’ markets. In one quarter shortly before it was acquired, Cullinet got exactly two new-name accounts. I was told this by John Landry and Bob Weiler, who ran the company before it was acquired, after their little company Distribution Management Systems (DMS) was acquired by Cullinet.

• 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.

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.

So with no further ado, here some observations of and about Ingres through the years.

• Ingres was of course the first of several DBMS companies spun off from UC Berkeley’s INGRES research project, and one of several started with Mike Stonebraker’s involvement. I wrote about that history briefly in my now-defunct Computerworld blog.
• Ingres (then called RTI) and Oracle (then called RSI, for Relational Software Inc.) were of course arch-rivals. As a general rule, Ingres was first to market with new features such as a 4GL or a truly distributed DBMS. Oracle, however, was the first to market with the features customers most cared about, at a level of completeness they found acceptable. Eventually, when Sybase was a factor too, Ingres was always betwixt and between — everybody’s second choice, but not the first choice of enough buyers to keep on prospering. (Later on in the 1990s, Gupta took over the Ingres role in the low-end market — the product was broader than Powersoft, but who cared?)
• Ingres was eventually merged into ASK Computer Systems. While surely a distraction, that’s not what killed it. Each predecessor company had its own problems, and they pretty much stayed out of each other’s way, at least in product strategy. What killed them is that neither side of the business managed to stay fully competitive in product.
• Ingres’s fatal technological mistake was whiffing on parallelism. And it did so in the most painful of ways. Ingres had a joint development project going in the Portland, OR area with Sequent, to develop a parallelized version of their DBMS. They pulled out due to expense, and Informix stepped in. And that’s how Informix managed to be competitive with Oracle in parallel processing, while lack of competitiveness in that area is what doomed Sybase and Ingres. Ouch!!!
• A second Ingres failing probably wasn’t as big as I thought at the time. This was an inability to offer abstract datatypes, aka object/relational, aka UDBMS (where the “U” is for “universal”). I thought this feature would be hugely important, and my opinion on that score probably was a big part of influencing Informix to overpay for Illustra. But Microsoft has never had the feature, and it doesn’t seem to have suffered all that much in the marketplace for its lack.
• ASK was doing even worse on the product side than Ingres — it never came out with a decent GUI version of the product, although ASK did get a license to resell Baan’s code — and the whole sorry mess was eventually sold to CA. CA has a well-deserved reputation for slashing development costs and profiting from slowly-dying software products. But I watched this acqusition from the inside, and to this day I think they really wanted to make the product competitive. But there was one not-so-little problem …
• CA ran off all of Ingres’s engineers right after the acquisition. CA’s policy upon acquiring companies was requiring employees who wanted to keep their jobs to sign non-compete agreements. In Ingres’s case, however, that policy was a spectacular failure. Oracle, Informix, Sybase, and much of IBM’s DBMS development were all located in the Bay Area. Finding another local job for these guys (and gals) was EASY. Competitors went into a feeding frenzy hiring Ingres engineers, and there was essentially NOBODY left. In my judgment there was a reasonable chance CA could revitalize development with an aggressive investment strategy, but they ultimately blinked. And with very limited ongoing development, the product obviously faded quickly as a mainstream competitor.

I think I’ll go write about the rest of the story over in the DBMS2 blog.