Disputed history of the term Business Intelligence
According to Computerworld, Howard Dresner coined the term business intelligence in 1989 at Gartner Group. That seems odd, since a week before that story appeared Howard told me and a couple of other folks that he and his colleagues coined the term, not when he worked at Gartner, but previously when he worked at DEC.
Either way, it’s been established that Howard and his colleagues were several decades late; the term was first coined no later than the late 1950s. Whether anybody much used it in the interim is, of course, quite a different matter: I recall terms like decision support and executive information systems (EIS), but not “business intelligence” before the time frame in which Howard claims to have (re)introduced it.
By the way — that “Monash BI” link is NOT to anything I wrote. It’s something associated with Monash University, on the other side of the planet.
| Categories: Analytics | 5 Comments |
Setting the record straight
Computerworld got software industry history a bit wrong by implying that John Cullinane innovated packaged software (specifically, they said “packaged application”). Here’s what really happened, as I learned soon after becoming an analyst in the early 1980s:
- 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.
| Categories: Application software, Applied Data Research, Cullinet, IBM, McCormack & Dodge, MSA, Pre-relational era, System software | 7 Comments |
Tom Evslin on Microsoft
Since I’m not finding the time to post my own stuff here, let me at least link to other people’s.
Tom Evslin has several posts about meetings with Microsoft and so on. It all jibes with my perceptions of the company in the same era.
| Categories: Microcomputer software, Microsoft | Leave a Comment |
How soon they forget
I was just writing about LinkedIn again, and was reminded that nobody ever answered the trivia question based on this post:
Who was the original fictitious Rob Carpenter?
| Categories: Fun stuff, MSA | 7 Comments |
A humorous take on programming history
It’s oh-so-retro in these days of YouTube pyrotechnics, but I love this.
| Categories: Fun stuff | Leave a Comment |
Why Michael Stonebraker matters
My deal when I blogged at Computerworld was that I could reuse my stuff if I linked to them. Below is the meat of a post about Michael Stonebraker I made in May, 2005.
Edit: There’s now a whole Michael Stonebraker section on DBMS2.
I’m probably going to mention Mike Stonebraker’s name in one or more other blog entries soon, and not necessarily in the context of always agreeing with him. So I’d like to take a moment to point out that he’s the greatest living contributor to database technology, and this may even have been true when Dr. E. F. “Ted” Codd was still alive.
Along with Eugene Wong and grad student Jerry Held, Mike founded and ran the INGRES research project at UC Berkely, which directly spun off the company later known as Ingres, Oracle’s chief direct competitor in its early years. One of his key lieutenants (and successors) was Bob Epstein, who designed Sybase‘s database technology, which is also the core of Microsoft‘s DBMS. Jerry Held went on to run much of development at Tandem, starting with Non-Stop SQL, the first industrial-strength relational DBMS, and later ran the database products for Oracle.
Mike himself went on with the POSTGRES project, which introduced an approach to user defined functions and abstract data types that swept the DBMS industry. POSTGRES begat Illustra, which was acquired by and became integral to the products of Informix, where Mike also served as CTO. Informix’s database technology was of course later taken over by IBM.
That’s quite a track record, although there are also a couple of more or less failed startups along the way. …
The IEEE awarded Mike its most recent John von Neumann medal, which seems to be a big deal. Here’s the citation.
Related link:
- Official-looking Ingres Project history
| Categories: Database management systems, Informix, Ingres, System software | 6 Comments |
(Crosspost) New ways to read our research!
We’ve finally redesigned the Monash Information Services website. In particular, we’ve created two great new ways to read our research. First, there’s a new, Google-based integrated search engine. (And it really works well, the one glitch being that it brings back feeds and pages interchangeably. Try it out!) Also – and I really encourage you all to subscribe to this — there’s a new integrated research feed.
The reason you should care about these is in both cases the same: Our research is actually spread across multiple sites and feeds. I write about Google both in the Monash Report and on Text Technologies. I write about enterprise text management both on Text Technologies and on DBMS2. I write about computing appliances both on DBMS2 and in the Monash Report. I write about data mining in all three places. And now that there’s an integrated, industry history relevant to any of the other subject areas may find its way onto Software Memories. Your view of my views simply isn’t complete unless you have access to all of those sites.
| Categories: About this blog | Leave a Comment |
Prerelational financial app software vendors 1 — a quick overview
MSA (Management Science America). This section got so long I’m breaking it out as a separate post just about MSA.
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.
| Categories: Application software, McCormack & Dodge, MSA, Pre-relational era, SAP | 5 Comments |
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. Read more
| Categories: Application software, McCormack & Dodge, MSA, Pre-relational era | 384 Comments |
Prerelational DBMS vendors — a quick overview
IBM. With BOMP and D-BOMP, IBM was probably the first company to commercialize precursors to DBMS. (BOMP stood for Bill Of Materials Planning, foreshadowing the hierarchical architecture of IMS.) Out of those grew DL/1 and IMS, IBM’s flagship hierarchical DBMS, and the world’s first dominant DBMS product(s). Of course, IBM also innovated relational DBMS, via the research of E. F. “Ted” Codd, then some prototype products, and eventual the mainframe version of DB2. To this day DB2 on the mainframe remains one of the world’s major DBMS, as does the separate but related product of DB2 for “open systems.”
Cincom. In the 1970s, Cincom was probably the most successful independent software product company. Its flagship product was Total, a shallow-network DBMS that was a little more general than the strictly hierarchical IMS. What’s more, Total ran on almost any brand of computer hardware. Cincom remains independent and privately held to this day.
Cullinane/Cullinet. Charlie Bachman innovated a true network DBMS at Honeywell, but it didn’t turn into a serious product at that time. B. F. Goodrich, however, ran a version. This is what John Cullinane’s company bought and turned into IDMS, which at least on the mainframe supplanted Total as the technical, mind share, and probably revenue market leader. Cullinet (as it was then called) ran into technical difficulties, however, losing ground to the more flexible index-based DBMS. It was eventually sold to Computer Associates.
A lot of software industry leaders cut their teeth at Cullinet, notably Andrew “Flip” Filipowski, later the colorful founder of Platinum. Other alumni include Renato “Ron” Zambonini, Dave Litwack, Dave Ireland, and the original PowerBuilder development team. John Landry and Bob Weiler ran the firm for a while toward the end, but they don’t really count; rather, they’re the most prominent alumni of applications pioneer McCormack & Dodge.
Note: Index-based is a term I used in and probably coined for my first report in 1982, comprising both inverted-list and relational RDBMS, as opposed to the link(ed)-list hierarchical and network products such as IMS, Total, and IDBMS. The companies that beat Cullinet were long-time rival Software AG, and then especially Applied Data Research; then all three of those independents were blown out by IBM’s DB2. And then the whole mainframe DBMS business was in turn obsoleted by the rise of UNIX … but I’m getting ahead of my story.
Software AG. Like Cincom, Germany-based Software AG is a 1970s DBMS pioneer that has always remained independent and privately held. Sort of. Twice, Software AG of North America was spun off as a separate, eventually public company. Software AG’s flagship DBMS was the inverted list product ADABAS. SAP’s MaxDB was also owned by Software AG for a while (and seemingly by every other significant German computer company as well – or more precisely, by Nixdorf where it was developed, and by Siemens after it bought Nixdorf).
I actually visited Software AG in Darmstadt once. Founder Peter Schnell and key techie Peter Page were both gracious hosts. Schnell was proud of their new building, and especially of the hexagon-based wooden dual desks he’d personally designed. General analytic rule – when the CEO is focused on the décor, this is not a good sign for the company’s near-term prospects. (I call this having an “edifice complex.”)
Applied Data Research (ADR). ADR is often credited as being the first independent software company, having introduced products in the late 1960s and prevailed in antitrust struggles against IBM to allow the business to survive. Basically, it sold programmer productivity tools. This led it to acquire Datacom/DB, an inverted-list DBMS developed in the Dallas area. In the early 1980s, Datacom/DB began to boom, and was on a track to surpass both IDMS and ADABAS in market share until DB2 showed up and blew them all away. ADR was particularly aided by its fourth-generation language (4GL) IDEAL, which was an excellent product notwithstanding the famous State of New Jersey fiasco. (As John Landry said to me about that one, “4GLs are powerful tools. In particular, they allow you to write bad programs really quickly.”)
ADR was an underappreciated powerhouse, boasting all of the Fortune 100 as customers way back in the early 1980s (yes, even archrival IBM). When the DBMS business stalled, however, ADR was quickly sold — first to Ameritech (the Illinois-based Baby Bell company), and soon thereafter to Computer Associates.
Computer Corporation of America (CCA). CCA’s DBMS Model 204 may have been the best of the prerelational products, boasting an inverted-list architecture akin to that of ADABAS and Datacom/DB. The company was also interesting in that it was first and foremost a government contract research shop, and hence did all sorts of interesting prototype work that sadly never got commercialized. In about 1983 it became that the company wasn’t going anywhere, and it put itself up for sale.
I was personally instrumental in that decision. Our investment banker pretended he was considering taking CCA public. CCA President Jim Rothnie showed us revenue projections. I asked how he had gotten them. He replied that he had taken the market size projection 5 years out, assumed 10%, and drawn a “plausible curve.” However, I quickly got Socratic with him. “How many salesmen do you have?” “How much revenue does the average experienced salesman produce?” “How many experienced salesmen do you expect to have next year?” “How high do you think their average productivity can grow?” “Let us multiply.” (Yes, I really said that. I can be a jerk. And anyway Jim was the sort of analytic guy one can say that to without giving serious offense.)
CCA was sold to a Canadian insurance company whose name I’ve now forgotten. Eventually, it was spun back out (perhaps after some intermediate changes of ownership), and resurfaced as primarily a data integration company, called Praxis.
In the real old days (mid 1970s, perhaps), Model 204 was resold by Informatics (later Informatics General, later the hostile takeover that became the guts of Sterling Software, which like so many other companies was eventually absorbed into Computer Associates). I know this because Richard Currier used to sell the product when he worked at Informatics. That probably makes Richard and me about the only two people who still remember the fact.
Hmm. I forgot to mention Intel’s System 2000. Well, truth be told it was a dying product even back when I first became an analyst in 1981, and I recall nothing about it, except Gene Lowenthal’s observation that Intel had had trouble selling chips and DBMS through the same salesforce. I think Al Sisto, who I probably met when he was head of sales at RTI (Relational Technology, Inc. — later called Ingres), came out of that business, but I’m not 100% sure. I remember Pete Tierney from that RTI management team more clearly anyway, although that’s mainly because we stayed in touch at subsequent companies over the years.