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.
"
(Via Software
Memories.)