Boole & Babbage

» see boole.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The merger took effect on 30 March 1999. BMC Software's own 8-K puts it in the flat language these things get recorded in: effective that day, a wholly owned subsidiary of BMC was merged with and into Boole and Babbage, Inc. The stockholders had approved it at a special meeting the same morning. The press release went out under the headline that BMC had completed the merger, and a company that had been selling software since 1967 stopped being a company.

It started in Palo Alto with three employees under a different name. Ken Kolence and David Kaitch called it K & K Associates, and the product was measurement: a way for a data center to find out what its IBM mainframe was actually spending its time on, which in the 1960s was close to unknowable from the outside. Franklin Johnson, the venture investor everyone called Pitch, put money in and joined the board, where the 1998 annual report still lists him as a director since 1967 and chairman since 1971. The company was renamed for George Boole and Charles Babbage, two mathematicians who had been dead for a century and were in no position to object.

The shares went public on 3 February 1984 on NASDAQ under the ticker BOOL. By the fiscal year that ended on 30 September 1998, the last full one it ever reported, the company had about 930 employees, 555 of them in the United States, and ran its headquarters out of 3131 Zanker Road in San Jose. Its own count of its installed base was more than 12,500 products at more than 6,000 sites worldwide. Revenue for that year came to roughly $218 million. No single customer accounted for a tenth of it, which is what a product sold into machine rooms everywhere looks like on a balance sheet.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the thirty-first of october ~

The agreement was signed on 31 October 1998 and the announcement followed on 2 November. The terms were 0.675 of a BMC share for each Boole share, about 19.1 million BMC shares in total, accounted for as a pooling of interests. Press coverage at the time valued it at around $900 million against BMC's closing price of 30 October. The figure of a billion dollars that circulates now is a rounding nobody's filing supports.

What BMC said it had bought was scale. After the close it described itself as a company of about 4,400 people in 26 countries with something like $1.2 billion of combined revenue over the preceding twelve months. Boole's products went into that line and came out with BMC's name on them. Enterprise software gets absorbed this way, without anybody outside the purchase order noticing.

~ what it actually sold ~

Performance measurement is a dull phrase for a product that existed because mainframe time was the most expensive thing a large company bought. If a bank's machine was idle for a fraction of every hour, or spending its cycles waiting on a disk instead of working, that was money, and until somebody instrumented it nobody could prove where it went. Boole & Babbage sold the instruments, and later the consoles that watched the whole room: MainView, and Command/Post before it.

One claim follows this company around that the dates will not support: that no software house had gone public before it. Boole listed in 1984, and Cullinane had been trading for years by then. The true version is less quotable. It was selling a software product on its own, for money, in a decade when software was mostly something that arrived free in a box with the hardware.

~ the distance ~

I have never stood in front of a mainframe console. The machines this company existed to watch sat in bank basements and government ministries, bought by people whose job title included the word operations. The nearest an ordinary person got to one was a bank statement printed in a typeface somebody else had chosen. There was no consumer edge to it at any point in 32 years. The distance here is a floor of a building I have never been on, and my dial-up ISP in Ankara makes no difference to it either way.

boole.com resolves today. It belongs to a British consultancy that builds queueing models and has nothing whatever to do with the company buried here.

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