Cullinet

~ the last words ~

Everything i have ever been paid to write has been software sold as a product to somebody who did not commission it. That was a proposition somebody had to argue for, and in 1968 John Cullinane and Larry English started a company in Arlington, Massachusetts on the argument. At the time an enterprise either wrote its own programs or used whatever had come bundled with the hardware. Buying a program off a company that had written it speculatively was not a normal thing to do.

The first few attempts at it did not work. Cullinane went to the data processing departments of banks looking for internal applications worth productizing and found that almost nothing built in-house was general enough to resell. A source code management system called PLUS came out badly against Pansophic's Panvalet. What finally paid was a report writer named Culprit, and specifically a rebadged version of it called EDP Auditor, which was the identical product under another name with predefined reports and support aimed at electronic data processing auditors. Corporations licensed both. Auditors with Culprit could produce reports faster than their own IT departments, and the IT departments would then buy it to keep up.

The company that mattered began in early 1973, when Cullinane, Jim Baker and Tom Meurer decided to bet everything on a database. IDMS had started as General Electric's Integrated Data Store and had been modified at B.F. Goodrich to run on IBM mainframes, and Cullinane bought the rights to market it. It became the leading independent database of the mainframe era, up against Software AG's ADABAS and IBM's own IMS, and it is the reason the rest of this happened. Financial and manufacturing applications were bought and rewritten on top of it through 1979 and after, which made Cullinane an early integrated suite vendor in a category later called ERP.

The name became Cullinane Database Systems for the 1978 flotation and Cullinet Software in 1983, partly so that the founder's name would stop being attached to a business he had handed over. Six years later Computer Associates bought it for around three hundred and thirty million dollars in stock, the deal announced on 19 june 1989 as one CA share for every two of Cullinet's. Accounts of the final figure vary. What does not vary is that the company had not turned an annual profit since 1986 and had put itself up for sale.

~ the record ~

~ the firsts ~

The list is longer than any company that obscure has a right to. Cullinane Database Systems went public in 1978 in the first successful offering by a pure software products company anywhere, and it was the first software company Hambrecht and Quist ever floated. On 27 april 1982 it became the first computer software firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and later the first to be a component of the S&P 500. It was the first software company valued at a billion dollars, and it bought the first Super Bowl advertisement anyone in the industry had run.

It also functioned as a training ground for the industry it had helped invent. Andrew Filipowski left and founded Platinum Technology, and Jon Nackerud went on to co-found the company that commercialized Ingres. There is a whole generation of software executives whose first serious job was selling a mainframe database out of Massachusetts.

~ the slide ~

The first attack came from IBM two quarters after the IPO. IBM introduced the 4300 series and its salesmen told every shared customer that IDMS would not run on it and that all future IBM software would be built on IMS. Every existing customer went up in flames and every prospect went on hold. Technically the fix took the modification of one instruction. Commercially it took a new Integrated Data Dictionary, and Cullinane got both done inside three months and came out of it winning four competitions in five instead of one in five.

The second attack was not survived. Cullinane handed the company to Bob Goldman in 1983, it ran into trouble over open architecture and the relational model, and a veteran IBM and Data General executive named David Chapman was brought in as chief executive with fifty million dollars of cash reserves sitting on the balance sheet. Chapman spent 1986 and 1987 buying technology and moving the product line toward Digital's VAX line. Some of the acquisitions were poor. The fifty million was gone. Cullinane came back in 1988, fired him, repositioned the products around something called Enterprise Generator, and got the company profitable again by the fourth quarter, which was just enough to make it sellable to Charles Wang.

~ what it left behind ~

IDMS is still here. Thirty-five years after the company that sold it stopped existing, the database is still marketed and supported for IBM mainframe operating systems, and the UK tax authority ran its Pay As You Earn system for years on ICL's licensed port of it. Very few dead software companies leave a product still under a support contract when the youngest person who ever worked there is retired.

The argument is the bigger inheritance. Before Cullinane the default assumption was that software came with the machine or came from your own staff, and the entire industry i work in rests on that assumption having been broken by somebody willing to bet a small Massachusetts company on a database it had not written. Wang got that for the price of a stock swap, in a year when the seller had no other offers.

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