Harbinger Corporation

» see harbinger.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Harbinger was founded in December 1983, a few months before I was born, under a name it would spend the next decade living down: Computer Technologies for the Home. C. Tycho Howle and David Leach started it in Atlanta. Whatever the home-computing plan had been, the money turned out to sit somewhere else entirely, in moving commercial documents between large companies that did not run the same software as each other.

That business has a name nobody outside it enjoys saying. Electronic data interchange is the practice of sending a purchase order or an invoice from one company's system straight into another company's system as a structured message rather than as paper or a phone call. The messages traveled over private service networks called value-added networks, which existed because the public internet either did not reach these companies or was not trusted to. Harbinger sold the software at both ends and ran a network in the middle.

By the late 1990s the stack it supported was a museum of the previous twenty years of data communications sitting next to the next twenty. The company's own filings put X.25 and Bisync in the same breath as IP, because its customers were running all of it at once and had no intention of stopping. Harbinger's job was to make a purchase order arrive regardless of which decade the receiving end was living in.

~ the dossier ~

~ the wire before the web ~

The scale of this is easy to miss because none of it was consumer-facing. Harbinger's own management estimated that of three million American companies with five or more employees, about two hundred thousand had adopted business-to-business electronic commerce, and that those transactions carried roughly $45 billion of value. Virtually every company in the Fortune 500 was in that count. None of it had a logo you would recognize.

The company went public in August 1995 and moved from 1800 Century Place to Lenox Park Boulevard around the same era. By March 2000 it employed 1,003 people, 309 of them building or maintaining the products. It had also started hosting the software itself and selling access over the internet, which the industry at the time called being an application service provider, roughly a decade before the same arrangement was renamed software as a service.

~ the one good year ~

The numbers tell a short and brutal story. In 1997 Harbinger lost 33 cents on every revenue dollar. In 1998 it lost about eleven. In 1999 revenues rose 15 percent to $155.5 million and the company finally cleared a profit, just under eleven percent of sales. That was the year the market decided business-to-business commerce was the future, and Gartner was predicting $7.3 trillion of it worldwide by 2004.

Peregrine Systems' board approved the purchase on 5 April 2000 and signed the merger agreement the same day, at 0.75 of a Peregrine share for every Harbinger share. The press put the headline value near $2 billion. The deal closed on 16 June, and on that same date Harbinger Corporation filed its Form 15 with the SEC to deregister its common stock. On the line where that form asks how many holders of record are left, it says ONE (1).

~ four owners after ~

Peregrine then ran into one of the larger accounting scandals of the period and went into bankruptcy in 2002. The pieces it had bought from Harbinger were sold on to private equity and reassembled under the name Inovis, and for a while the European arm of that still traded as Harbinger Commerce, so the brand went on living on one continent after it had gone from the other. Inovis was bought by GXS in 2010, GXS by OpenText in 2013.

The protocols, meanwhile, did not care about any of this. EDI messages are still moving between companies today in formats that were already old when Harbinger was profitable, which is the thing about plumbing. It gets bought and resold above ground and keeps running underneath.

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