Cullinet

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Cullinet was a software company whose main product was the database management system, IDMS. In 1989, the company was bought by Computer Associates. Cullinet was headquartered at 400 Blue Hill Drive in Westwood, Massachusetts.

[edit] History

The company was originally started by John Cullinane and Larry English in 1968 as Cullinane Corporation. Their idea was to sell pre-packaged software to mainframe users, which was at that time a new concept in an era when enterprises only used internally developed applications or the software that came bundled with the hardware.

Rather than write its own products, Cullinane approached IT departments of major enterprises, particularly banks, to identify internally developed applicationss that he felt had potential to be productized and licensed to others. However, it proved difficult to sell these applications because most weren't generalized and supportable systems. As a result, the company had to create its own utility packages. The first was a tape based source code management system, TMS, that competed with Pansophic's (PanDA) and UCC's products (UCC-1) in the space. TMS had the handicap of being "tape" and not "disk" based so it was never successful. The first breakthrough product was a report writer named Culprit, actually developed in-house by Gil Curtice and Anna Marie Thron who had built the PHI payroll system. The product competed with Mark IV from Informatics but was perceived as a late entry in the report writer category.

The company struggled with financial stability until they branded a variation of Culprit, EDP Auditor,'"which was nothing more than a second name for the same product with a collection of predefined reports aimed at the new discipline of EDP Auditing. What was remarkable is that many corporations licensed essentially identical products. This lead to serendipitous prosperity for Cullinane. As EDP auditors developed knowledge about business systems and computers, they an internal group that could invariably produce reports faster than always-slower-moving internal IT departments. As a result, MIS departments would be compelled to buy the Culprit version for their own use — to compete.

As the company prospered in the early 70's it was approached by a consultant to BFGoodrich, Naomi Seligman, to consider taking over development of a Honeywell database management system IDS that had been modified to operate on IBM and IBM compatible mainframes (RCA). Actually IDS was originally developed by General Electric, and a Bill Curtis had supposedly gotten the rights to convert the system to run on IBM equipment. The decision was made in early 1973 — primarily by John Cullinane, Jim Baker and Tom Muerer — to bet the company on the effort. Several executives joined the effort over the next three years, including Andrew Filipowski, Robert Goldman, Jon Nackerud, Ron McKinney, William Casey, Bob Davis and Ray Nawara to exploit this potential opportunity. IDMS was to be a great bet for the company as it became the leader among many capable and popular products of the mainframe era. It competed with Cincom's Total, Software AG's Adabas, MRI's System 2000 and IBM's IMS & DL/1. Until the emergence of relational databases its reign would be supreme to the unending frustration of IBM. On the back of this bet Cullinet would become the largest software company of its time from the mid-70s to the mid-80s.

John Cullinane mentored a series of future entrepreneurs and software industry executives. One of the early executives to head the company, at the time of its IPO, was Andrew 'Flip' Filipowski, who later founded Platinum technology, inc. and other companies and has been recognized as one of the 100 most influential people in the technology field. Another was Robert Goldman who became the CEO of several well known public software companies including AICorp. Jon Nackerud started the database company RTI with its Ingress database product. Another of note was Sergio Ferragut perhaps the first Cuban immigrant to run a US software company. Prior to becoming a public company in 1978 the company's name was changed to "Cullinane Database Systems, Inc. The company changed its name to Cullinet Software in 1983 because John Cullinane wanted to distance his name from the personal connection to the business when he turned the company over to Bob Goldman. This name change maintained the historical connection to him and highlighted the company's leadership and dominance in the emerging database management system space. Joe McNay, a board member, was particularly important regarding the company's IPO, the first ever in the software products industry. Of note is that Greylock purchased some shares from John Cullinane in 1977 less than a year before the company was to go public. It was to be the early foundation on which their Greylock's software technology investment prowess rested. It was Greylock’s first investment in a software company.

The public offering was of note as it was the first truly successful offering of a software products company in the 1970's and its success was to be the catalyst for the thousands of tech IPO's to follow. Today we take for granted the asset of software and it is difficult to understand that at one time it was nearly impossible to convince banks and investment bankers that there was in fact value there. One needs to appreciate the difficulty of underwriting and selling to the public a company with no physical assets except for the ethereal concept of executing software instructions to understand the pioneering path that we are all indebted to Cullinane. It was the first software company to be taken public by Hambrecht & Quist and the first to have a billion dollar valuation. It was also the first software technology company to do a Super Bowl ad and one additional historical fact was that because it was a technology company it was comfortable being the first to develop it’s S1 for the IPO with word processing technology forever affecting the time and effort required to produce an S1 and changing forever the process.

In 1983 the company's name was permanently changed to Cullinet Software on the premise that all computers would be networked in the future. He successfully argued that it was more than a database company with a more extensive product line than just IDMS. In fact it was and would be for a few more years the largest software company on the planet. He was however, for better or worse, unsuccessful in completely detaching his personal connection to the company.

One of the products that was at the core of its success was the "active" Integrated Data Dictionary (IDD) which to this day is recognized as a model for meta data repositories, frequently emulated by software efforts of the late 80's such as Reltech and Brownstone Solutions. Together IDMS, IDD and 'IDMS/DC succeeding in becoming a comprehensive suit which made it a major competitor of IBM's IMS because these IDMS products were fully integrated and IBM's weren't. Cullinane Database Systems, Inc., went public in 1978. On April 27, 1982 the company became the first computer software firm to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and later, the first to become a component stock of the S&P 500 Index.

Beginning in 1979, in an attempt to promote less dependence on the database sales alone, Cullinet launched into financial and manufacturing applications as well as developing software for the nascent personal computer market. The company acquired financial applications from McCormick and Dodge, and completely rewrote them using IDMS. They also acquired an MRP system from Rath & Strong and completely rewrote it using IDMS. Thus, Cullinet had a suite of integrated financial and manufacturing systems, the first on-line database driven applications. These were to prove very successful. Eventually, it acquired a small Boston-based company called Computer Pictures whose development team which was responsible for creating a statistical graphics display engine, created the core of software engineers that was next tasked with developing "Goldengate" a Lotus Symphony-like PC product.

Goldengate was a part of Cullinet's flawed ICMS (Information Center Management System). The promise of ICMS was the ability to move data between the mainframe and PC desktop. Apple Computer was supposed to do the same for the Apple Lisa, but never delivered. ICMS was unveiled in a splashy 20+ city closed circuit TV broadcast. ICMS was delivered but proved to be far too slow to be useful. To be fair, ICMS was ahead of its time. Fast, reliable, yet inexpensive data transmission was not yet available.

GoldenGate was a mistake. The company should have developed PC based IDMS development tools, instead. In fairness many failures mark the landscape in that space and era including the infamous Ovation product introduced with great fanfare by Ovation Corporation in a race with Lotus's Symphony suite attempting to create the early office suites now dominated by Microsoft Corp.

Goldengate's other flaw was that it was built pre-Windows which was expensive for Cullinet because of all the permutations and combinations of PC hardware and memory configurations.

By the mid-1980's, John Cullinane announced that he wanted to once again hand over the helm of Cullinet to someone else while he pursued other interests. This time he had the sixth sense that the world around him was changing and that Cullinet's dominant software position was at risk as was his own reputation. Bucking conventional wisdom, he brought in a recent acquaintance, David Chapman as CEO of the company. At the time, Cullinet had some $50,000,000 in cash reserves. David Chapman, a veteran IBM executive (but who brought no software background), started an aggressive campaign to acquire technology from other companies. A fatal strategic flaw of this era was the attempt to provide a pseudo-relational database/application generator in an attempt to call IDMS a relational database. The company felt it had such clout in the market that it could redefine the relational database specifications by its product rather than adapt its products to the specification. As a last ditch effort, E.F. Codd was brought to Boston to see this system in the hopes that he would give IDMS Release 10 his stamp of approval. He was unimpressed and refused to call IDMS relational.

In 1986-87, Cullinet foresaw the coming slump in mainframe computer sales due to more and more powerful minicomputers such as Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX line of computers. Cullinet tried entering this market and competing against Oracle Corporation. A number of companies were acquired for this purpose, none of them successful. Out of this effort, IDMS/R was born which was truly relational.

However, the company, despite having the best, and most integrated software products in the world, had been put on the defensive by its competitors, something it had never allowed in the past. The big issues were open architecture and relational technology, neither of which, the company responded to well. It had fallen into the classic technical trap that had nearly put the company out of business in 1970: namely, its technicians were building software the way they felt the customer ought to like it vs what the customers wanted to buy.

Sales slumped. The stock price fell from $32 a share to less than $5. An exodus of talent left the company. In 1988, John Cullinane returned to Cullinet, fired David Chapman, and tried to salvage the company. Unfortunately, the company never recovered from the damage to its reputation.

In 1989, the company was bought by Computer Associates for $330,000,000 but that was a fraction of the several billion dollar valuation it carried at its peak, or the great potential it had because it was way ahead of Oracle, Sap, etc. at the time.

[edit] Products

IDMS 

A CODASYL network database management system first developed at B.F. Goodrich. John Cullinane acquired the rights to market IDMS in the early 1970s. IDMS legacy systems are still being run today. Only a few customer have migrated to IDMS/R.

IDMS/R 

A completely separate database engine was developed in California by Dr. Kapali Eswaran originally from IBM's System R project. The company had also developed a 4GL for use with the database engine. The components were all named after planets. This product was designed to run on the Digital VAX system. Eswaron's company was acquired by Cullinet in July 1987 and its main product re-launched as IDMS/R. The 4GL was dropped in favour of one developed by a Cancor, a Canadian company based in Mississauga, Ontario which was acquired in January 1987.

IDMS-DC 

A teleprocessing system similar to IBM's CICS system. When it was first released, it was reported that IBM challenged Cullinane to prove that the code had not violated copyright. This suspicion was due to the fact that many internal CICS codes begin with the initials "RH". Many IDMS-DC modules also begin with "RH" after it two authors, Nick Rini and Don Heitzman, both employees of Cullinane.

ADS/Online 

IDMS-DC help spawn a fourth generation (4GL) programming system called ADS/Online (Application Development System). The original name of the product was "AIDS". ADS/Online was a COBOL-like language and was successful because it competed against IBM's CICS, which tended to be used mainly be COBOL programmers. ADS/O was later ported to run directly in IBM's CICS and was adopted by nearly 1,500 companies.

ADS/Batch 

A port of ADS/Online to the batch mainframe environment. It was not well received by Cullinet's customers.

Culprit 

An RPG-like reporting tool. It was originally marketed as tool for use by auditors, known as EDP Auditor.

Online Query (OLQ) 

A powerful online reporting tool.

Online English 

A powerful online reporting tool that used the "Intellect" natural language AI engine from Artificial Intelligence Corporation (AICorp).

IDD 

(Integrated Data Dictionary) A renowned integrated data dictionary.

TMS 

An early tape based source code management system that was long forgotten.