Informatics General: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:27, 21 January 2024

Revision as of 18:29, 21 January 2024

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The third founder was another TRW colleague, Richard H. Hill, who had been a professor at [[UCLA]] and an assistant director of a joint data center between that university and [[IBM]].<ref name="yost-wf"/><ref name="yost-it-109">Yost, ''Making IT Work'', p. 109.</ref>

In January 1962, Bauer approached Frank and Hill to start a new independent company that would provide software services.<ref name="ck-65">Campbell-Kelly, ''From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog'', p. 65.</ref><ref name="frank-oh-39-40">Frank, "Achieving the American Dream", pp. 39–40.</ref> At the time, it was an unusual move since few people saw software as a viable business.<ref>Norborg, "An Interview with Walter Bauer", pp. 11–12.</ref><ref name="yost-wf"/> "Primarily, we were going to develop systems for large-scale computer systems, probably of a military nature. That was our first objective," stated Bauer in a later interview.<ref name="yost-it-109"/> Despite a lack of any kind of business school training, Bauer put together a business plan for the new company.<ref name="bauer-oh-2-4-5">Johnson, "Oral History of Walter Bauer" (1995), pp. 4–5.</ref> Indeed, throughout his time with the company, Bauer embodied the personality characteristics of [[entrepreneurship]].<ref>Aspray, ''An Interview with Bruce Coleman'', p. 14.</ref>

[[Venture capital]] was hard to locate for such start-ups in that era and Bauer met with several rejections.<ref name="yost-wf"/> He and the others then decided to join forces with [[Dataproducts|Data Products Corporation]], a newly formed manufacturer of [[Peripheral|computer peripheral equipment]].<ref name="ck-81">Campbell-Kelly, ''From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog'', p. 81.</ref> The co-founder of Data Products, [[Erwin Tomash]] (1921–2012),<ref>Yost, "Computer Industry Pioneer: Erwin Tomash", p. 4.</ref> was from Minnesota and had earlier worked at [[Engineering Research Associates]], a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s.<ref>Norborg, "An Interview with Erwin Tomash", pp. 2, 17–18.</ref> He had known Bauer and thought that the two new efforts being formed together would provide a hedge against either one of them encountering start-up difficulties.<ref>Webster, ''Print Unchained'', p. 122.</ref>

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==Products and divisions==

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the company broke its revenues down into three sources: software products, professional services, and information processing services; from 1978 through 1982, the three were in rough balance, with each of the three comprising anywhere from 26 to 39 percent of the total.<ref name="ar-1982-reportings">{{cite book | title=1982 Annual Report | publisher=Informatics General Corporation | year=1983 | pages=2, 5, 16, 28}}</ref> Beginning in 1982, the company categorized revenues as coming from cross-industry customers versus vertical market segments;<ref name="ar-1982-reportings"/> by 1983, the verticals, which included products and services for the legal, accounting, insurance, and other industries, had eclipsed cross-industry revenues.<ref name="ar-1983-overall">{{cite book | title=1983 Annual Report | publisher=Informatics General Corporation | year=1984 | page=2}}</ref> These changes reflected complicated, and frequently changing, reporting structures within the company.<ref>Aspray, ''An Interview with Bruce Coleman'', p. 13.</ref>

===Mark IV and Mark V===

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==Final years and the Sterling Software takeover battle==

Informatics continued to grow, both organically and via acquisition. Indeed, by the early-mid-1980s Informatics General had made more than thirty different acquisitions along the way.<ref>Campbell-Kelly, ''From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog'', p. 180.</ref> Depending upon when and how the counting was done, the company had some seventeen divisions within it, and sometimes subdivisions within those; some of these were small-sized businesses that revealed a lack of focus within the overall company.<ref>Aspray, ''An Interview with Bruce Coleman'', pp. 11–12.</ref> The divisions were organized into groups, and these groups were sometimes independent entities unto themselves.<ref>Grad, ''Oral History of Bruce Coleman'', p. 29.</ref>

Werner Frank had a parting of the ways with Informatics management and left the company at the end of 1982, with some acrimonious relations taking place between him and Bauer.<ref>Frank, "Achieving the American Dream", pp. 75–77.</ref>

There were attempts to change the structure of Informatics' management, such that Bauer would be less involved in operations.<ref name="oh-frank-24">Yost, "Oral History of Werner Frank", pp. 24–25.</ref> Accordingly, in February 1983, Bruce T. Coleman was named president of the company.<ref>{{cite news | url=https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/10/business/executive-changes-221110.html | title=Executive Changes | newspaper=The New York Times | date=February 10, 1983}}</ref> He had originally been hired in 1978 as a group vice president.<ref>Grad, ''Oral History of Bruce Coleman'', pp. 28–29.</ref> However, during a large-scale reorganization of the company in August 1984, which involved the selling off of some unprofitable businesses, Coleman departed and Bauer resumed being both chairman and president.<ref name="lat-target"/> Coleman later said that Bauer had fired him after Bauer disagreed with his proposals to sell off several pieces of the company.<ref>Grad, ''Oral History of Bruce Coleman'', pp. 34–35.</ref>

[[Image:Informatics General corridor at night.jpg|thumb|left|260px|An Informatics staffer having a late night at the office]]

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* {{cite book | title=From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry | url=https://archive.org/details/fromairlinereser00mart_0 | url-access=registration | first=Martin | last=Campbell-Kelly | publisher=MIT Press | ___location=Cambridge, Massachusetts | year=2003 | isbn=978-0-262-03303-9 }}

* {{cite conference | last1=Cardenas | first1=Alfonso F. | last2=Grafton | first2=William P. | contribution=Challenges and requirements for new application generators | url=https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1982/5089/00/50890341.pdf | title=AFIPS '82 Proceedings of the June 7–10, 1982, National Computer Conference | publisher=American Federation of Information Processing Societies | date=June 1982 | pages=341–349}}

* {{cite interview | url=https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107222 | title=An Interview with Bruce Coleman OH 337 | first=Bruce | last=Coleman | interviewer=William Aspray | publisher=Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota | ___location=Washington, D.C. | date=May 3, 2002 }}

* {{cite interview | url=https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746639 | title=Oral History of Bruce Coleman X6825.2013 | first=Bruce | last=Coleman | interviewer=Burt Grad | publisher=Computer History Museum | ___location=Telephonic| date=April 30, 2013 <!-- https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2020/01/102746639-05-01-acc.pdf -->}} Interview completed May 2, 2013.

* {{cite book | title=The Computer Establishment | url=https://archive.org/details/computerestablis00fish | url-access=registration | first=Katharine Davis | last=Fishman | publisher= McGraw-Hill Book Company | ___location=New York | year=1981 | isbn=978-0-07-021127-8 | type=paperback 1982}}

* {{cite book | last=Frank | first=Werner L. | title=Legacy: The Saga of a German-Jewish Family Across Time and Circumstance | publisher=Avotaynu Foundation | ___location= Bergenfield, New Jersey | year=2003 | chapter=Chapter 22: Achieving the American Dream: Becoming an Entrepreneur | chapter-url=http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Frank_Werner/Frank_Werner.oral_history.2006.102657942.pdf | pages=478–529}} Chapter also appears beginning on p.&nbsp;31 of pdf and cited page numbers are to those pages.