These days, it’s not much of a surprise to see celebrities promoting enterprise technology. Christian Slater has shown up in ads for HP. Matthew McConaughey touts Salesforce. At last year’s Black Hat conference, digital billboards blasted Palo Alto Networks commercials starring dog-avenging gunslinger and cyberpunk fan Keanu Reeves.
But way back when, celebrities weren’t really endorsing tech, let alone B2B tech. Which is what makes this 1993 promotional video where Star Trek: The Next Generation’s William T. Riker (played by Jonathan Frakes) explaining enterprise management software to a bewildered airline worker from the bridge of the USS Enterprise so memorable.
Frakes was endorsing B2B products made by Boole & Babbage. That name might be largely forgotten today, but it brokered the world’s first venture capital deal in software. In the 1990s, its mainframe and client-server software was reportedly running at most Fortune 500 companies and two-thirds of the world’s big commercial banks.
So, what happened? Boole ceased to exist in 1999, when it was absorbed by software giant BMC. As part of our Quarter Century Project, IT Brew spoke to former Boole employees to figure out why.
When hardware fought software. In 1967, tech entrepreneurs David Kaitch and Kenneth Kolence scored what Palo Alto Online reported was the first-ever venture capital deal in the software industry with investor Franklin “Pitch” Johnson. Initially known as K & K Associates, it had a then-fresh concept: selling software not only separately from hardware, but for the purpose of analyzing and managing hardware.
While a feud with IBM over Boole performance-measuring the rival firm’s hardware nearly killed the company early on, Johnson would later say in an interview with the Computer History Museum that Boole found its niche persuading customers to upgrade their software rather than their IBM mainframes.
“You know, you guys are competitors of ours, really, because when you sell your products, people postpone upgrading their mainframes,” he recalled an IBM executive telling him.
The relationship with IBM would eventually become more cooperative in the mid-1970s as IBM warmed to the idea that “it was strategically smart to have data processing run as efficiently as possible,” Johnson added. By around 1980, he said, the company surpassed $100 million in revenue.
Jim Laccabue, currently a sales manager at Ceeview, worked in sales at Boole from 1983 to 1989, eventually rising to a senior role as account executive. When he first started in 1983, Laccabue told IT Brew, the concept of software remained obscure enough to the general public that he often ended up explaining it to his friends.
“It was a very different time in software, and a very different feel,” Laccabue said. “No one was dying to join a software company back then.”
During his time at Boole, he added, “Databases and applications became very hot.” But it wasn’t flashy, and executives at client corporations spent more of their time dealing with strategic issues like networking remote offices and striking connectivity deals with phone companies.
“It was always that ‘you have to have it’ sort of software. You’ve got to manage your mainframes, you’ve got to manage your big computers that you’re delivering,” Laccabue said. “But it’s not sexy—you’re always dealing with the technical systems guys…CIOs wouldn’t even really get involved.”
By the tail end of the 80s, Laccabue said, Boole was falling behind direct competitors like the now-defunct Candle Corporation. (He eventually left to work for them.)
Candle’s products had features that didn’t necessarily improve functionality but had more appealing end-user interfaces, Laccabue said: “Boole & Babbage was the old-school command-line interface. Candle was the first one to make a pretty pie chart, ring the bell at the terminal.”
Candle was “winning deals because they ring the bell,” Laccabue argued. “Can we just ring the bell, for crying out loud? It’s like three lines of code.”
Throughout the 80s, enterprise computing was also moving away from mainframes to client–server models. That posed a challenge for Boole, as its financial health relied almost entirely on mainframes.
Michael Bunyard, VP and head of marketing IAM at open-source tech firm WSO2, worked in Boole’s marketing department starting in 1985.
“There was really that mentality that the mainframe was going to die, and that distributed systems, or client–server was going to take over the world,” Bunyard told IT Brew. “So, Boole & Babbage had to adapt to diversify the portfolio.”
Mainframes vs. client–server. That need led to the 1989 purchase of Avant-Garde Software, which created the client–server software that Boole developed into CommandPost network management software. Bunyard said CommandPost eventually became Boole’s flagship product.
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“The mainframe products were really kind of the cash cow, and the investment area was everything client–server,” Bunyard said. “The market really only cared how we were doing in client–server.”
By 1991, according to the International Directory of Corporate Histories (IDCH), the company was in a rough shape—yet it staged a remarkable comeback during the transition to client–server by focusing on “software that minimized computer downtime and software that helped customers minimize operating costs.”
Henry Fieglein, an enterprise architecture lead at Allegis Group, worked as chief architect at competitor Maxm Systems Corporation, developer of the Max/Enterprise network automation software. He told IT Brew that in the 90s, Boole and Maxm dominated the market for banking enterprise management systems.
“IBM had a product at the time called Tivoli,” Fieglein said. “Everyone thought they would come in and dominate the market—they couldn’t even touch the surface of the level of sales that we were able to do.”
“The problem is the systems cost a million bucks, and so you’re very limited in the size of company that could afford to purchase something like that,” he added.
In 1996, Boole executives made the decision to buy Maxm outright. Fieglein ended up as chief architect for Boole, though he initially wasn’t happy about it.
“My group and I, after we heard about the purchase, we went out on a bender for three days,” he quipped. “It took a few days for us to come to the reality that we were going over to the dark side.”
The merger ended up being very fruitful. Fieglein said Maxm developers generally focused on new technologies while the Boole team focused on servicing customers. Meanwhile, according to the IDCH, Boole was one of the few companies still supporting mainframes with monitoring products like MainView and the messaging middleware Command MQ.
It helped that Boole used big names to boost its profile. This era saw the company embark on the lavish campaign featuring Frakes, who not only starred in ads but showed up alongside Boole marketing staff at trade shows and other engagements. Former Boole Senior Marketing Director Pat Letsos told TrekCore she believed this was the first-ever marketing deal between a tech firm and Paramount Studios. (Frakes later starred in another Boole marketing video in 1996 parodying Paramount’s Airplane! film franchise.)
Still, problems persisted. While Fieglein said sales didn’t appear to be slowing in the late 90s, the company’s sales cycles could be six to 12 months due to costly product demos involving lugging around expensive products like IBM RS/6000 workstations and servers, complete with networking setups.
There was also a perception that Boole was saturating its own market and “running out of companies that could afford to buy a million-dollar product,” Fieglein added. He argued that while Boole was focusing on servicing its existing customers, other companies like IBM were expanding their offerings via mergers and acquisitions.
Competitor BMC swallowed up Boole in a 1998 deal, completed in 1999, that CNN valued at $900 million. Bunyard, who said he was in “all the strategy meetings” concerning the sale, said BMC’s offer was essentially too good to pass up at a time when major stockholders thought it was time to cash out.
“It was a stock deal, and BMC stock had just always done very well, [it was a] way better performing stock than Boole ever was,” Bunyard said. “So, I think it was a good exit for some of the executives and investors.”
In the dustbin, still operational. Fieglein said it’s hardly surprising Boole has slipped into obscurity.
“It wasn’t Microsoft, it wasn’t Oracle, it wasn’t even Sun, right?” he said.
“I think the reason why things become a footnote is because they don’t make it, and we rarely talk about the companies that don’t make it,” he added.
But the company’s legacy continues, and not only through products like MainView and CommandPost that BMC continues to develop and sell today. There’s still demand for programmers who can work with the archaic basic assembly language still running in many corporate mainframes, which includes old Boole systems still chugging along across the planet, Bunyard said.
“Mainframes never did die, and they still are powering a lot of the backend of a lot of the biggest companies in the world,” Bunyard said.
This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.
