Cincom Systems, Inc., is a privately held multinational computer technology corporation founded in 1968 by Tom Nies, Tom Richley, and Claude Bogardus.
The company's best known product today is named Total (trademark TOTAL).
IBM mentions Cincom as being "the original database company".
Historic significance
Cincom Systems was founded in 1968, when the product focus in the computer industry was far more on hardware than software, and mass merchandising in the industry was nonexistent. The company’s first product, Total, was the first commercial database management system that was not bundled with manufacturer hardware and proprietary software.
Thomas Nies
By the late 1960s, Tom Nies, a salesman and project manager at IBM, had noticed that software was becoming a more important component of computer systems and decided to work for a business that sold software. The only software businesses in existence at that time were a small number of service bureaus, none of which was located in Cincinnati, where Nies resided. In 1968 Nies joined Claude Bogardus and Tom Richley to found Cincom Systems, which initially only wrote programs for individual companies. Within its first year, the company realized that it was solving the same data management problems for its various clients. Nies proposed the solution of developing a core database management system that could be sold to multiple customers. Total was the result of this development effort.
On August 20, 1984, President Ronald Reagan called Cincom and Tom Nies "the epitome of entrepreneurial spirit of American business."
The Total solution
At a time when each application program "owned" the data it used, a company often had multiple copies of similar information: "... people would get five different reports and the inventory balances would say five different things. What were our sales during April? Well, you'd get five different numbers, depending on how you total things up."
The problem was known, and CODASYL's Database Task Group Report wrote about it, as did General Electric and IBM. Cincom's TOTAL "segregated out the programming logic from the application of the database."
Despite IBM being "where the money was," there was still the problem of compatibility between large systems running OS/360 or small systems running DOS/360, so they "implemented 70 to 80 percent of the application programming logic in such a way that it insulated the user from" whichever they used; some used both.
Thomas Nies and Cincom
From 1968 through the present, Cincom founder Thomas M. Nies has been the longest actively serving CEO in the computer industry, and Cincom Systems was described in 2001 as "a venerable software firm, included in the Smithsonian national museum along with Microsoft as a software pioneer."
Corporate history
1968 to 1969
Convinced that software was a potential profit center, rather than a drain on profits, as was then viewed by IBM management, Thomas M. Nies, left IBM late 1968 and brought along Tom Richley and Claude Bogardus. This executive trio functioned as sales and marketing (Nies), product development (Richley), and research and development (Bogardus). By March 1969, the company became a full-service organization by adding principals Judy Foegle Carlson (administration), George Fanady (custom systems), Doug Hughes (systems engineering), and Jan Litton (product installation).
The name Cincom comes from the portmanteau of "Cincinnati" and "computer". This is due to the company being founded in Cincinnati, OH.
Initially they simply wrote programs for local companies. At some point they realized that the data management aspects of many programs had enough similarity to develop a product. From this effort came what became Total, an improvement and generalization of IBM's DBOMP.
Other than IBM, which was still in the "selling iron" business, Cincom became the first U.S. software firm to promote the concept of a database management system (DBMS). Cincom delivered the first commercial database management system that was not bundled with a computer manufacturer's hardware and proprietary software.
1970s and 1980s
Cincom introduced several new products during the 1970s, including: ENVIRON/1 (1971), a control system for teleprocessing networks.