Informatics General

Informatics General Corporation
Company typePublic
NYSE: IG
Industry
FoundedWoodland Hills, Los Angeles, California (March 19, 1962 (1962-03-19))
Founders
  • Walter Bauer
  • Werner Frank
  • Richard Hill
DefunctAugust 13, 1985 (1985-08-13)
FateAcquired
Headquarters
Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California
,
United States
Number of locations
30 in North America
9 overseas
Key people
  • Frank Wagner
  • John Postley
  • Bill Plumb
  • Warner Blow
  • Mike Parrella
  • Geno Tolari
ProductsFile management and report generation; many others
Brands"Fulfilling the computer's promise"[1]
Revenue$191 million (1984, equivalent to $560 million today)
$5 million (1984)
Number of employees
2,600 (1985)
Divisions
  • Software Products Group
  • Data Services
  • Answer
  • Management Services
  • TAPS
  • Life Insurance Systems
  • Legal Information Services
  • Professional Software Systems
  • others

Informatics General Corporation, earlier Informatics, Inc., was an American computer software company in existence from 1962 through 1985 and based in Los Angeles, California. It made a variety of software products, and was especially known for its Mark IV file management and report generation product for IBM mainframes, which became the best-selling corporate packaged software product of its time. It also ran computer service bureaus and sold turnkey systems to specific industries. By the mid-1980s Informatics had revenues of near $200 million and over 2,500 employees.

Computer historian Martin Campbell-Kelly, in his 2003 volume From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry, considers Informatics to be an exemplar of the independent, middle-sized software development firms of its era, and the Computer History Museum as well as the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota have conducted a number of oral histories of the company's key figures.[2] Historian Jeff Yost identifies Informatics as a pioneering "system integration" company, similar to System Development Corporation.[3] The Chicago Tribune wrote that Informatics was "long a legend in software circles".[4]

Informatics General was acquired by Sterling Software in 1985 in what was the first hostile takeover in the software industry. Immediately, Sterling Software became a member of the largest corporations within the software industry, with $200 million in revenue.

  1. ^ "Position announcements". Computerworld. June 20, 1977. p. 64.
  2. ^ See Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog, p. 57, and the seven oral histories listed in the Bibliography below, including three of Walter Bauer. Campbell-Kelly portrays Applied Data Research (ADR) and Advanced Computer Techniques (ACT) as two other typical software firms of the 1960s.
  3. ^ Yost, Making IT Work, pp. 87–88.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference ct-somuch was invoked but never defined (see the help page).