Artifact Details

Title

Mann, Jim (James L.) oral history

Catalog Number

102702335

Type

Document

Description

James (Jim) Mann describes his personal and educational background and his career in the computer services industry. As an IBM salesman in Wichita in the early 1960s, he was hired by the accounting firm Fox & Company to run a service bureau operation they had acquired. He developed a successful service business processing tax returns for accountants after developing the Dynatax software and, when the service bureau operations owned by Fox & Company were merged with three other companies, he was chosen to manage the resulting company, Dynafacts. Dynafacts was merged with United Data Centers in 1972; United Data Centers was then acquired by Tymshare in 1974. He briefly left the computer services industry after leaving Tymshare but returned to the industry as Chief Operating Officer of Bradford National Corporation in New York City until he was chosen by the venture capital team to head Sun Data Corporation, a service bureau which had been spun off by Sun Oil Company. Under his leadership, the company changed its name to SunGard, and via an aggressive growth-by-acquisition strategy, he grew it to become a multi-billion dollar company specializing in financial accounting software and disaster recovery services. He describes in detail his management philosophy of allowing the acquired companies to continue to operate independently as long as they contributed to the financial growth of the SunGard parent company.

Date

2010-05-20

Contributor

Haigh, Thomas, Interviewer
Johnson, Luanne, Editor
Mann, James L. (Jim), Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Jeffries & Co. 10th Floor, 520 Madison Avenue, New York

Extent

56 p.

Category

Transcription

Subject

Mann, James; Accountants Computer Users Technical Exchange (ACUTE); Association of Data Processing Service Organizations (ADAPSO); Bradford National Corporation; Comdisco; Dynafacts; DynaTax; Eisenstat, Al; FastTax; Fox & Company; Goldstein, Bernie; Growth by acquisition; IBM sales training; Owens, John; Sun Data Corporation; SunGard; Tymshare; United Data Centers; Winn, Fran

Collection Title

Oral history collection

Credit

Software Industry Special Interest Group

Lot Number

X5654.2010