Artifact Details

Title

Service Bureau Pioneer History Meeting, session two : financial management and growth

Catalog Number

102743008

Type

Document

Description

This session is called "Financial Management and Growth." The attendees constitute pioneering founders in the computer services business -- that is, processing services, custom programming, and the various services that new users turned to in the early days of Big Iron computing. Because it was a new kind of business -- providing computer services for the first time to many business -- the tenets of pricing, marketing, labor and capital allocation and so much more was left to seat of the pants decision-making. The surprise was that so much of what they imagined worked, and continues to this day. The session will discuss how service bureau companies were financed in the beginning and over all of the early years. It will also examine what pricing models were used, along with the cost structures. It will look at whether profits really existed or did not. The discussion also will expand to include the focus on growth: What were the things companies did to build customers and profits? Was it geographic, spreading out? Was it applications? Adding new ones? Was it markets? Changing the structures? And how was information for change gathered and processed?

Date

2010-05-19

Contributor

Casey, Frank, Speaker
Gartner, Gideon, Speaker
Grad, Burt, Moderator
Haigh, Thomas, Speaker
Hamilton, Denni7s, Editor
Houtz, Jim, Speaker
Jerger, Doug, Speaker
Johnson, Luanne, Speaker
Mann, Jim, Speaker
Miller, Stu, Speaker
Rollins, John, Speaker
Schachter, Oscar, Speaker
Tessler, Bob, Speaker

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

New York, New York

Extent

42 p.

Format

PDF

Category

Transcription

Subject

Applications; Accountants Computer Services (ACT); AZTECH Corporation; Custom Data Services; Data Processing and Accounting Services (DPAS); SunGard

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit

Software Industry Special Interest Group

Lot Number

X5820.2010