SOFTA Ventures

History

In The Beginning
• First property management system for IBM PC	• Industry leader with largest marketshare
• Company grew to over 100 employees	• Inc 500 Company in 1989
• Sold to publicly traded company	• Visit SKYLINE to learn more

It all started n 1982 with Time Magazine deciding that the Man of The Year was the personal computer. So early 1983 I decided to go out to one of the many computer chains around then, remember Entre Computer, and purchased for a whopping $6,000 the following: an IBM XT (IBM PC XT) with 256K RAM and two 5 ¼ disk drives, a monochrome monitor and a Diablo daisy wheel printer (Diablo Printer). Imagine how advanced all that was for the day and now would be so primitive to say the least.

From then it was on to trying out the few software programs around then. And since there was no hard drive, your software resided on drive A: and your data was written to drive B:. It was slow and clunky but it worked and who knew any better. After all it was the days of WordStar and Dbase II and VisiCalc.

Met a couple of guys marketing Total Recall, which was a list manager that interfaced with WordStar allowing for a simple merging of a list of names with a document to produce a personalized letter or document.  It was all slow as the two disk drives ground away between running the program and accessing the data but eventually the project would get done.

Eventually we all went into business together, the Total Recall boys and Larry and Michael, a bit later on. We started The SOFTA Group which developed and marketed SKYLINE: Property Management System to the property management industry which was very large back in those days.  We launched SKYLINE in October 1984 with a huge backlog and on the newest IBM AT (IBM AT), which had the faster processor than the XT and so could do faster. And in those days, everyone wanted to hardware and software delivered and installed in a turnkey solution. So were we in the hardware business too. We delivered it all. And we made sure it worked and kept them going, even though many of our clients hardly knew what to do with a computer. It was very new. There was no Internet, so no email and no self-help wikis or blogs or PDFs to look up. Everything had to be delivered by hand or UPS.

We built a very successful company back then with more than 100 employees and many of the biggest real estate owners and managers using SKYLINE or requiring it as part of a management contract.  We sold SKYLINE in 1993 and it continues on today at SS&C Technologies with many of the same people we hired over 20 years ago.

We Did It Before, Let’s Do It Again
• Virtual Assistant on the phone anytime, anywhere	• US Patent for mail synchronization process
• Early integration of Internet and telecom platform	• Evolved into an affordable phone system for SOHOs
• Raised $20,000,000 in venture capital	• Visit Onebox to learn more

Towards end of The SOFTA Group period Larry had traveled with a friend to London for holiday season. While over there, Larry discovered that he did not have friends’ email addresses or phone numbers with him. So he thought it would be great to have all that type of information available whenever or wherever one might be. How handy that seemed.  We reconvened the partners from the SKYLINE days and reconstituted ourselves as Planetary Motion, which then created CoolMail.

We began delivering a clever easy to use affordable solution to busy on the go types. They could listen to their emails being read to them over the phone, all their contacts were available as was their calendar too. One place to call for quick access to the important information one needs to get through the day and it did not matter if you were in New York, Hawaii or Europe.

We were truly one of the first unified messaging solutions available to the public. One call did it all.  And we got a lot of folks excited, venture capitalists, newspaper editors and associations wishing to get their members to use the service, see for yourself  at (CoolMail Buzz). We weathered the dot-com disaster and went on to join CoolMail with Onebox, at www.onebox.com.

If At First You Do Succeed Try Try Again
• Leading facilities management software solution	• Fortune 500 clients including Best Buy and RiteAid
• Integrated with SKYLINE accounting system	• Sold to publicly traded company
• Over 1600% ROI	• Visit SamTrak Enterprise to learn more

We came through the dot.com fiasco, a great many companies did not, deciding though that it was time to do something else. So CoolMail moved on to become part of the OneBox brand.

In the summer of 2001, does not sound good already does it, a software solution for facilities managers became available for purchase. It had at one time integrated with our old SKYLINE system and we knew the founder very well.  The Michael and Larry show bought the SamTrak facilities maintenance system, formed Achievement Technologies with two former resellers from the SOFTA Group days. The nugget was the installed client base,  which included many of the who’s who of American retail.  The client base included Best Buy, Rite Aid, Musicland Group, Dollar Stores and a host more.

We managed to hang on through the September 11^th tragedy and actually expand the business by joining the new SKYLINE with our new SamTrak system. This gave us new distribution and access to many of the clients to whom we had originally sold SKYLINE.  It was not too long before SS&C, a NASDAQ company to whom SKYLINE was sold, came the idea that they should own SamTrak too. By early 2005, we sold Achievement Technologies, in plenty of time to get our Apple iPhones and write some new history.

And what better way to start writing some new history than at our own blog ……