The COMMAND/Post enterprise manager software, developed by Boole & Babbage, serves as a foundational pillar in the history of automated operations and event management.
The technical evolution of Boole & Babbage and its flagship client/server alert consolidation suite, COMMAND/Post, transitions across four distinct engineering eras from its 1960s mainframe roots to its absorption into BMC Software.
1. Mainframe Performance Foundation Era (1967–1988)
Before building distributed client/server enterprise consoles, Boole & Babbage pioneered software that could physically measure and optimize computer hardware performance.
- 1967 – Company Founding: Founded by Ken Kolence and David Katch as “K & K Associates”. It was soon renamed Boole & Babbage after mathematicians George Boole and Charles Babbage.
- Late 1960s – PPE & CUE Architecture: Released the Problem Program Evaluator (PPE) and Configuration Utilization Evaluator (CUE). These tools sampled the instruction counters and wait states of the IBM System/360 operating system to map software bottlenecks.
- 1980s – MainView Architecture: Standardised mainframe monitoring with the introduction of MainView. This platform unified performance views across IBM’s MVS, CICS, and IMS environments using low-overhead assembly language monitors.
- 1984 – OS Obsolescence Shock: IBM altered its core operating system architecture, rendering massive parts of Boole & Babbage’s traditional monitoring code obsolete overnight. This forced an architectural pivot toward external automation logic.
2. Client/Server Pivot & COMMAND/Post Genesis (1989–1993)
As corporate networks shifted away from centralized mainframes toward distributed systems, the company adapted by acquiring and engineering a manager-of-managers (MoM) approach.
- 1989 – Avant-Garde Acquisition: Boole & Babbage acquired Avant-Garde Computing. Avant-Garde possessed pioneering client-server network management and event filtering code.
- 1990 – Launch of COMMAND/Post: Utilizing Avant-Garde’s software as a baseline, Boole & Babbage engineered and launched COMMAND/Post. It acted as a centralised “Manager of Managers” console designed to aggregate, parse, and filter event logs from disparate network hardware.
- 1993 – The Star Trek Marketing Phenomenon: To market COMMAND/Post and MainView as futuristic “enterprise command centers,” the company licensed the Star Trek IP from Paramount. They ran an iconic campaign featuring actor Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker) operating Boole & Babbage consoles directly on the set of the USS Enterprise bridge.
3. Open Systems & Intelligent Agents Era (1994–1997)
During this period, COMMAND/Post evolved from a basic network alert collector into an intelligent, automated event-correlation engine capable of multi-platform system administration.
- 1994 – Intelligent Agent Engine: COMMAND/Post was heavily re-architected with intelligent agent technology. Agents deployed onto UNIX, Novell NetWare, and Windows NT servers could filter events locally before passing correlated data upstream to the main console.
- 1995 – Revenue Equilibrium: The enterprise transformation crossed a critical financial and technical milestone: Boole & Babbage’s revenues split exactly 50-50 between traditional mainframe tools and distributed client/server software (like COMMAND/Post).
- 1996 – Command MQ Distributed Messaging: Boole introduced Command MQ. This was one of the industry’s first performance management systems specifically engineered for IBM MQSeries messaging middleware architectures.
- Late 1996 – Maxm Systems Consolidation: Boole & Babbage acquired arch-rival Maxm Systems Corp., absorbing their Max/Enterprise network automation software. This consolidated the event management market and combined top filtering algorithms into the COMMAND/Post product pipeline.
4. BMC Software Merger & Legacy Era (1998–Present)
As large software suites looked to consolidate end-to-end IT service management (ITSM), Boole & Babbage’s specialized event console became the ultimate target for cross-platform integration.
- Late 1998 – The Merger Announcement: In October 1998, the board agreed to an acquisition by BMC Software in a stock swap valued at $900 million.
- March 1999 – Integration and Product Lifecycle: The merger officially closed. BMC integrated COMMAND/Post’s upper-level console consolidation engine with BMC PATROL, which was a market leader in localized application and database event automation.
- Legacy Footprint: The combined console architecture allowed users to manage databases, network topologies, messaging layers, and servers from a singular screen. Key architectural methodologies pioneered by MainView and COMMAND/Post remain embedded within BMC’s modern enterprise portfolio.
COMMAND/Post enterprise manager software developed by Boole & Babbage technical timeline by era
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