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If you still only thought of Dataware Technologies, Inc. as the publisher of software behind a large number of corporate and governmental CD-ROM titles, you'd be missing the picture, even though the discs using Dataware software do constitute a significant portion of the CD-ROM market. Dataware has set itself the ambitious goal of supporting businesses and large institutions' need to access their own information, for in-house use and for commercial publishing. From its start in 1988, the company has focused on the acquisition of technologies and businesses with this goal in mind, which, as Dataware observers are now seeing, doesn't necessarily mean CD-ROM uber alles.
Not that anyone should feel embarrassed for thinking about Dataware as a CD-ROM-centric operation. After all, since 1986, when Dataware's CEO Kurt Mueller began the work that led to the founding of Dataware in 1988, with his efforts with the German company Computer 2000, CD-ROM has been the tool of practice. Even today, visitors to the company's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts can't avoid thinking of Dataware and compact discs together: neatly-framed copies of hundreds of discs tile the company's reception-area walls and spill down the hall to the distant cubicles.
Dataware started its CD-ROM display when the company assumed its current corporate form in the move to Cambridge in 1988. While it is quite likely that one day CD-ROMs could cover all the walls of their large office, the story of this company's anticipation of the real value of electronic information is more and more miscast by the hallway displays of shiny discs.
DATAWARE'S ORIGINS: A MARKET OPPORTUNITY EMERGES
In 1982, Bain & Company, a New York-based consulting firm that helps large companies to develop and implement business strategies, sent Mueller to Germany to help establish their Munich office. Mueller stayed with Bain in Munich until 1984, doing mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures, specifically helping American and British companies come to Germany. From 1984 to 1986, he ran Lotus Development Corporation's startup operations in Germany.
Mueller's first distributor of Lotus products was the German company, Computer 2000. At the time, Computer 2000 was a tiny company with three partners. "However," Mueller recalls, "they got the contracts to sell Lotus 1.2-3, and the Hercules monochrome graphics board, two of the products that...