UCCEL: the biggest software company in the World?
So, in December 1983, I started to work for the Director of International Licensees, starting at £14,000. UCC sold utility software for IBM MVS systems; things like tape management, job scheduling, and other products that only had appeal inside the data centre.
What had happened was that a couple of years ago a new European Director had been appointed, ex-Cincom, who had slowly recruited a couple of of people he had worked closely with at Cincom to senior positions. I slipped in by accident, more or less, lower down the chain, as "technical consultant"; I actually had a job title, contrary to my normal expectations. The European Director was called Mike Cocks, and he had been hired into Cincom by the American who was sent over in the early seventies to set up their European operation, Mike Hunt. The story was that he had turned the wrong way coming out of Heathrow, drove the right distance, and opened an office where he arrived, in Maidenhead.
UCC had been mainly a bureau in the States, and 50% of revenue was from that side of the business. They had developed utilities for their own use, with inspiring names such as UCC1, UCC2 and UCC7. Over time, the software business was clearly going to be more important, but only the European business was really run as a software company.
I sat in the UK support office for the first couple of months, picking up UK support calls and reading the microfiche for the products to learn how they worked (all assembler, of course). When they ran a training class, I was there listening in.
We didn't have access to a machine that could run the products, of course; the cost would have been prohibitive for our volume of business. So you asked the customer what he had done, and what seemed to have happened. We followed it through in the code to see how that result might have been obtained, and made suggestions. If they worked, the problem was fixed. We had a slow modem dial-up to the Dallas head office, and could run TSO/ISPF (an interactive session) to the mainframe there. The main support and development teams had put together a couple of crude problem databases, and we could search through them; there were also paper files of patches that had been issued. Careful reading of that would come up with answers to most problems.
Failing all else, you would either telex or phone people you knew in support to get them to pick up the problem, with full access to a development machine in front of them. No email, no fax, at least in those days.
The first customer I had to deal with was in Singapore, the Port of Singapore Authority. The agent in Singapore was reasonably feeble, I would now say, and couldn't do much more than process the transaction. They had got the PSA to agree to install the product, go through training, and then maybe sign a contract while I was there, if it all went well. So I went out to spend two weeks in mid-February on the equator, half cooked in the humidity outside, and half-frozen in the chill air-conditioned inside. This was with a product that I had first heard of two months ago, and hadn't touched or seen until that day, and I had to install it and then run a five day training class. Standing over an AC vent in the computer room for two days was probably a mistake. I developed a bad cold, and spent the training class with regular nosebleeds. By then I had developed the habit, when on long trips over weekends, of taking the sightseeing bus trips for tourists. This kept boredom away (with luck), and forced me to be awake at normal times in strange timezones. For the next few months, life went on as normal. I spent a couple of weeks in Israel, then started making regular trips to Tokyo, where we had just appointed a new agent. All good learning experiences, but nothing much exciting.
About the same time, we appointed a new agent in South Africa. Most of our agents were either current or ex agents of Cincom, so we knew quite a bit about them, and these people were no exception. I spent a bit of time out there, in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town. One minor, unfashionable point: I saw less segregation there than I did in America. I took to spending weekends riding at a club near Johannesburg; horse riding was a relatively new interest for me. Some of the local members thought that I lived there.
In early '85, we decided to expand, and hired a secretary and another support person (also called Paul). He was inexperienced in product support, but had worked in mainframe operations management, so should be able to communicate with our typical users. So for four or five months, he stayed in the office, and went on classes to learn our products.
Some time in June, another old contact from Cincom who had left at about the same time called me, and offered me the job of Licensee Manager with his company (CCA). It sounded good, I liked him, and I accepted. I then made the big mistake of letting UCCEL (they changed their name) persuade me to stay. This pissed off the other guy; and it never works, ever. I did get a pay rise to approx £40,000 out of it, though. UCCEL were in the throes of taking over another company, Corodale, based in Boston, who made similar products but for IBM's smaller and cheaper OS, called DOS, or DOS/VSE at the time. I was to be responsible for international agents, and to work with one of the senior European managers in devising the introduction plan.
Problem was, VSE was dying, as was the whole mainframe market, although we hadn't seen it at the time. The existing market was saturated with those products, and there wasn't much scope to generate new sales revenue. We worked out a reasonable model, only to be told that we had to increase the revenue generated.
Just after I moved over to the VSE products, we had to schedule a UCC-1 training class in Cape Town so Paul (the other Paul) was put up for it. He'd been in the job for a few months, and had been on a couple of classes, so it seemed reasonable. My boss, Peter, went off the Japan for a couple of weeks just before the class. Two days before, Paul came to me and said that he couldn't do it. I wasn't impressed, told him so, and arranged for one of the good UK support people (John Reeves) to take it over.
I got a really serious telling off for that. Paul eventually moved over to UK Sales, where he was better suited.
The next year was pretty bad. I had targets that were never going to be met, and someone was out to get me (I still haven't really worked out if it was Peter Thorpe or Mike Cocks). Because we were so far away from targets, I was trying to be useful outside my product line as well. By this time we had two support people (John Reeves, who moved over from UK support, and Steve Wakefield, who I hired), and an extra business manager (Graham Smith). One of the various things I helped on was to set up the contract for a new agent in the Middle East.
This was one of those things that only happens in real life. We had decided that we needed an agent in the Middle East, as it was the largest uncovered territory we had. So we talked to a few people in the business, and they all said beware of rip-offs, but this company are at least honest. So we set up a deal with them. Peter and Graham did most of the visits, but they couldn't get on with the ex-pat Brit who ran the part of the business we were working with. So I got to negotiate it all. This meant a lot of time out there (the company, Al-Falak, was based in Saudi Arabia).
In September ('86), Liz had a miscarriage at five months, following on from placenta praevia. I took a couple of days off work. On the day that I came back in, I was told that, unless things improved, I would be out of a job. They didn't. I also didn't look for work, thinking that my best option was to work hard in UCCEL. It wasn't.
