A mainframe company turned client-server, and sold for a 500% year
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
A human resources software vendor Jonathan Hare joined in autumn 1993 as Director of Business Development. A struggling mainframe company restructured into a client-server applications vendor; the turnaround completed with an all-cash sale yielding, by Hare's contemporaneous account, a 500% single-year return to investors.
It is where the Application Service Provider idea took its practical shape — the experience he says he drew on when he independently rediscovered the hosted model at Evolve.
S-094 adds the aftermath edge: the $52M Ceridian sale that Val Vaden orchestrated, and — when five key Tesseract employees later quit to join Evolve — the cease-and-desist Ceridian sent despite having waived Hare's non-solicitation provisions. The bluff's fate is its own episode.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Patrick C. Sommers, president of Ceridian Employer Services, was chairman; Hare reported directly to him after he stepped in. Val Vaden was on the board and had been VP of marketing.
Hare left to found Evolve Software in February 1995 and brought the entire core technical team with him. Tesseract had by then been acquired by Ceridian, which made the move legally delicate — and is why an uninvited guest at the funding meeting was a genuine problem rather than an irritation.
Val Vaden, who had hired Hare into Tesseract, made his first serious money on the Ceridian sale.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Omnis — the only client-server tool that worked across everything
Open →board member who hired HareHarvard then Stanford, Tesseract, Benchmark — and a game of chicken with a city bus
Open →sold toThe acquirer whose extortion-by-letter evaporated after one phone call
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.
Correct this entry → Add a story, photo or link → Browse the graph →