I opened the West coast office of Systems Union in 1989 in beautiful downtown Bellevue (on the 'eastside' of Seattle) and began shuttling up and down the western seaboard selling SunSystems. Now (2022) it makes me laugh to see that a current Infor SunSystems customer case study is World Vision, an account I first sold in 1989!

It was around this time that I began evangelising the concept of 'SQL accounting' in Systems Union i.e. using a SQL RDBMS as the back end of an accounting system - something no-one was doing at the time. Yes, I know. Oracle Financials and SQL for Platinum came out around this time.

Unfortunately neither of them worked or at least that's what customers who'd been persuaded to buy them told me when we replaced them with SunSystems.Whereas our 'SQL connectors' to both the Oracle and then the Sybase databases did work - albeit rather slowly. And it took at least 4 hours to get running as opposed to the 15 minutes it normally took to install SunSystems.

The innovation of SQL accounting (or 'Client/Server Accounting' as I termed it in my book of the same name) was a hard sell. Neither Sybase at Emeryville nor Microsoft (who provided the COBOL-to-Sybase connector we used) were convinced that linking accounting applications to a SQL database was commercially interesting so this was another uphill struggle.

Even Systems Union was reluctant to switch from COBOL-ISAM to SQL but over the next decade every accounting software vendor that mattered embraced client/server accounting. What an evangelist I was!