by Joseph Brady, Director of Business Development and Cloud Alliance Leader at Treehouse Software, Inc.
Introduction
Many readers know that Treehouse Software has been around since 1983, serving enterprises worldwide with industry-leading software products and outstanding technical support. This blog series will dig a little deeper into Treehouse Software’s origins and explore how founder and president, George Szakach blazed a trail from being a programmer and manager in the 1960s and 1970s, to creating and growing his own software company from the early 1980s up to the present.
Treehouse First Generations… 1980s – 90s
As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, George’s foundational mainframe experience from 1960 to 1975, combined with skills honed from 1975 to 1982 at Software AG, planted the seeds for the next step, building Treehouse Software. George explains:
“Treehouse Software was started during Christmas of 1982, with a consulting assignment I decided to take in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia doing ADABAS performance analysis and tuning. In addition, I was asked to teach the customer how to use ADAMINT (which I get credit for developing from July 1975 through May 1979 – or blame, take your pick). I thoroughly enjoyed my 10 weeks in the Kingdom, where I became a big fan of pistachio nuts.
Treehouse Software was incorporated in mid-1984 in Sewickley, PA. The plan then was to provide consulting and educational services to SAG sites, while developing software products related to the SAG enterprise. The services might sell the products, and vice versa. It worked and still works. I started hiring help almost immediately as the demand for products and services was growing.
By the way, Sewickley is a small town near Pittsburgh where the oil, steel, coal barons of the 1800s and early 1900s had their summer homes up the hill from the river. The 100-year-old horse-and-wagon trails and stone walls around the estates can still be seen.”
The Sewickley Bridge spans the Ohio River between Sewickley and Moon Township, PA.
Some interesting facts about Treehouse Software, Inc.
By the end of the 20th century, Treehouse designed, developed, and released ten products, most notably:
- TRIM, ADABAS and Natural Performance Monitor
- Auditre, Auditing Tool for ADABAS
- N2O, Change Management System for Natural
- SECURITRE, Security System for ADABAS, Natural, and ADABAS Utilities
- tRelational/DPS, ADABAS-to-RDBMS Data Replication Package
- DPSync, Real-time ADABAS-to-RDBMS
Treehouse also marketed several additional products from companies around the world. Most were related to ADABAS.
Other miscellaneous Treehouse happenings last century:
- Taught classes for over 4000 students, ADABAS and Natural related, and related to Treehouse products.
- Partnered with 20 affiliates or marketing representatives in various countries, topping out at 14 around 1990.
- Produced 55 issues of the popular Treetips newsletter, with a hard-copy circulation of 13,000 per issue.
- Attended 11 Software AG conferences.
- Presented at 90 regional and local Software AG meetings in various countries.
- Visited affiliates, customers, and partners in at least 24 countries on all continents except Antarctica.
- Invited to Oracle Conference in 1995, in Philadelphia, where Emilie Szakach entertained the crowd with an on-stage dance with Chubby Checker.
- Bought four IBM mainframes for the company.
- Hired many top notch programmers and analysts, tech writers, support personnel.
- Along with most of the world, we awaited and prepared for the feared Y2K debacle, which didn’t happen. However, as the year 2000 approached, one of Treehouse’s most popular and most requested give-aways ever, was our Y2K desk clock…
Cha, Cha, Cha, Changes…
Along with many new products, innovations, and memorable, contributing staff moving through the doors of the Treehouse, we’ve also had several iterations of the company logo and colors, as seen in the following graphic. Do you have a favorite?
Coming soon… Part 3: Change is in the Air, and in the Clouds…
About Treehouse Software
Since 1983, Treehouse Software has been serving enterprises worldwide with industry-leading mainframe software products and outstanding technical support. Today, Treehouse Software is a global leader in providing data replication, and integration solutions for the most complex and demanding heterogeneous environments, as well as feature-rich, accelerated-ROI offerings for information delivery, and application modernization.
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