History
Synergy began life in 1988 as a research project for computer-aided software engineering by software developer Pete Orelup at Computers West of Irvine, California. Computers West was supporting itself through contract software development and an application for finance and insurance at automobile dealerships on the Pick OS, and probably had fewer than 10 employees.
In 1989, the company decided to pursue development of a software configuration management and version-control product, renamed itself CaseWare, and hired three more developers, Alan Wright, Kris Meissner, and Greg Holmberg. The system was re-imagined as a platform for building SCM systems running on Unix (Sun Solaris).
It was decided that a compiled language such as C++ was not sufficiently flexible, reliable, and productive, and so a new programming language was created, Accent. Accent has many features similar to Java, but pre-dates it by five years. It has a compiler that compiles to machine-independent byte-codes, and a virtual machine execution environment with automatic memory management. Except for the compiler and execution environment, the entire Amplify Control product was written in the Accent language, including a scalable, networked client-server architecture and use of a SQL database with a schema flexible enough to allow customer extension of the built-in data types in Accent without changes to the physical schema.
The system also included an automated, distributed build and continuous integration system, much like today's Maven and Hudson tools. The product was first released in 1990. Later a bug-tracking system was also built on the platform.
The company was somewhat successful, but lacked experienced leadership and started to lose market-share to ClearCase. In 1991 the company was nearly broke and the original developers walked out en masse. A new CEO, John Wark, was brought in, and the company was relaunched, although without the developers. Both the company and the product were renamed from CaseWare to Continuus Software in 1993. On July 29, 1999 Continuus Software announced a public offering listing its stock on the NASDAQ Stock Market. In October 2000, the Swedish software company Telelogic, agreed to purchase Continuus Software in a deal worth $42 million. Under Telelogic, Continuus was renamed to Synergy. In 2008 IBM announced that it had purchased Telelogic. Synergy was added to the IBM Rational family of SCM tools and named Rational Synergy.
Read more about this topic: Rational Synergy
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