To move forward, we often need to look back.

In our industry, that means exploring our corporate forebearers’ history, examining what worked, what didn’t and what has changed.

It also means looking at what’s stayed the same.

In 1995, Dr. David Allison of the Smithsonian Institute travelled to Cincinnati to interview a software expert. Thomas Nies, the industry’s longest-serving CEO, welcomed him into Cincom Systems’ headquarters, where they spoke for over two and a half hours. The transcribed conversation has aged as gracefully as Nies’ company, which remains one of the world’s leading software enterprises.

“We literally helped to create the entire database industry through this process of seeing what the customer problems were and responding to how we could help solve them,” Nies told Dr. Allison. “However, we next began to see that database management was only one of many problems that needed to be solved (…) So later, we branched out into a lot of other technology areas as well.”

More than 20 years later, Cincom continues to address companies’ IT challenges with its innovative software solutions. Greg Hall, Cincom’s Director of Product Management, tells Microsoft Dynamics 365 MVP Rick McCutcheon about the company’s newest innovation.

“My job is to make sure that we’re focusing on the right markets,” he says. “And we noticed in 2015 and 2016 that they had really started to shift. The world is moving toward the cloud, and we must get out in front of it.”

Hall heads Cincom’s CPQSync product, the organization’s first foray into cloud-based Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solutions. Working within the world of CPQ itself is nothing new for the company, which has had its hand in the game for more than 20 years, but this new, cloud-based delivery method is a significant leap forward for the Microsoft Dynamics space.

“When we started developing CPQSync, we really wanted to make sure that we were building integrations the right way,” says Hall. “We’re full-integrated with the Dynamics 365 Common Data Service (CDS)*. This makes the user experience between CPQSync and Dynamics 365 CE completely seamless.”

Cincom’s focus within the CPQ software industry has remained consistent for more than two decades, but its readiness to adopt new technologies has kept it at the forefront of innovation.

Its success is due to both.

*Common Data Service has been renamed to Microsoft Dataverse.