Personality Profile - Andrew Filipowski: Unconventional Leader

He aims for the top in systems
management with Platinum Technology

                      Name: Andrew Filipowski
                       Age: 44
            Place of Birth: Chicago, IL
          Current Position: Co-founder, chairman, CEO, and president, Platinum
                            Technology, Inc.
 Years in Current Position: Eight
     Years in the Industry: 26
             Car He Drives: 1993 Range Rover
Favorite Non-Work Activity: Always works, but likes skiing and
                            photography. Active in environmental 
                            organizations.
Prediction for the Future of Open Systems: "We don't believe
     that Unix is the single solution. If you mean that there should
     be an interchangeability of parts, then yes, that's our religious
     experience. People ought to be able to unplug this and plug that
     in. I say 'open enterprise' to describe the heterogeneous environments
     that really exist because I can't find a single global 5,000
     company that's just using Unix, nor do they ever want to be just
     Unix."

Andrew Filipowski has been described as flamboyant, colorful, flippant, profane, dynamic, and driven. He is all those things and more. Most notably, he is chairman and CEO of Platinum Technology, a rapidly emerging vendor of enterprise-wide systems management software.

Filipowski's resume reads a little like a movie script. The quintessential self-made man, he is the son of immigrants and struck out on his own rather than finish college. He rose rapidly, becoming a CEO in his 20s. Today he is either CEO or chairman of a diverse group of companies, including a chain of chicken restaurants, food stores, a real estate company, an entertainment company that records gospel music, a film and production company, and a residential builder. He's deeply involved in environmental issues as founder of the Platinum Wildlife Foundation to preserve the dwindling population of black rhinoceroses in Africa.

Filipowski does not fit any standard mold. He's a bearded, long-haired leader who believes in team management and looks as if he would be more at home on a Harley-Davidson than behind a big desk. "I'm driven by competitiveness," he says. "I'm such a liberal that I've crossed the boundary into conservatism. I'm such a conservative that I go beyond right and fall into liberalism. I work almost all the time-even well into my sleep. Recreation for me is the formation of strategies, the selling of those strategies, the execution and step-by-step process of getting an idea implemented."

A graduate of Harvard's short course for business managers, "Flip"-as he is known to friends-also knows the value of effective management. "The greatest obstacle to success is to try to do these things single-handedly," he says. "You can't do things in a complex business unless you can develop some extraordinary teams of folks to get the job done and present a compelling strategy, articulate it, and then sell it effectively. Then you can get a group to do it with an enormous amount of passion and commitment."

Learned by Doing

Filipowski's parents immigrated from Poland to Chicago, where Andrew was born a few months after they arrived. He attended St. John's Military Academy in Wisconsin and began college at the University of Illinois at Chicago. However, he quit after a semester, got married, and began the career in computing that was to lead him, 10 years later, to head his own company. In the meantime, he learned by doing things. "In today's terminology, it would probably be called hacking," Filipowski says. He started in 1969 as a computer operator for Time, Inc., where he stayed for two years, then moved to Motorola, where he became involved in systems programming and database administration. In 1972 he was put in charge of the data processing department at AB Dick, managing a 95-person department at age 22. "I kind of got into systems programming the quick and dirty way," he says. "I had a knack for it. So I suppose that's how the whole thing started out, just enjoying that sort of work."

In 1973, Filipowski met John Cullinane, then president of the software company Cullinane Corp., Westwood, Mass, who had come to AB Dick to try to sell his company's database. Cullinane recruited Filipowski and by 1978 Filipowski was the chief operating officer of the firm, later called Cullinet Software. He started a Chicago office for the company and later was appointed its executive vice president. He spent much of his time running the company's Midwest region, selling database products, and teaching people how to use them.

But even with that success, Filipowski became restless. He wanted more control. "It was probably a case of being 27 years old and thinking you're real smart and thinking you own the company when somebody else really does," he says. "It gets you in a conflict situation. I was pretty insistent that the owner stay out of it and that I run it my own way. He was insistent that I wouldn't. Although it never got to a flat-out fist fight, it was obvious that if I wanted my own company, I'd have to start it myself."

So in 1979 Filipowski and co-worker Ray Nawara started DBMS, Inc., a database tools company. The company grew to $16 million in annual sales in seven years. However, the market for IDMS, the Cullinet database on which DBMS depended, faltered and Filipowski and Nawara had a falling out. A subsequent struggle for control of the company led to Filipowski's ouster in 1987. Immediately, he secured financial backing for a new database management company and started Platinum Technology, headquartered in Oakbrook Terrace, IL.

Platinum's Strategy

Filipowski formulated the strategy of specializing in software to support IBM's DB2 databases, providing tools for managing information stored in the databases. Eventually, the company's range of products expanded to include relational database systems residing on mainframes, midrange, Unix-based, and PC/LAN client/server systems. In its early days, Platinum's primary competitor was BMC Software, Inc., Sugar Land, TX, the largest supplier of tools for DB2. "Whenever you start a company and you want to grow it into a monster, you have to define a niche that you can defend as a small company," Filipowski says. "In 1987, it appeared that relational database management systems might be a good place to put your money. If they became universally accepted, then they would provide a fertile marketplace in which to exploit the need for deployment tools, operational tools, and administrative tools. We got lucky and that technology flourished."

Platinum grew from $1.3 million in total revenue in 1988 to $95 million in 1994. Its net income grew from a $1 million loss in 1988 to $9.3 million in profit in 1992. In the past two years profits have been lower due to Platinum's acquisition of other companies, but it accumulated a substantial nest egg of $120 million by the end of 1994. Then, between January and May of this year, Platinum went on a buying spree, acquiring 10 companies in five months-all part of a plan by Filipowski to put together a unified series of systems management products across the computing spectrum from PC LANs to mainframes. In February, he announced the company's Platinum Open Enterprise Management System, an architecture for unified systems management.

The Acquisitions

The acquisitions and their products include: At the time the acquisitions began, with Platinum's high return to its venture capitalists-an 80 to 1 return in two years-and its successful public offering of 1991, the company was poised to take on a broader market. "That kind of put us in the limelight and gave us the opportunity to do other things," Filipowski says. "As we came to the dominance of the DB2 and Oracle-Sybase-Informix tools niche, and we had $120 million in the bank, it was time to take the next step. How do we get from dominating this niche to dominating the entire software business, if that's our expectation?"

Platinum avoided being acquired by a larger company and decided to go into the acquisition mode itself. "About two years ago, it became clear to us that the marketplace was morphing into a different space," Filipowski says. "Five years ago it was a host-centric computing environment in which most serious global 5,000 companies were running the majority of their commercial business on a couple of host machines in non-networked environments. Through the process that I describe as morphing, people went from host-centricity to coupling up computers into networks. That became feasible because the bandwidth of the interconnections became wide enough to make that feasible. People were buying additional processors rather than expanding the ones they had. They began thinking in a different way, and they certainly were influenced by GUIs, workstations, PCs, and all the desktop computers that were proliferating through their organization. When they tried to connect them, they created a whole new environment-one in which the host-centric systems management tools didn't function. Mistakenly, of course, the Unix environments and all the other new environments were being referred to as non-industrial-strength. Most people made it sound like a genetic defect in Unix or in Windows, and a genetic strength in MVS. The truth was that nobody had sat down and written the necessary systems management software to take those toy computers into the industrial-strength world. It was just a matter of the software existing or not."

Filipowski thought he saw an enormous, multibillion-dollar opportunity, spread across a broad spectrum of systems software. "It was a matter of how much we wanted to go after, and whether we could sneak through the gauntlet of other software companies all aiming for the same thing," he says. The competition appeared to be Computer Associates and Legent-later acquired by Computer Associates. That acquisition, Filipowski says, "put the Legent threat away." Startups such as Open Vision and Tivoli "had the fatal flaw of thinking that Unix would be the dominant environment in the enterprise, and we disagree with that view," he says. "We think anyone who is limited to Unix is going to be ultimately relegated to a tactical situation. We have a picture that says it's MVS, Unix and Windows. All three are going to thrive and remain interconnected for a long time to come."

Once Platinum decided to go after that marketplace, the company mapped out the problems that were causing its customers the most pain. "We drew what we thought was the product line that needed to be delivered to them to relieve most of that pain. We briefly considered writing all this code ourselves, but we didn't think we could write it all from scratch. We felt relatively certain that the acquisition of these smaller companies would be roughly the same, anyway. We were certainly after fresh new technology-not broken down product lines. There were companies present and with good technology in almost every area. We set out to pick off the number one player in every category, and we feel today that we got real lucky for whatever reason. We have never been turned down in any of the acquisitions we went after, which is a real surprise. We thought we'd find some of our competitors going after some of the same companies, but our competitors were pretty much asleep during this whole period, dealing with whatever issues they had internally."

Ready to Grow

Filipowski now feels that his company is ready to become a multi-billion-dollar company. "We feel we can reach $2 billion or $3 billion in revenue by the end of this decade and more," he says. "We certainly can sustain the base we have of $300+ million and should sustain a 40 to 60 percent growth rate for some time. We might even surprise with a couple of 100 percent growth years with the product line we have now."

Filipowski's philosophy is to leave his new acquisitions alone to produce technology that will win in the marketplace, consistent with his approach of team management rather than a hierarchy. "I don't think we have to go out and start tailoring their suits so they look like us," he says. "That's a pretty unrealistic expectation in this day and age. Their responsibility is to create and dominate with the best technology they can possibly produce, and they were picked because they had the passion to do that. And they will have to demand of their own people that they dominate each individual product niche that they have selected."