[1] The company’s first product, Total, was the first commercial database management system that was not bundled with manufacturer hardware and proprietary software.

The only software businesses in existence at that time were a small number of service bureaus, none of which was located in Cincinnati, where Nies resided.

[2] At a time when each application program "owned" the data it used, a company often had multiple copies of similar information: The problem was known, and CODASYL's[10] Database Task Group Report wrote about it, as did General Electric and IBM.

[9] Starting in 1971, Cincom opened offices in Canada, England, Belgium, France, Italy, Australia, Japan, Brazil and Hong Kong.

[citation needed]On August 20, 1984, U.S. President Ronald Reagan called Cincom and Tom Nies "the epitome of entrepreneurial spirit of American business.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed at the time, and Cincom's founder Tom Nies stepped down from his post at the company to retire.

They would use the data management aspects of many programs with reasonable similarities to develop the product called Total, which was seen as an improvement and generalization of IBM's DBOMP.

[17] Other than IBM, which was still in the "selling iron" business, Cincom became the first U.S. software firm to promote the concept of a database management system (DBMS).