Compuware
More info
- Creator
- Peter Karmanos Jr., Thomas Thewes, Allen Cutting
- Released
- 1973–2020
- Owner
- BMC Software (from 2020)
- Type
- Developer tools
Detroit company that built debugging and testing tools for mainframes and, almost in passing, produced Dynatrace.
Peter Karmanos Jr. and two colleagues started Compuware in the Detroit area in 1973 as a consulting outfit. The real money came from tools for COBOL programmers on mainframes: Abend-AID explained why a job had crashed, File-AID let you browse and edit data files, and Xpediter was an interactive debugger. If you'd been reading hex dumps from failed JCL jobs, that was a big deal.
In 2003 the headquarters moved into downtown Detroit, at a time when few big companies dared. Compuware bought Dynatrace in 2011, but in 2014 Thoma Bravo took the company private and split the two apart. The mainframe business was bought by BMC Software in 2020, gathering most of CA's old rivals under one roof.