Technical direction

In 1981 Don Christensen was introduced to Phil Stymfal, a software engineer who was in charge of technical decisions at New England Life Insurance (NELI). Stymfal immediately saw the advantages of ADS and was unafraid to try new products. He recommended that NELI purchase TELON and NELI became the first commercial customer by signing a license agreement for $30k in mid-1981.

When the system proved itself at NELI, Stymfal used his connections through The New England Productivity Group to generate more interest in TELON. Through these contacts Christensen was able to sign two more Boston-area customers to $30k license agreements: Raytheon and John Hancock Life Insurance. Christensen has stated that TELON might never have been successful without Stymfal's influence and his confidence in recommending an untried product.

Not long before the NELI contract, Christensen left Liberty Mutual to start his own company. Since ADS had been written on Liberty Mutual's mainframe, Christensen left with the understanding that if Liberty ever decided to use TELON it could acquire the software free of charge. Christensen Systems Inc. was created soon after the NELI signing and its first employee was Chris McNeil, who had worked with Christensen back at Liberty Mutual before moving to Cape Cod. His responsibilities included supporting NELI and to continuing work on TELON.

When it was obvious that TELON was becoming a successful product and that CSI was a stable company, Liberty Mutual became the fourth customer by the end of 1981. They were able to use the software for free but later signed a support agreement. In a fitting tribute, both the original Liberty Mutual CAPS system and second claims processing applications that McNeil and Christensen worked on while employed at Liberty Mutual were rewritten using TELON.

With four major customers by early 1982, CSI hired Stymfal as the second employee to work alongside McNeil. Stymfal's role was as Director of Development and he, together with McNeil, made most of the technological decisions regarding TELON until their departure in 1987. By this point, Christensen had moved into more of a sales and marketing position. An office was opened in Quincy, Massachusetts, and developer Gig Kirk was hired in September. In October Bob Giel, an acquaintance of Stymfal, was hired as Director of Finance to handle business and sales planning.

The name TELON had not yet been created and the system was still being called by its generic name, ADS. Casual research was done to come up with a name. Christensen was drawn to using Greek works and originally explored using Telos (Greek for "purpose" or "goal") but it was already utilized by a software company in California. Finally TELON was chosen as a contraction of Telos and Eon (forever). McNeil created a draft of the TELON logo, using eight concentric circles to represent an octave and the multiple steps of evolutionary development. A local graphic designer was then hired to draw it professionally.

The ease with which CSI was able to attract its first four customers caused a lack of urgency in pursuing further sales. Christensen did not create a large enough sales pipeline to keep up the growth, creating a lull in sales. This would later contribute to the decision to sell CSI to Pansophic Systems.

Through 1982–83 development of TELON would continue with additional features being added including:

• Generating COBOL for executing in the CICS environment.
• Generating PL/I. TELON was the only one of the major CASE generators that generated PL/I
• Supporting multiple databases including IMS/DB and DB2.

By this time TELON itself was starting to become a large application. The TELON Design Facility (TDF) was a series of TSO applications that took users through the creation of their screens. It had been decided from the beginning that the TDF would be written with TELON itself. Christensen would later remark that this helped guarantee that TELON would be a robust system because developers would be forced to use it. It also gave CSI ideas for ways to improve productivity.

Financial picture

Almost all of the early sales for TELON were generated through Phil Stymfal's contacts with other insurance companies. These contacts gave CSI a chance to give a demo at the companies which usually ended in a sale. Companies outside of Stymfal's circle were reluctant to look at TELON perhaps because it was much less expensive than its main competitors at the time, Informatics' Mark V and IBM's application generator, and was, therefore, not taken seriously. In 1982, TELON for IMS was being sold for $75,000 so CSI raised the price to $95,000 to give it more credibility. The price of the CICS offering was also increased. Two years later, after it was acquired by Pansophic Systems, TELON would see another price increase for much the same reasons.

In 1982 CSI was able to secure $100,000 in working capital from the Boston area consulting firm Computer Partners in exchange for the exclusive right to bring TELON into Boston area companies. A year later CSI bought out its commitment by securing a loan from State Street Bank and Trust Company.

Advantages of TELON over its competitors

The main asset of TELON was that it worked; customers were able to see immediate returns on their investment in the software. In the early years, when TELON was cheaper, it would take only one project for a customer to break even. Even after the price increases, companies could recoup their costs quickly.

Because TELON generated fully independent COBOL code, the resulting applications could be maintained by traditional methods (i.e. "by hand") if CSI were ever to become insolvent. This made the decision to purchase TELON less risky for those companies that were given a trial since they would not have to scrap their application.

This is in direct contrast to the two main competitors of the time, Informatics' Mark V and IBM's application generator. Mark V was an add-on to Informatics' successful report generator Mark IV but it was unwieldy and didn't address as much of the development lifecycle as TELON. IBM's solution required a run-time component for the generated applications to execute, putting the customer in a long-term bind with IBM. Both products were much more expensive than TELON and head-to-head trials proved TELON to be more productive.

TELON gave a standard structure and design to all the applications written with it. Developers could easily understand the design of any TELON application once he or she was familiar with the TELON methodology.

Release 2.0 problems

TELON 2.0 was the first major release of TELON after it was acquired by Pansophic. Among other things, it added support for IBM's DB2 database system. 2.0 was plagued by delays, revolving management, and was released in 1987 with many bugs. As a result, TELON lost some of its market share and almost lost its lead in the industry. It took a few years before TELON was again considered a solid product.

Telon/38

For a short period in the late 1980s, Pansophic marketed a product known as Telon/38, targeted at the IBM System/38 platform. Telon/38 was a rebranded version of the Synon/2 tool from Synon. Years later, Synon/2 also came to be acquired by CA and is now known as CA 2E.