Candle Corp - The Software Magazine 1995 Top 100 - Company Profile - Brief Article

Software Magazine, July, 1995 by Colleen Frye, Deborah Melewski

Corporate revenue for Candle Corp. rose slightly in 1994, moving to $213 million from $209 million the previous year. Although such growth is negligible by software industry standards, the company can claim success as its modest progress comes in the midst of a dramatic product transition.

In recent years Candle has had to rethink its position, focusing on a new strategy. Like other systems management vendors that built successful companies during the mainframe era, Candle faces new challenges in the increasingly distributed computing environments of the mid-1990s. Its approach is unique, although it embraces emerging industry standards. Candle has made a special commitment to bringing object-oriented software techniques to the management of multiple platforms. Objects will pay a dividend in scalability, Candle attests. Unix markets form the new battlefield the company is aggressively pursuing.

This has required considerable investment. For R&D alone in 1994, Candle spent 35% of total revenue. Further, customers for the most part are still in the prototyping stage for enterprisewide network and systems management projects, and a general trend toward fewer operation centers may also have played a hand in mitigating near-term growth.