The Agenda - Fast Change

Nonetheless, he quickly became a convert. Several factors helped to win him over: the number of decisions that were made over the phone or through email, rather than in meetings; the environment at Tivoli; the holiday party in Raleigh, during which IBMers danced and socialized with colleagues, in many cases for the first time; the quarterly bonuses (IBM's bonuses are annual); the sense of autonomy. That sense of autonomy is especially attractive: Edwards, who is now vice president of application-management R&D at Tivoli, says that he no longer fears being "escalated" (IBM-speak for "going over someone's head to the boss"). "When people tell me that they're going to escalate, I tell them, 'You can, but I don't know who you're going to escalate to, or how far you're going to get. The first thing that person is going to ask you is, Did you talk to Ken? So it's best for us to work through the issue,' " Edwards says.

From Red to Purple

At the time of the acquisition, the folks at Tivoli were experiencing their own sense of apprehension. Many of them were happy to accept the resources that IBM had to offer, but they feared that they might be smothered in the process. People who had come to Tivoli as refugees from big companies worried that they would experience bureaucratic déjà vu. Almost everyone at Tivoli was concerned that their company would lose its culture.

Martin Neath, 35, vowed to himself that none of those fears would be realized. Neath, the seventh employee ever to work for Tivoli, had risen through the ranks at the company, going from programmer to executive vice president, and in the eyes of his coworkers, he as much as anybody else embodied the company's spirit. His office in Austin is the unofficial Tivoli museum. On his bulletin board are the single-malt scotch labels that inspired the code names for Tivoli products; a copy of former CEO Frank Moss's statement of company goals from 1994 (Number one: "Make Tivoli a great place to work"); a stock certificate from 1995, the year in which Tivoli went public; and a "Liquidator" water gun that was used in Tivoli's legendary shoot-outs. Neath also has memorabilia from the company's ongoing war with Computer Associates, including a roll of toilet paper featuring the face of CA's CEO. But the most significant artifact is his desk: It happens to be the company's original conference table. He remembers when all of Tivoli's employees could fit around that table, just like a family.

Now that Tivoli was part of IBM, Neath was determined to preserve Tivoli's status as a close-knit company and as a "high-energy, results-oriented kind of place." That small-company spirit, after all, is what fueled Tivoli's survival and success during its early days.

"Systems-management software is important stuff, but it ain't that sexy," explains Mark McClain, 36, Tivoli's vice president of marketing. "Frank Moss made it sexy, though. He made us believe that we were a cutting-edge company doing cool stuff. It's like the famous story of the three bricklayers: The first says, 'I'm laying bricks,' the second says, 'I'm making a wall,' and the third says, 'I'm building a cathedral.' Tivoli is that third bricklayer."

History also figured into the fears of many Tivolians. After all, IBM was largely responsible for Tivoli's creation in the first place. Were they now characters in some Dickensian plot twist? In the late 1980s, more and more companies were moving away from their centralized mainframe computers and toward distributed networks. In response to that trend, a handful of IBMers in Austin wanted to build software that would help manage the far-flung systems on those networks.

IBM chose to pass up that opportunity. But three IBMers -- Robert Fabbio, 41; Steve Marcie, 35; and Todd Smith, 47 -- grabbed it. They left IBM to start Tivoli; the company was incorporated in August 1989.

"We envisioned a single product to manage computers on a network, and as far as we knew, nobody had done that before," recalls Marcie, now a technology ambassador for Tivoli. That lack of precedent, he adds, "is what created most of our problems inside IBM." As it turned out, they solved those problems so well that their startup managed to attract financing from top venture-capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers -- the VC outfit that helped launch other well-known software startups, such as Lotus and Netscape.

Seven years later, when they were considering the deal with IBM, Moss, Neath, and the rest of the Tivoli executive team understood that IBM would give them a competitive edge against Computer Associates. But how would the two companies work together? "The first pillar of the Tivoli culture was a willingness to take risks," says Moss. "There was a real sense of urgency. We used to say, 'No mañana' -- there is no tomorrow."