I originally posted this on LinkedIn, but was asked to also post it here, so I here it is! I am happy to engage with any feedback / debate / discussion it might generate.
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TM1 is 40 years old this year; an unbelievable milestone and a testament to the genius of Manny Perez's invention which he bashed out on an IBM PC in his attic in New Jersey back in the early 80s (check out this awesome clip of Manny revisiting that attic to re-live that time here: https://youtu.be/XSc1OgaHGkA)

But 40 years of TM1 makes it "old" technology. Often people associate "old" with "no longer relevant" or "not modern" or something else with bad connotations attached to it.

But I encourage you to think about that for a few seconds longer than maybe you normally would when hearing something like that from some software vendor or consultant or analyst.

So… TM1 has been around for 40 years! Do you know how many BI / FP&A / Planning / Reporting tools have come and gone in that time? Too many to count. There have been many products that were the new shiny thing that shot to fame on a wave of hype driven by private equity investors and industry analysts and great marketers and salespeople that most people today have never even heard of anymore. Holos anyone? Excelsius? Crystal Reports? Oracle Express? I mean, do you remember Outlooksoft? Probably you don't…

What technology in the BI / FP&A software industry that was around in the early 1980s is still around? I can only think of one: Excel (and it actually came just *after* TM1). So humble TM1 and Excel are still standing after all the comings and goings over the years. And if I was a betting man, I imagine they will also be the only ones still around 40 years from now.

Why is that? Well, I could write a book on that, but if I had to condense it down to one thing… 

Both Excel and TM1 are cell-oriented. This is way more key than anyone in the industry seems to notice. The thing is, no one talks about it because nothing else other than TM1 and its clones (i.e. other functional databases that have tried to replicate the TM1 approach) can do it. (Also, for some reason the whole BI industry seems preoccupied with trying to eliminate Excel but keeps getting defeated generation after generation... but I digress).

TM1 is a category of database that is simply not acknowledged in the broader database and technology worlds. There are reasons for this, but not *good* reasons; Manny had a well-reasoned theory about people who default to "cell think" as opposed to "report think".

Cell-orientation is critical to enable the flexibility necessary to solve all kinds of business problems that you just can't any other way. Why do you think so many people go back to Excel once they have reached the limits of the latest shiny BI tool? It is because Excel has flexibility that works and matters that BI tools simply do not even think about. TM1 is simply an extension of this philosophy but taking it way beyond the limits of Excel and providing the power of an enterprise scale database to cell-oriented application building. 

Manny understood this similarity between the tools around cell orientation early on and that is why it was clear to him from the beginning that a spreadsheet was an obvious and ideal user interface for TM1.

Again, this versatility of cell-orientation has enabled users to solve problems that are simply not possible to solve in other technologies. The TM1 enthusiasts who have used other BI and FP&A tools understand this, but most people do not. (Interestingly, even TM1 gurus may not understand this if all they have ever known is TM1).

So don't knock TM1 because it is old. It is old, but its longevity is actually a signal of its greatness. And I am convinced that Manny's invention has its best years still ahead of it. If TM1 is anything, it is battle tested. For hundreds of different use cases it is still easily the best technology out there. By far.

So Happy 40th Birthday TM1! See you at your 80th! : )

Ben Heinl (a big fan)

#DoGoodTM1

#OldisGood