In 1988, co-founders Mike Muhney and Pat Sullivan "sat in a 10x10 office for ten months and laboriously birthed what would be the world's first CRM. The original name for the software was Activity Control Technology, then Automated Contact Tracking, before finally just using the acronym Act!.
It's funny to think that one of the most enduring CRM products in software history emerged from such humble beginnings.
Over the next decade and a half, the Act! program evolved from a DOS application to Windows, and from a Foxpro architecture to SQL. Sage undertook the monumental task of making the difficult transition from DBF to SQL, and later in 2010, they introduced considerable changes to the program's structure, as Opportunities were promoted to the level of the parent table to match Contacts, Groups, and Companies. This change dramatically enhanced the capabilities of Opportunities, and changed pipeline management within Act! for years.
Subsequent years saw fewer dramatic feature changes to the product under Sage's management until in 2013, Swiftpage took ownership and two years later transitioned to a subscription-based model, thereby joining the majority of the CRM industry.
Over the next eight years Act! would introduce such exciting technologies as Marketing Automation, API integration, custom tables, Insights reporting, and finally a robust 64-bit SaaS-enabled version of Act! Premium Cloud. Act! has come a long way in the past 36 years, so we hope you'll all join us in wishing this proud CRM product a Happy Birthday.
