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American Management Systems

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American Management Systems (previous NASDAQ symbol: AMSY) was founded in 1970 as a technology and management consulting firm. It was founded by a group of five former United States Department of Defense officials who worked under Robert McNamara in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The company grew to a size greater than nine thousand workers, with many offices in both the United States and other countries. At one point in the 1990s, one quarter of the company's revenue, albeit none of the profit, came from Europe. Much of its business was creating large computer systems for various government entities. It created a large accounting system for New York City during its recovery from its fiscal crisis in the late 1970s. For the first 20+ years of its existence, the company was based in Arlington, Virginia on the banks of the Potomac River with a commanding view of Washington DC. In the early 1990s, AMS moved its corporate headquarters to Fairfax, Virginia. By the late 1990s, all AMS offices in Arlington were vacated and all D.C.-area personnel (approximately half of the worldwide staff) were based in Fairfax. In 2004, several factors, most notably an inattentive Board Of Directors, a series of ineffective CEOs, and the senior executives' overall inability to adapt to new business models, combined to force it to be sold. (It had already sold its Global Energy Group to Bangalore, India-based Wipro Technologies in December 2002.) CGI, a Canadian company, was the primary purchaser, getting the commercial business and all government business not related to national defense. The defense portion of AMS could not be sold to a company based outside the U.S. so that part of AMS was purchased by CACI. The AMS brand was retained by CGI and the AMS website will direct users to the CGI site. CGI's United States headquarters are in Fairfax, Virginia.

AMS in Europe.

At the beginning of the 1990s, AMS provided the billing solution for an American Telephone Company Airtel. Following the expansion of the GSM standard in Europe, Airtel invested in a number of foreign GSM providers. This led to the expansion of the AMS billing solution, Spectrum 2000, into Europe. In 1992 AMS was in a unique position as provider of the billing system to the emerging mobile telco market in Europe; making AMS a major player in the European Market. AMS expanded into Portugal, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Poland. Despite this success, the company did not develop sufficient service delivery and business development units. Instead, it decided to commit to a huge (over 100M$) investment in the development of the sophisticated Customer Care and Billing System (Tapestry) for German fixed-wire telecom Arcor. Lack of commitment to marketing of this system contributed to the problems that led to significant layoffs in Europe in 2002. Furthermore AMS lost prestige when D1 chose Amdocs for its billing solution, after AMS decided to abstand the new tender.