Mr. John Norris Maguire

The founder and former President of Software AG of North America, Inc., overseas distributor of the Adabas system. Adabas (from "adaptable database") is a commercial relational database management system (DBMS) originally developed by Software AG in the late 1960s. The database system was first developed for IBM 360 computers. He joined the Navy as an electrician's apprentice and then pursued his education in electrical engineering at the University of Rhode Island and in business at MIT's Sloan School--where he studied industrial dynamics with Jay Forrester. Upon graduation he joined Lockheed Missiles and Space Company where he worked on software simulation problems between 1960 and 1966. He worked at CACI on software products including Quick Query, and then founded Software AG North America (SAGNA) in February 1972 to market the ADABAS database management system developed by the German company Software AG. SAGNA was incorporated in the U.S. in 1973, went public in 1981, and was purchased by Software AG (Germany) in 1988. The product line was expanded over the years to include a number of other application development and information management tools.