CMG R.I.P.

In 1990 I got a job with a fairly small IT services company called CMG. Over the next 10 years it grew steadily into a medium sized IT services company. There was an incredible sense of community in the company. All the shares were held by the staff and there were regular after work updates on how business was going - followed by drinks on the company. When the company went public in the December 1995 it made quite a few millionaires over night, and over the following few weeks, as the share price went through the roof (sadly I was not among them). At one point during the dot.com bubble the company was worth something like 70 times the floatation price, and many employees had aquired shares at a fraction of that price . However, during those heady, frothy days at the turn of the century, CMG made a rather poor investment in merging with an overpriced and over large IT services company called Admiral. As a result of that deal, and the should-have-been predictable collapse in IT stocks a few months later, CMG became a take-over target itself; and in December 2002 was bought up (they say "merged", but we all know the truth) by Logica, forming LogicaCMG. I left LogicaCMG in 2005. Today, LogicaCMG has renamed itself to just "Logica", so CMG now officially no longer exists.

One long-serving member of CMG has organised a "wake" to mourn the loss of this great name. About 700 former employees will be meeting in a pub in the City of London on Friday evening 2008-02-29 to re-live the good times for the last time. CMG, R.I.P.