AdvantageCS history

Ron Ghormley, then Vice President at Townsend and Bottum, was named the first CEO of T and B Computing. Cecil Murray, who had come from Infomatics, became the first president.

T and B Computing began with 2 product lines: project management software Track 50 and accounting software INTACT 50. The first clients were book and magazine publishers, and thus a new product line was formed: INTACT 50 for publishers.

In 1988, T and B Computing was sold by Townsend and Bottum to Thomas S Monaghan, Inc. Thomas Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza, was acquiring technology companies at the time.

In 1989, we developed a replacement of INTACT 50 called Publisher’s Advantage Computing System®, or “Advantage,” for short.

The company became an independent corporation in 1992, when its current shareholders purchased it from Thomas Monaghan. Shortly thereafter – in 1997 – we changed our name to Advantage Computing Systems to better reflect our presence in the market.

In 1997, we began to expand our footprint outside the US: firstly in the UK, then further into the European continent. Between 2007 and 2012, the share of our clients in Europe grew to 35%.

In 2002, we began developing our digital subscription solution, complementing our subscription management solution for print products. Importantly, we offered bundles of digital + print for our clients, as many of them were going through a digital transformation of their content. 

And in 2012, Advantage was ported to .NET from our proprietary Tools, which had been developed in the late 1980s. This move put us on a strong footing for continuous software development, allowing our engineers to utilize dozens of development applications available in the .NET framework. 

Left to right: CEO Roger Varblow and others hold a meeting (1997), sales team members smile from their trade show booth (2002), a quiet day in the Advantage Computing Systems office (2005), and an in-person Advantage training session (2005).

Since 2012, the Advantage subscription management platform has undergone numerous UI, developer framework, and functionality changes to best serve our clients' evolving business needs. Initially designed to cater to print publishers, Advantage's functionality has since expanded immensely to become an industry leading subscription and membership management solution for digital and physical products and member organizations.

In 2016, we launched our e-commerce solution Cider, designed for flexibility, scalability, and integration with Advantage. Additionally, we released a revamped version of our popular Members Advantage membership management offering, adding support for digital memberships along with numerous performance, UI, and workflow changes. 

In 2020, we migrated Advantage from a desktop application to a Web UI interface, significantly improving the user experience with a new, highly customizable UI and a multitude of new features and quality of life updates throughout the application.

And after years of developing new features and improvements for Cider, we launched the next iteration of the product – Cider Plus – in 2023, making the platform faster, more flexible, and easier to use than ever before.

In 2025, AdvantageCS is celebrating its 45th year in business. Although the company has undergone numerous name, ownership, and product changes over the last four decades, our core values - innovation, trust, reliability, and collaboration - have been and will always be the foundation of our success.

Left to right: AdvantageCS gathers for a company photo (2017), clients explore new features during an Advantage Academy training session (2018), Director of European Operations Philippe van Mastrigt and VP Dan Heffernan give a presentation at FIPP World Media Congress (2024), and Director of Client Services Scott Ghormley chats with European clients (2024).