Message From the Chairman

Bobby G. Stevenson

In June 1969, in response to anti-trust litigation brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, IBM agreed to unbundle, or separate, its hardware, software and services offerings. With this separation, competitors could choose to compete with IBM in just one of these areas (i.e., data processing services) rather than having to compete in all three. Thus, the Information Technology services industry was born.

In June 1974, CIBER was co-founded in Michigan by myself and two others, that had a vision to “run a services company because there weren’t any at the time that were very well-known.” One of the goals was to create a company that “would treat its customers and employees better” than the company I worked for as an IMS database programmer.

CIBER’s growth in the 1970’s was attributable to relationships developed with its first customers: Detroit Edison, K-Mart, GM’s Fisher Body Division and Ford Parts & Service Division. CIBER prospered in the new industry by providing high levels of service to its customers and new career opportunities for its employees. In its first decade, CIBER grew to eight branches with no acquisitions. By 1984, there were 200 employees generating $8 million in revenue.

CIBER’s second decade was characterized by more organic expansion, the addition of Mac Slingerlend as CFO and the subsequent concerted effort to free CIBER of bank financing in favor of public financing to foster growth. This effort culminated in CIBER’s first public offering in March 1994. That year, we closed our second decade with almost $50 million in revenue and 1,000 CIBER employees.

Access to the public markets, coupled with a robust economy in the first-half of our third decade, allowed us to compound our organic growth with dozens of acquisitions that brought new customers, new capabilities and new geographies. Today, embarking on our fourth decade, CIBER, with revenue in excess of $1 billion, has completed more than 60 acquisitions and has grown to more than 80 offices in 18 countries and more than 8,500 employees.

In the past 30 years, technology has revolutionized business. Many of the applications CIBER developed over the years have allowed Corporate America to remove layers of reporting management and provide itself with enormous productivity gains. Once, CIBER’s legacy was developing CICS and IMS programs. We still do that today, in addition to developing websites and enabling electronic commerce. When we began, we provided contract programmers. Today, for both commercial and government customers, we develop end-to-end solutions – from problem definition, through design and build, to integration, hosting and on-going support. And, we still provide contract programmers.

Where many competitors have failed, CIBER has succeeded by evolving as our industry has matured. Continuous change is a given in our industry and in our company. CIBER’s revenue stream has broadened, but still represents the past with many of our original clients and employees still with us today, giving ample evidence that our founding vision and goals will be fundamental to CIBER’s success in our fourth decade.

Today, CIBER is one of the world’s largest system integrators, still in the services industry, still growing and ever evolving.