CenturyLink, Inc., is an American multinational communications company headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana. It provides communications and data services to residential, business, governmental and wholesale customers in 36 states. It also provides long distance service. The earliest predecessor of CenturyLink was the Oak Ridge Telephone Company in Oak Ridge, Louisiana, which was owned by F. E. Hogan, Sr. In 1930, Hogan sold the company, with 75 paid subscribers, to William Clarke and Marie Williams, for $500. They moved the switchboard to the Williams family front parlor. In 1946, the Williams' son, Clarke McRae Williams, received ownership of the family's telephone company as a wedding gift.
Founded in 1969, Software AG is an enterprise software company with over 10,000 enterprise customers in over 70 countries. The company is the second largest software vendor in Germany, the seventh largest in Europe. Software AG is traded on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol SOW and part of the technology index TecDAX. The company was founded in 1969 by a group of six young employees at the consulting firm AIV. ADABAS was launched in 1971 as a high performance transactional database management system. In 1979 Natural, a 4GL application development language, was launched. The company continued to open offices and subsidiaries in North America, Japan, UK, France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Saudi Arabia. By 1987 Software AG had around 500 employees, 12 subsidiaries in Europe and offices in more than 50 countries. In 1999 Software AG was listed on Frankfurt Stock Exchange and soon after the company released Tamino Information Server and Tamino XML Server.
