HFO systems is celebrating its 15th year of business in the Columbia area.
Fifteen years ago, Harold Owens faced a challenge. As the programming manager for a software company in Columbia,
SC, Y2K loomed over the horizon and the company he worked for decided to abandon its current software customers and focus on other areas of its business.
Harold had been
in the software design business first as an operating systems programmer and then in 1985 as an applications programmer. Prior to that, while attending U.S.C. in the Computer Science department, Harold worked as a data entry clerk on an IBM 370E, then became a systems operator 6 months later.
After graduating in 1982 with a degree in Computer Science he started designing operating systems. In 1987, Harold had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a new software design company working with IBM's new AS/400, the replacement for IBM's midrange system 36 and 38.
One of three original programmers, Profitvision was born. ProfitVision is a robust distribution system used in wholesale, retail and services industries for the IBM midrange computer system. When systems were designed prior to 1990, most programmers decided that adding the century to date fields was not worth the effort. By 1995, the Y2k debacle was born out of this decision.
Harold did not want any of his customers to suffer so he decided to put in his resignation and take up where his last company left off. With over 20 Provitvision customers, Harold proceeded to fix all the Y2k bugs in the base programs and also the tons of modified programs for each customer at no cost to them.
This is the main goal of HFO Systems:
To provide great support at minimal cost to customers.