As McLeod Software celebrates its 25th year this week at its annual User Conference in Birmingham, Ala., company officials say they are on track for their biggest year ever.

In fact, 2009 was the company's best year in sales in its history, despite the recession.

When asked about this apparent contradiction, founder, President and CEO Tom McLeod pointed out that when times are good and carriers are making money, they don't have much time or inclination to spend a lot of time analyzing and fine-tuning operations. When times were touch, he said, "in terms of analysis tools, our business intelligence framework and profitability analysis capability was something the asset-based carriers were getting deeper into and went ahead with last year."

There were some companies that put IT projects on hold, but now that business is looking up, McLeod said, the software company has seen "a flurry of demand ... as companies are trying to set the stage for growth, and be on the right platform for the uncertain regulatory situation. The potential of an EOBR mandate, the additional challenge of managing CSA regulations, are making a lot of companies think about getting their house in order."

Memory Lane

In a sit-down with reporters, Tom McLeod recalled the company's first customer, a trucking company in Decatur, Ala. The computer system was a Unix operating system that supported 12 workstations (this was before you could network PCs.) It had an option of a 35-megabyte or a 60-megabyte hard drive. McLeod recommended the 60-MB, but the company went with the less expensive 35-MB.

He also recalled that in those early days, he was the company's only salesperson for five years. "I moved into programming to get out of sales, so it's ironic," he said.

About 10 years ago, McLeod decided to take a clean-paper approach and redesigned its software to be platform-independent. "We were able to build a true platform-independent, multi-tier product that is now letting us build on it very rapidly, plugging in new technologies like our new iPhone app. Whether I'm using a workstation, a Web form, an iPhone; I can run on an AS400 or a Windows server or a Unix or Linus server; I can work with an SQL or Oracle database. This helps our customers get a better return on their investment as well."

Today, the company has more than 500 customers.

To help celebrate the anniversary, company personnel surprised Tom McLeod with a cake in the shape of a McLeod-graphic tractor-trailer, made by the bakery on the Food Network show "Ace of Cakes."