About TM1 Fanboy
My name is Christoph Hein, although within the IBM Planning Analytics community I am better known as TM1 Fanboy.
I hold a Magister Artium in Modern History from Philipps-Universität Marburg. During my studies, I focused on the Thirty Years’ War and its aftermath. Today, my historical interest has shifted toward the history and evolution of software, especially enterprise planning systems.
I was born in 1984, one year after the first release of TM1.
I started working with TM1 in 2011, shortly after finishing university. At that time, IBM had recently acquired Cognos and was still figuring out what exactly it had bought. It was a fascinating moment to enter the TM1 ecosystem: the classic TM1 world was still very much alive, while the long transformation toward IBM Planning Analytics had already begun.
Over the years, TM1 has endured major technological changes: from personal computing to client-server architecture, from 32-bit to 64-bit systems, from on-premise installations to cloud platforms, and now toward artificial intelligence.
Few software products in enterprise computing have survived such a long historical arc.
Professionally, I work in planning and performance management and serve as Managing Director of Intito DACH, an IBM Gold Business Partner. But this website is not a consulting website.
TM1 Fanboy is a personal project.
Most writing about TM1 focuses on implementation, modelling, rules, feeders, or product releases. These topics matter, but my interest lies in a different set of questions:
Why did TM1 emerge when it did?
Why did OLAP become necessary?
Why did some planning technologies disappear while others survived?
What does the history of TM1 tell us about the evolution of finance, management, and decision-making?
This blog explores TM1 and OLAP as historical subjects. The story of TM1 is not only the story of a software product. It is a small but revealing chapter in the history of modern business computing.