Candle Corporation was an American software company active from 1976 to 2004. The company spent the first two decades developing system monitoring applications for a variety of IBM mainframes and their corresponding software, their first being OMEGAMON which saw quick widespread adoption in commercial enterprises. In the mid-1990s, the company made pivots toward non-mainframe monitoring software and middleware. IBM acquired the company for between $350 million and $600 million in 2004. History 1970s – 1980s Aubrey G. Chernick (born 1949 in Los Angeles, California), the founder of Candle, grew up in Deloraine, Manitoba, after his family moved there from California. After graduating from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry, he landed a job at the university's environmental protection laboratory, performing analyses of the Red River of the North. The minicomputers at the lab were Chernick's first hands-on experience with computers; with a fellow employee, he learned how to program in BASIC. Following this, Chernick deviated from his original career path of medicine to work as a software developer for Computer Science Corporation (CSC)'s Canadian subsidiary in Ontario. After getting laid off from CSC after three months, he worked as a programmer for Laurentian University, working on IBM's System/360 Model 40 mainframe, and for the Government of Manitoba, where he learned how to operate and code for IBM's MFT and MVS operating systems. These jobs provided Chernick his first experiences with mainframes. While attending meetings hosted by in Ontario SHARE—a users' group for IBM mainframe personnel—Chernick observed recurring complaints from attendees, who spoke of not being able to satisfy common needs with IBM's operating systems. In 1975, Chernick convinced Canada Life's Ontario branch to let him use their mainframes as a development platform for an application that monitored system performance, in exchange for a bargain license for the final product. The finished software, which he named OMEGAMON/MVS, took roughly five months to develop. Immediately afterward, Chernick established Candle Services Corporation from his apartment in Toronto in Octoberr 1976 and began selling OMEGAMON door-to-door to various businesses (one such being Datacrown, where he unsuccessfully vyed for employment). He named the company Candle both to convey enlightenment and warmth and to avoid the glut of tech-jargon-heavy names. In 1977, Chernick moved the company to West Los Angeles and abbreviated the company name to Candle Corporation. In California, he gained clients such as Southern California Edison, Northrop, Hughes Aircraft,