Definition: Sterling Software

(Sterling Software, Dallas, TX) A software company founded in 1981 that provided a variety of products for applications and systems management as well as software and services to the U.S. government. Sterling grew through numerous acquisitions over the years, including Knowledgeware and Texas Instruments Software in the mid-1990s. Sterling itself was acquired by Computer Associates (CA) in 2000.

Its family of application development tools for all major hardware platforms, originally under the COOL brand, became CA products with names such as Gen, Aion and Plex.