About Us

Aggressive Banqueting Concepts is located in Mukilteo, Washington, a small town north of Seattle on the shore of picturesque Puget Sound.

The company was founded in 1993 by Ray McCann and Dave Townsend for the specific purpose of creating ABC Event Manager. The original founders still operate the business, with Ray heading up functional design, marketing and sales while Dave as Chief Engineer, attends to product development.

Unlike many other software vendors, we actually design and create what we sell. As a result, there is great personal pride in our product. We work hard to keep it the best in class.

Company History

Ray McCann has been an entrepreneur and businessman for 45 years, starting his first business while still a teenager. One of his most successful enterprises was a booking agency, RM Productions, which secured employment for musicians and other entertainers. It was in this capacity that in 1992 he began working with software creating and design. He wrote an application in Access to run his booking agency. This software was featured in a series of how to books by Microsoft Press called Running with Access by John Viescas. During this time he began to talk with some of the hotels with which he did business about software for managing banquets.

Ray had employed this custom software to automate his agency and knew the value of a friendly database for keeping organized, so he volunteered to do some research for his clients. To his surprise, he discovered that there were only four viable product on the market, and it was technologically behind the curve. They were written in DOS, outrageously overpriced and difficult to use. Ray quickly saw that the market for this type of software would be larger if it were Windows-based, easy to use, and reasonably priced.

In 1993 Ray approached Dave Townsend, already a 20-year veteran of software development, to create the application. Later that year their company was formed and work began on what would become ABC Event Manager. With the help of knowledgeable hospitality professionals, the basic design was forged. It would take another three years of hard work before it was ready for installation at the first beta site.

In 1996, ABC Event Manager went online at three hotels and a private athletic club. Users praised it for its no-nonsense approach to managing large amounts of detailed information, and for its ability to reduce their workload and increase productivity. Over the next two years the design would be further refined. Ideas offered by users provided new features and usability improvements, and improvements in technology were leveraged to make the software more reliable and flexible.

ABC Event Manager is now installed throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Honduras, England, Sweden and Ireland. ABC is multi lingual with English, Canadian, French Canadian, Spanish and Swedish versions. It was private labeled to other companies so it is found under different names: ABC Event Manager, (Aggressive Banqueting Concepts), Cobra Catering (HSI), Guestline Catering (Guestline LLC, England), IQware Catering (IQware, Florida).