CMC Media was founded in 1997 as the parent company for an online publishing and community business that was, in every sense, ahead of its time. We launched at a moment when the internet was still figuring out what it was — and started building things that wouldn't become mainstream for another decade.
The name comes from our original community: CM Crossroads, an online hub for professionals in configuration management and application lifecycle management. What started as a focused technical community grew into something much larger — and the company grew with it.
We rebranded to CMC Media to reflect the broader scope of what we'd become: a full online media company running podcasting, video production, webinars, live 24-hour broadcasting across multiple channels, and a portfolio of professional publications. We called it social media when people were still calling Facebook social networking.
In 2004, we hosted our first ALM Expo — a three-day virtual conference with two simultaneous tracks, a general session each day followed by five one-hour training sessions. Over 5,000 application lifecycle management professionals and software developers attended. Every bit of it was broadcast through a platform we designed and built ourselves. We ran ALM Expo every year until 2009.
By 2007, CM Crossroads had grown to 1.2 million active subscribers — the largest online community for software development professionals in the world at the time. Members shared files, participated in live chat, attended webinars, and connected with peers across the industry. Everything people now associate with social media, built before social media existed as a category.
We sold off most of the assets in 2009. The timing was what it was. But the experience — of building community infrastructure from scratch, of figuring out live broadcasting before there were tools for it, of running large-scale virtual events before anyone had a playbook — that doesn't disappear.
Today, CMC Media is applying the same founding instinct to professional training: meet people where they are, build the infrastructure they need, and create the community that makes the learning stick. The medium evolved. The mission didn't.