Partners consortium.

In 1989, Platinum grossed $6 million in sales and employed about 40 people. Nine years later, the company's annual sales reached about $1 billion, and it employed 5,000 people around the country, including 1,500 in the Chicago area. In 1999, Platinum was purchased for $3.5 billion by Computer Associates, a larger competitor based in New York that assumed both its operations and its name. Filipowski soon used some of his proceeds to begin an Internet “incubator” company called Divine InterVentures Inc., which, after being billed as the harbinger of a burgeoning Internet industry in Chicago, quickly sank along with the rest of the high-tech industry of the early 2000s.