J.D. Edwards World Solution Company or JD Edwards, abbreviated JDE, was an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) softwarecompany. Products included World for IBM AS/400 minicomputers (the users using a computer terminal or terminal emulator), OneWorld for CNC architecture (a client–server fat client), and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (a web-based thin client). The company was founded March 1977 in Denver, Colorado, by Jack Thompson, C.T.P. "Chuck" Hintze, Dan Gregory, and Ed McVaney. It was purchased by PeopleSoft, Inc. in 2003.
PeopleSoft, in turn, was purchased by Oracle Corporation in 2005, and Oracle continues to sell and support EnterpriseOne[1] and World[2] ERP software line.
Historical background[edit]
Formation[edit]
Ed McVaney originally trained as an engineer at the University of Nebraska, and in 1964 was employed by Western Electric, then by Peat Marwick, and moved to Denver, Colorado in 1968, and later became a partner at Alexander Grant where he hired Jack Thompson and Dan Gregory. Around that time he was coming to the realization that, in his words, "The culture of a public accounting firm is the antithesis of developing software. The idea of spending time on something that you’re not getting paid for—software development—they just could not stomach that."[3] McVaney felt that accounting clients did not understand what was required for software development, and decided to start his own firm.
"JD Edwards" was founded in 1977 by Jack Thompson, Dan Gregory, and Ed McVaney; the company's name drawn from the initials "J" for Jack, "D" for Dan, and "Edwards" for Ed. McVaney took a salary cut from $44,000 to $36,000 to ensure initial funding. Start-up clients included McCoy Sales, a wholesale distribution company in Denver, Colorado, and Cincinnati Milacron, a maker of machine tools. The business received a $75,000 contract to develop wholesale distribution system software and a $50,000 contract with the Colorado Highway Department to develop governmental and construction cost accounting systems. The first international client was Shell Oil Company. Shell Oil implemented JD Edwards in Canada and then in Cameroon, Africa. Gregory flew to Shell Oil in Douala, Cameroon to install the company's first international, multi-national, multi-currency client software system.
Enterprise Resource Planning concept developed[edit]
As the majority of JD Edwards's customers were medium-sized companies, clients did not have large scale software implementations. There was a basic business need for all accounting to be tightly integrated. As McVaney would explain in 2002, integrated systems were created precisely because "you can’t go into a moderate-sized company and just put in a payroll. You have to put in a payroll and job cost, general ledger, inventory, fixed assets and the whole thing. SAP had the same advantage that JD Edwards had because we worked on smaller companies, we were forced to see the whole broad picture."[3] This requirement was relevant to both JDE clients in the USA and Europe and their European competitor SAP, whose typical clients were much smaller than the American Fortune 500 firms. McVaney and his company developed what would be called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software in response to that business requirement.