GXS (OpenText GXS) is a subsidiary of
OpenText Corporation headquartered in
Gaithersburg, Maryland
Gaithersburg ( ), officially the City of Gaithersburg, is a city in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. At the time of the 2020 U.S. Census, Gaithersburg had a population of 69,657, making it the ninth-largest location in the state. Gai ...
,
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
.
Its GXS Trading Grid managed more than twelve billion transactions in 2011. Since 2004, GXS has invested more than $250 million in GXS Trading Grid. As of March 16, 2012, more than 550,000 businesses connect to GXS Trading Grid and, on average, more than 2,000 new businesses join each month.
As of December 31, 2011, 58.5% of GXS revenues come from the U.S. and 41.5% of GXS revenues are earned outside the United States and are managed by regional headquarters in
Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta i ...
,
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
,
São Paulo
São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for ' Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the Ga ...
and
Tokyo
Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...
.
On November 5, 2013,
OpenText Corporation in
Waterloo, Canada, announced their acquisition of GXS.
History
Mark III
The roots of GXS go back to the
Dartmouth Time Sharing System
The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) is a discontinued operating system first developed at Dartmouth College between 1963 and 1964. It was the first successful large-scale time-sharing system to be implemented, and was also the system for wh ...
, started in 1962, eventually a joint project between Dartmouth College and
General Electric
General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable en ...
under the oversight of
Donald Shell
Donald L. Shell (March 1, 1924 – November 2, 2015) was an American computer scientist who designed the Shellsort sorting algorithm. He acquired his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Cincinnati in 1959, and published the Shellsort algo ...
. See the history under the referenced articles. GE met with success in selling computer
remote timesharing services provided via distributed centers, on the Mark I Time-Sharing System and formed the Information Processing Centers Business (IPCB) in 1966 renamed six months later as the Information Services Department (ISD). As the power of the
mainframes
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...
increased, GE replaced the dedicated
DATANET-30
The DATANET-30, or DN-30 for short, was a computer manufactured by General Electric designed in 1961-1963 to be used as a communications computer. It was later used as a front-end processor for data communications. It became the first front end c ...
(DN-30) communications computers with a multi-tier network composed of DN-30 and other computers forming a world-wide star
network topology
Network topology is the arrangement of the elements ( links, nodes, etc.) of a communication network. Network topology can be used to define or describe the arrangement of various types of telecommunication networks, including command and contr ...
with redundant circuits and switchers. With the reimplementation of the time-sharing system on GE 635 computers at Dartmouth and the growing network, GE renamed the system the Mark II time sharing service. The computers were accessed in
ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...
text-mode on 300 and 1,200
bps terminals. They offered pre-written business, mathematics and engineering applications in libraries (as well as a few games) which could be run by any subscriber as well as a platform for software development in
BASIC,
Algol
ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...
and
Fortran IV.
Meanwhile, GE, under president
Fred J. Borch, decided to exit the computer manufacturing business in 1970, but held on to the time sharing operations portion, which in 1969 had become a GE "division", the Information Services Business Division (ISBD). Honeywell also retained non-U.S. distribution rights to the ISBD services. By 1973, the distributed mainframe computer centers had been consolidated into one in Brook Park, Ohio, near Cleveland.
Honeywell 6000-series mainframes replaced the older GE 635 systems as did subsequent generations in later years. GE always adopted the largest and fastest in the Honeywell 6000 family.
GE ISBD created a custom connection between Mark II and the original batch operating system for the GE systems, the
General Comprehensive Operating System
General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS, ; originally GECOS, General Electric Comprehensive Operating Supervisor) is a family of operating systems oriented toward the 36-bit GE/Honeywell mainframe computers.
The original version of GCOS wa ...
(GCOS). Dubbed the "Foreground/Background Interface (FBI)", it allowed Mark II users to create
batch
Batch may refer to:
Food and drink
* Batch (alcohol), an alcoholic fruit beverage
* Batch loaf, a type of bread popular in Ireland
* A dialect term for a bread roll used in North Warwickshire, Nuneaton and Coventry, as well as on the Wirra ...
jobs and "submit" them to be sent automatically to a system running GCOS, run there when convenient and the output returned to the Mark II user for review.
This combined system, with the introduction of the "FBI" was then called Mark III in 1972.
Another proprietary GE innovation in 1975 was to run the mainframes in single-processor "clusters", enabled by a specialized and custom hardware box (the "Scratch Pad" (SPAD)) that connected the systems. This allowed up to six fully separate mainframes to coordinate their access to the Mark II file systems. All file system updates were first coordinated on the SPAD before any mainframe wrote updates to the disk file system. This allowed users to be distributed across multiple mainframes, access the same files and if a mainframe should crash, users could login again instantly to another computer in the cluster. This created availability numbers often above 99.99%.
As the GE network grew, the Mark III mainframes were eventually located in three processing centers called Supercenters. The center in Brook Park, Ohio, was supplemented by first one in Rockville, Maryland (1974) and in (1977) Amstelveen, The Netherlands. All were completely networked and equally accessible from anywhere in the world, allowing GE to move load from one center to another and transmit off-site backups for disaster recovery purposes.
In 1979 the distribution agreement with Honeywell led to the formation of a joint-venture company called GE Information Services Company, or GEISCO. Three years later, GEISCO became a wholly owned GE subsidiary with the buy-out of Honeywell's interest in the venture. Without the need for a separate legal entity for shared-ownership, eventually GEISCO quietly became just General Electric Information Services (GEIS).
As GEIS, the service was expanded with
Fortran 77 and
C programming languages (1985), but was hard hit by the availability of Personal Computers supplanting much of the isolated computational loads previously accomplished on time sharing. GEIS refocused on "Network-Based Services" where the world-wide availability of homogenous access to a customer's applications and data could be leveraged to advantage. Services like sales-force reporting, international banking and transfers, customer support and eventually e-mail (delayed by GE's aversion to running afoul of international common-carrier laws) all required a highly reliable worldwide network and GEIS had the biggest and the best.
GEIS also tried to adapt its pricing model. Since the outset, GEIS services were always priced as a combination of proprietary Computer Resource Units (CRU), Terminal Connect Hours (TCH) and Kilo-Characters (KC). The CRU was a highly proprietary formula which took in variables such as the CPU time, memory size and file system input-output operations performed in a program run. It was carefully adjusted whenever new hardware (or sometimes operating system software) was deployed so that test programs generated the same CRU numbers over many years, giving customers stability. TCH and KC meaning are, as expected, the time connected to the network and the number of characters sent in or out. The monetary pricing attached to these numbers could vary over time and from country to country. Responding to competition and customer values, GEIS introduced "transaction pricing" where the above "resource pricing" was suppressed and the applications could issue their own transaction counts that were then priced. This met with limited success.
GEnie
In October 1985, GEIS introduced
GEnie
Jinn ( ar, , ') – also romanized as djinn or anglicized as genies (with the broader meaning of spirit or demon, depending on sources)
– are invisible creatures in early pre-Islamic Arabian religious systems and later in Islamic myt ...
, an
online community
An online community, also called an internet community or web community, is a community whose members interact with each other primarily via the Internet. Members of the community usually share common interests. For many, online communities may fe ...
similar to
CompuServe and
AOL. Initially, for the first years into the '90s GEnie was extremely successful. It became a major group within GEIS and a force in the online community, particularly gaming. However, it was always saddled with its initial business justification: A means to generate extra revenue from unused computer and network capacity outside the mainstream business use load times. This made the service appear largely costless from a computer and network resource accounting view and was the basis of the ongoing refusal by management to lease additional mainframes to support the service when it became popular. This choked developments GEnie could have made, but didn't dare deploy at the risk of becoming even more "too successful."
With the rise of the Internet, GEIS failure to provide
email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...
service until 1993, the extremely slow speed of the character-based Mark III network, the lack of an internet portal, their decision not to develop a
graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...
, and competition from
ISPs
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...
, CompuServe, and AOL; GEnie ended on the last day of the millennium. Mark III service and GEIS itself soon followed.
GXS
In 2000, GEIS was rebranded GXS (Global Exchange Services).
In June 2002, GXS was acquired by venture capital firm Francisco Partners from
General Electric
General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable en ...
(GE). It then operated as an independent firm, although GE retains a minority share in its investments.
In 2011, GXS Trading Grid was named "SaaS Product of the Year" by Techworld.
On November 5, 2013,
OpenText
OpenText Corporation (also written ''opentext'') is a Canadian company that develops and sells enterprise information management (EIM) software.
OpenText, headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, is Canada's fourth-largest software company ...
announced its intention to acquire
GXS.
In January 2014, GXS was acquired by Canadian-based OpenText Corporation (NASDAQ: OTEX) (TSX: OTC) and adopted the name OpenText GXS.
Acquisitions and partnerships
In 2003, GXS acquired Celarix, a supply-chain optimization software and services vendor, and in 2004 GXS acquired HAHT Commerce.
In 2005, GXS acquired the EDI and Business Exchange Services assets of
IBM Corporation.
[
In May 2006, ]Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
and GXS formed a partnership to integrate Microsoft technologies with the GXS Trading Grid. Microsoft endorsed the GXS Trading Grid as its recommended network for Microsoft BizTalk Server
Microsoft BizTalk Server is an inter-organizational middleware system (IOMS) that automates business processes through the use of ''adapters'' which are tailored to communicate with different software systems used in an enterprise. Created by M ...
. GXS and Microsoft were awarded the first Power of Partnership Award in June 2006 by START-IT magazine.
Also in 2006, GXS acquired product data quality service provider, UDEX.
On June 4, 2007, Verizon
Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas ...
announced that it will sell GXS Trading Grid services as Custom Supply Chain Managed Services and Invoice Automation Service.
In 2008, Accenture and GXS entered into a global partnership to support Accenture Supply Chain Services (ASCS) business. Through the agreement, Accenture offers GXS Trading Grid(r) services, such as Active Orders and Active Inventory Management to its manufacturing customer base.
On January 5, 2009, GXS announced its acquisition of Interchange, one of the leading e-commerce service providers in Brazil. GXS acquired Interchange from Banco Real, Citibank Brazil, EDS, an HP company, and Itaú Unibanco.
On June 3, 2010, GXS completes merger with Inovis, another business-to-business and e-commerce provider.
On March 29, 2011, GXS announced it had acquired RollStream - a Software as a Service (SaaS) company.
Operations
GXS provides business-to-business integration and on-demand supply chain integration, synchronization and collaboration solutions over its cloud platform, GXS Trading Grid. In 2004 the company launched its GXS Trading Grid via a partnership with webMethods. The Trading Grid enables the real-time flow of information between businesses regardless of standards preferences, spoken language or geographic location.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:GXS (Company)
American subsidiaries of foreign companies
2014 mergers and acquisitions
Software companies based in Maryland
Companies based in Gaithersburg, Maryland
Cloud computing providers
Software companies of the United States