GXS (OpenText GXS) is a subsidiary of
OpenText Corporation headquartered in
Gaithersburg, Maryland
Gaithersburg ( ) is a city in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. At the time of the 2020 United States census, Gaithersburg had a population of 69,657, making it the third-largest incorporated city and the ninth-most populous communit ...
,
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
.
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)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...
,
London
London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
,
São Paulo
São Paulo (; ; Portuguese for 'Paul the Apostle, Saint Paul') is the capital of the São Paulo (state), state of São Paulo, as well as the List of cities in Brazil by population, most populous city in Brazil, the List of largest cities in the ...
and
Tokyo
Tokyo, officially the Tokyo Metropolis, is the capital of Japan, capital and List of cities in Japan, most populous city in Japan. With a population of over 14 million in the city proper in 2023, it is List of largest cities, one of the most ...
.
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) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1892, incorporated in the New York (state), state of New York and headquartered in Boston.
Over the year ...
under the oversight of
Donald Shell. 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 increased, GE replaced the dedicated
DATANET-30 (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 (Data link, links, Node (networking), nodes, etc.) of a communication network. Network topology can be used to define or describe the arrangement of various types of telecommunication networks, ...
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 ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...
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
Basic or BASIC may refer to:
Science and technology
* BASIC, a computer programming language
* Basic (chemistry), having the properties of a base
* Basic access authentication, in HTTP
Entertainment
* Basic (film), ''Basic'' (film), a 2003 film
...
,
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-600 series and Honeywell 6000 series mainframe computers.
The ...
(GCOS). Dubbed the "Foreground/Background Interface (FBI)", it allowed Mark II users to create
batch 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
Rockville is a city in and the county seat of Montgomery County, Maryland, United States, and is part of the Washington metropolitan area. The 2020 United States census, 2020 census tabulated Rockville's population at 67,117, making it the fourth ...
(1974) and in (1977)
Amstelveen
Amstelveen () is a List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality and List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of North Holland, Netherlands, with a population of 95,996 as of 202 ...
, 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
GEnie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) was an online service provider, online service created by a General Electric business, GEIS (now GXS Inc., GXS), that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around ...
, an
online community
An online community, also called an internet community or web community, is a community whose members engage in computer-mediated communication primarily via the Internet. Members of the community usually share common interests. For many, on ...
similar to
CompuServe
CompuServe, Inc. (CompuServe Information Service, Inc., also known by its initialism CIS or later CSi) was an American Internet company that provided the first major commercial online service provider, online service. It opened in 1969 as a times ...
. 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 (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...
service until 1993, the extremely slow speed of the character-based Mark III network, the lack of an internet portal, and competition from
ISPs, 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) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1892, incorporated in the New York (state), state of New York and headquartered in Boston.
Over the year ...
(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 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
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
Corporation.
[
In May 2006, ]Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
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. 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. ( ), is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the ...
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)
OpenText
American subsidiaries of foreign companies
2014 mergers and acquisitions
Software companies based in Maryland
Companies based in Gaithersburg, Maryland
Cloud computing providers
Defunct software companies of the United States