The origins of Great
Plains software can be traced back to a family of over-achievers in
Fargo, North Dakota - the Burgum family. Specifically, Katherine
Kilbourne Burgum has a long list of accomplishments, both personal and
professional. Among her many activities, she and her family maintained
several grain elevators where they stored grain for local area farmers.
In the early 1980’s, Mrs. Burgum and family began developing a DOS-based
accounting system to manage their own business dealings. Eventually,
Mrs. Burgum’s youngest son, Douglas, took over the reins of the up and
coming Great Plains Software and began to grow the company using a
down-to-earth approach of building relationships and providing top
customer service.
By 1986, the DOS
version of Great Plains was gaining prominence, and resellers started to
pop up around the country. As technology evolved, Great Plains began
work on a Windows-based accounting system which was released in the
early nineties as Great Plains Dynamics. Within two years, Great Plains
released two versions of Dynamics – one to run on the lower end
Pervasive and C-Tree databases, and a second version to run on the
Microsoft SQL database. These two products were initially called
Dynamics and Dynamics C/S+. These two products shared the same
application code, but operated on different database environments. Later
Great Plains made the strategic decision to take the underlying product
code of these two products in different directions, and the company
changed the name of the higher end Dynamics C/S+ to Great Plains
eEnterprise.
All the while, Great
Plains continued to build a stellar reputation for extensive product
features, friendly and knowledgeable resellers, stable product code, and
excellent product support. In the latter half of 1999, Great Plains
announced that they would acquire rival Solomon Software for
approximately $140 million, and this transaction was completed on May 8,
2000. Less than one year later, Microsoft acquired Great Plains for $1.1
billion. (In July 2002, Microsoft also completed the acquisition of
Navision Software for a price of $1.45 billion.) Since then Microsoft
has renamed the eEnterprise product to “Great Plains” and has
discontinued the Pervasive and C-Tree based versions of Great Plains.
Today Great Plains is available in two versions, one for the Microsoft
SQL Server database and an identical version for the MSDE database.
Additionally, Microsoft’s Small Business Manager product is actually a
hybrid version of Great Plains, limited in its modules and priced
starting at just $2,000.
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