Ross Systems

From Enterprise Software History

Ross Systems was founded in 1972 by Kenneth Ross. Ross started off selling financial applications that ran on Mainframes. Shortly there after, Ross began servicing the DEC marketplace, first offering financial software applications on the DEC PDP-11, and later the DEC VAX models in the early 80’s.

In 1988, as the company’s sales were approximately $20M, there was a buyout, spearheaded by Dennis Vohs, a former executive with MSA. At this time the total company employee count was about 130. The company had grown to 700 employees, and $70M by 1991. The growth was fueled by the domain expertise and advanced functionality they offered to process manufacturing companies. The Process Manufacturing software was produced using GEMBase by a company called Pioneer Computing that was purchased by Ross.

Later in the 90's, company purchased Cardinal Data of Needham, MA and Argonaut Software in an effort to build up critical mass, and make Ross a more attractive IPO.

In 2003 Ross was acquired by ChinaDotCom (CDC).