McVaney Takes JD Edwards Public, Retires, Returns and Retires Again
McVaney felt that in order to compete effectively, his company needed additional capital and needed to go public. Bringing in Doug Massingill as CEO, JDE went public on September 24, 1997, at an initial price of $23 per share and was traded on NASDAQ under the symbol JDEC. By 1998, JDE revenues was in excess of $934.0 million when McVaney retired. McVaney came out of retirement and fired Massingill returning in April 2000 as CEO because he felt that ongoing problems with quality control of the company's client–server OneWorld product were severely cutting into the Company's credibility as an ERP provider. McVaney stood firm that the Company wait as long as necessary to release an absolutely ironclad-reliable upgraded ERP product. After a delaying the upgrade for one year and refusing all requests by marketing for what he felt was a premature release, in the fall of 2000, JDE released B7333 which was rebranded a "OneWorld Xe." Xe proved to be a most stable release to date and went a long way towards restoring customer confidence. McVaney had also been quietly encouraging customer feedback by supporting the totally independent JDE user group called Quest International. Confident that the company was on the right track, McVaney retired again in January 2002, bringing in Robert Dutkowsky from Teradyne as the new president and CEO. McVaney remained on the board, and Dutkowsky, who comes from Teradyne, added the title chairman and at Edwards' stockholders meeting in March 2002, joked how felt happy to return to streams not far from JD Edwards' Denver headquarters. Dutkowsky, however, did little to ensure the success of JD Edwards. Instead he simply focused on selling the company, eventually succeeding in doing so to PeopleSoft in mid-2003. This in turn spearheaded the acquisition spree of Oracle which continued unabated to the present.
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