Don’t know if it’s time to strike up the band and belt out Happy Days are Here again at CDC Software – but the last few week’s news can only be positive.
Back in August of last year I’d written some observations under the headline “Watching the Wheels Come Off” about the Ross Enterprise company I’d been formerly associated with – and how events had taken a real turn for the worse under the (mis)management of Hong Kong based CDC Corporation. (CDC Corporation held CDC Software as a subsidiary, which was comprised of Ross Enterprise, Pivotal CRM and various other supply chain software acquisitions.)
I’d even finished off the blog post with the following : One can only hope that CDC has fallen on such hard times that they’ll have to spin off/sell the Ross Enterprise package to a company that will invest in development and rescue a once-great name in ERP software.
And following the events since August, the CDC Corporation bankruptcy, lawsuits and misadventures, it was good to see the news this week: Vista Equity buys CDC Software.
Having taken a lot of heat for the original blog post (mostly from the remaining few pals that were still with CDC) it’s hard to suddenly claim ‘I told you so” or take on the mantle of the prescient pundit (look that one up). I think it’s more luck than skill – like when I posted We’re All Steve Jobs Now a month or so before his too-early passing and inadvertently got about 73 billion search hits of people looking instead for obituary stories.
But if you report on somebody when they’re down, it’s only fair to sing their praises when things turn around. And this is good news – lots of great, talented people were at CDC and no doubt many remain (just not many of the ones I worked with). There are also some great customers and companies running that technology – success stories that I still tell to this day of how things can sometimes go right in ERP projects.
So I got what I hoped for – and I think the American software industry is better for it – and I wish the best to the new CDC Software leadership team* – although I’d probably drop that CDC brand – too many bad memories of the days of China Dot Com management.
Editors Note: Ross Enterprise would end up as part of the Aptean stable of ERP products and still exists to this day (2020) although the technology is a touch long in the tooth.
*Link no longer active – the CDC Software moniker was picked up by a call-center software company in 2014, I guess before the advent of the ‘Do NOT Call List’ so you could make a case that ‘CDC Software’ is a particularly unlucky name for your new software effort.