The NASDAQ exchange grew from around 2000 at the beginning of 1999 to a peak of 5048.62 on 10 March 2000, in less than 15 months it had gained more than 250%. On 16^th December 1998 analyst Henry Blodget predicted that within a year Amazon stock would reach $400 when it was at $250, it managed to achieve this in weeks. PSDI stock was carried along with this meteoric rise. Then, the bubble burst.

By 9^th October 2002 the NASDAQ exchange was at the low point in this bear market at 1114.11, a loss of 78% in 30 months. This is infamously known as the dot-com bubble. Amazon floated in May 1997 and survived the dot-com era, many other companies did not survive. Google did not go public until August 2004, after the end of the dot-com bubble.

As many of us now had shares in PSDI it was an exciting time, followed by two years when we realised our shares were not going to pay off our mortgages after all. One of the UK Maximo consultants was lucky enough to sell-out their shares very near the top.

During these years PSDI revenue was still growing but at a slower rate, with a small loss in the fiscal year to end of September 2002. In 1999 revenue was $145.66m, a rise of 21% over 1998, in 2000 $168.66m a rise of 15%, in 2001 $185.45m a rise of 10% and in 2002 there was a 7.5% loss to $171.88m. Chip Drapeau was President and CEO, and Bob Daniels was Chairman of the Board.

In early 1999 PSDI formed the subsidiary MRO.com, a coup to pick up the acronym for Maintenance, Repair and Operations, we were entering the dot-com market.

With the NASDAQ in freefall after its peak, on 11^th December 2000 the PSDI board voted to change the company’s name to MRO Software and on the NASDAQ the trading symbol changed from PSDI to MROI. To say we were not affected by the dot-com era would be incorrect, but our foundation of Maximo kept us going through this period.

Apart from changes to Maximo functionality, and I’ll talk about that in the next article, what I remember most about this period is frequent announcements of another company we had acquired, and a call for people to join the subsidiary MRO.com, effectively leaving Maximo to support products that would allow the supply chain of industrial parts used in maintenance.

The first sense of a new direction came early in 1997 with the announcement of a Comprehensive Internet Strategy comprising a set of Java-based applets, MAXIMO Everywhere Business Objects; Launch of MRO-online.com; and Supply-Chain Integration through the Internet.

Remember, Java had only been launched in May 1995 and the internet and HTML 1.0 had only been launched in 1993. This was bleeding edge, something we would continue to experience with PSDI and MRO Software. When Maximo 4.0 was launched on 9^th February 1998 it contained the first java components.

On 6^th February 1998 PSDI acquired A.R.M. Group in London, Ontario. Their product called M|Net provided an integrated supplier network for end-to-end MRO; it already had 400 suppliers. The aim was to develop an electronic marketplace for the procurement and supply of MRO goods and services.

By the end of September 1999 MRO.com had several products:

• mroMarketplace, an online community of supplier catalogs for more than 40 suppliers. A content aggregation hub.
• mroTransaction Server, an XML based connection to mroMarketplace that provides live real-time status of order fulfilment.
• mroSupplier, tools to assist vendors and manufacturers in electronic catalog creation and maintenance including data scrubbing and formatting. Catalogs could be general or contain unit prices specific to a buyer.
• mroBuyer, an application for electronic procurement of MRO supplies, including materials, parts and services.

In Maximo, Desktop Requisition was added with a punchout to the mroMarketplace allowing Maximo buyers to purchase MRO goods via the internet. The retrieved items would raise purchase orders with those suppliers when the Desktop Requisition was submitted. The Desktop Requisition would also provide visibility to real-time supplier availability, order status information, invoice and shipping history, and contract pricing. I can remember seeing much of this demonstrated and getting to know the Desktop Requisition application, but at the time in the UK we had no suppliers, although some proof-of-concept work was being performed with RS Components.

It was a different story in the US. In April 1999 W.W.Grainger, a business-to-business (b2b) provider of MRO supplies acquired a stake in MRO.com and formed their own b2b portal FindMRO.com. The above article came from InfoWorld magazine 13-Dec-1999, page 18. Another article on XML from a few weeks earlier says – while XML provides a lot of flexibility in data formatting, W.W.Grainger had developed a standard and their suppliers would need to conform to that.

At the end of September 1999 revenue from MRO.com was $6.1m. MRO-online.com was now providing downloads of Job Plans and PMs from manufacturers and suppliers.

One year later, by the end of the financial year to September 2000 there had been further acquisitions:

• On 29^th October 1999 PSDI acquired Modern Distribution Management, a leading newsletter publisher covering issues affecting buyers and suppliers of MRO supplies.
• On 2nd March 2000 PSDI completed the acquisition of INTERMAT, a provider of MRO Content Management Tools and Cataloguing services.
• On 21st August 2000 PSDI acquired IDFM a research and development consulting company specialising in enterprise asset management software.
• On 29^th September 2000 PSDI acquired Applied Image Technology and its product the Illustrated Parts Catalog, a digital representation of the parts of equipment, think of a maintenance manual for a car, but in electronic form.

The acquisition of Intermat, which had been founded many years earlier in 1978 was interesting from three perspectives, they had Struxure cataloguing software, the Standard Modifier Dictionary, a taxonomy for maintenance, repair and operations data, and they provided services to extract a client’s item data, classify it and provide the attribute details, so that the client could start with a new clean set of items. Struxure was web-based software for managing MRO catalogs.

Suppliers needed to describe their MRO items in a standard form that buyers could also use for searching. When buying a pump or motor you need to search by a classification hierarchy and then be able to compare characteristics of an item being offered from multiple suppliers to see which would meet your needs.

The acquisition of Intermat caused a reworking of the Item, Equipment and LocationA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More Specifications we had in Maximo to the functionality provided by today’s Classification application, with the ability to generate item, location and equipment descriptions based on the classification and attribute descriptions and their values. When used correctly it can help to identify duplicate parts, something which is still relevant today. The picture is from Maximo 4.1, May 2001.

MRO.com also introduced b2b auction services for MRO parts, both forward and reverse auctions, a way of buyers being able to sell off their surplus stock of parts. AuctionWeb launched in September 1995 and became eBay two years later in 1997 and it is now worth over $30 billion, another survivor of the dot-com era.

In fiscal year 2000 MRO.com revenue was $29.1m, an increase of 378%. In 2000 PSDI started a partnership with Ariba to provide b2b transactions linked to Ariba suppliers. Ariba was formed in 1996 and floated in 1999 as one of the first b2b internet companies. It was acquired by SAP in 2012. Commerce One was also being discussed, a b2b enabler that had helped to shape XML and SOAP to allow buyer/supplier communications.

In a Network World article from 16-April 2001, page 37, it talks about a new hosted software suite, MRO.com from MRO Software, which includes the three products mroDistributor, mroManufacturer and mroConnect.

By fiscal year to end of September 2001 the dot-com bubble had well and truly burst, the NASDAQ decline continued throughout the year. There was some rebranding of the supply side products, mroDistributor, mroManufacturer and mroConnect which by the end of the year had merged into a single offering called Online Commerce Services (OCS) which was administered through network.mro.com. These products continued to be enhanced, and it was being sold to some Maximo clients who could influence their trading partners to also subscribe to OCS.

In August 2001 MRO Software acquired Collego Corporation and their software Collego Catalog Manager, an industrial catalog management application which provided a way for suppliers to provide multiple catalogs of their parts from a single source of data, a catalog could be created specific to a buyer with bespoke pricing. I seem to remember that it cached the data making data retrieval faster than accessing a database directly.

The demand-side products were now referenced as Strategic MRO and those add-ons included:

• Maximo Illustrated Parts Catalog (IPC)
• Standard Modifier Dictionary (SMD)
• Maximo Catalog Manager
• Maximo Marketplace Manager
• E-Commerce Adapters to MRO Software’s OCS, Ariba and I2

The revenue from the supply-side products decreased from $25.4m in 2000 to $17.9m in 2001, a drop of 30%, but this was partly attributed to a change from license fees to a subscription model.

The NASDAQ continued to decline during the whole of the fiscal year ending September 2002, the e-Commerce solutions were contributing now less than 10% of MRO Software’s revenue. The salvageable parts had been brought into the Maximo product line and e-commerce commercial activities ceased.

In January 2003 Struxure, SMD and the industrial data normalization services (INTERMAT) were sold to IHS Markit, and they were later acquired by Spera, and so SMD continues today. In 2003 the Catalog Management Services were also sold.

The Illustrated Parts Catalog continued as an add-on until 2005. It allowed you to find items by navigating diagrams. You scanned the document, added hot spots and then entered the corresponding parts data. The picture is from Maximo 5.2.

I found a January 2005 OCS presentation, it annually transacted $1200m in PO value, 30,000 PO transactions/month. It had 800+ active suppliers and 8000+ registered buyers from 38 countries; 24 currencies, and OCS supported 13 languages. OCS continued through the IBM acquisition of MRO Software and was eventually retired on 30^th September 2010.