History of Great Plains

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. 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 Financials product is actually a hybrid version of Great Plains, limited in its modules and priced starting at just $995.