Items12The creator’s order
  1. 1Hasso PlattnerHasso PlattnerBorn 21 Jan 1944Enterprise resource planning. Plattner and four colleagues left IBM in 1972 to found SAP in Germany, writing standard software that let companies run accounting, purchasing and stock control in one system updated in real time, rather than commissioning custom programs. R/3 in 1992 brought it to…0i
  2. 2James GoodnightJames GoodnightBorn 6 Jan 1943Statistical analysis. Goodnight co-founded SAS in 1976 with John Sall, Anthony Barr and Jane Helwig, turning a North Carolina State University project for analysing agricultural data into commercial software for statisticians in drug companies, banks and government. SAS stayed private, licensed its…0i
  3. 3Dan BricklinDan BricklinBorn 16 Jul 1951The spreadsheet. Bricklin, a Harvard Business School student tired of recalculating financial models by hand, designed VisiCalc with programmer Bob Frankston, and their company released it for the Apple II in 1979. Changing one number and watching the rest update made accountants and planners buy…0i
  4. 4Scott CookScott CookBookkeeping for households and small firms. Cook, a former Procter and Gamble marketer, co-founded Intuit in 1983 with programmer Tom Proulx after watching his wife struggle with the household bills. Quicken made cheque registers simple, and QuickBooks did the same for small businesses that found…0i
  5. 5John WarnockJohn WarnockBorn 6 Oct 1940Documents that print and look the same everywhere. Warnock and Charles Geschke left Xerox PARC to found Adobe in 1982 and built PostScript, a language that let any printer reproduce a page exactly, which made desktop publishing possible. In the early 1990s Warnock pushed the Camelot project that…0i
  6. 6Ray OzzieRay OzzieBorn 20 Nov 1955Shared work across an organisation. Ozzie, inspired by the PLATO system he used as a student, founded Iris Associates in 1984 to build Lotus Notes, which combined email, shared databases and replication so offices on slow links could work from the same information. Large companies used it to run…0i
  7. 7David DuffieldDavid DuffieldBorn 21 Sept 1940Payroll and human resources, twice. Duffield founded PeopleSoft in 1987 to run HR and payroll on client-server computers instead of mainframes, and it grew into a major enterprise software company before Oracle took it over in a hostile bid in 2005. He then co-founded Workday with Aneel Bhusri,…0i
  8. 8Marc BenioffMarc BenioffBorn 25 Sept 1964Customer records as a subscription. Benioff, an Oracle executive, founded Salesforce in 1999 with Parker Harris and others to deliver sales tracking software through a web browser for a monthly fee, instead of installed systems that took months to set up. The model, later called software as a…0i
  9. 9Mike Cannon-BrookesMike Cannon-BrookesBorn 17 Nov 1979Issue tracking for software teams. Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian in Sydney in 2002 with a credit card, and their Jira tracker became the place where software and IT teams log bugs and tasks, followed by the Confluence wiki. Atlassian sold online at low list prices without a…0i
  10. 10Rod DruryRod DruryCloud accounting. Drury founded Xero in Wellington in 2006 to move small-business bookkeeping online, pulling transactions straight from bank feeds so owners and their accountants could reconcile accounts together in a browser. Selling through accountants, who recommended it to clients, spread it…0i