Sage X3 was developed by Adonix, an ERP software company founded by Emile Hamou, in 1979 in Paris, France. The company was originally called SPEMI (Société Parisienne de Micro-Informatique) which translated means microcomputing Parisian Company. The original platform for the company was SORD, a Japanese computer company which built microcomputers at the time. SORD was acquired by Toshiba. UNIX was the operating system of choice at the time and SPEMI wrote their initial product for this platform calling it ADONIX which is an acryonym for Accès aux DONnées sous unIX which means Access to Data on Unix. The first product was Adonix Enterprise V2 which covered all areas of ERP except for manufacturing.
Adonix acquired a company called PRODSTAR which offered a product P2 that focused on manufacturing but utilized older Cobol code. The X in X3 represents the combination of the Adonix V2 and PRODSTAR P2 products. The 3 represents the product’s goal to give three times as much value as previous versions. The first version of what is today Sage X3 was released in 2000 with four major releases in the first five years of availability representing a significant investment (Adonix had invested 20% of revenue into R&D annually).
Adonix acquired a legacy process manufacturing solution called CIMPRO in December 2002 from MAI Systems. CIMPRO was once a leading product but technology had gotten the better of it and there were only about 80 companies remaining on the product at the time of the acquisition. Much of the CIMPRO manufacturing functionality was redeveloped in the X3 development platform making X3 one of the very few SME ERP products to support both discrete and process manufacturing from a single code base. The acquisition resulted in an office in the northern New York City suburbs in Tarrytown, NY where much of the CIMPRO staff remained.
Adonix made other acquisitions including Italian ERP vendor Gruppo Formula SPA which sold a legacy ERP product called Diap@son.
Adonix made a move into the North American market in February 1999 with a relatively quiet and unlikely acquisition of GSI Transcomm based in Pittsburgh, PA which is why the US offices for Sage X3 are situated in Pittsburgh to this day. Transcomm was previously known as ADP-GSI Logistics and Distribution) which developed TOLAS distribution software, a legacy ERP system written on DEC VAX for the HP OpenVMS Alpha platform.
Adonix was truly a leader in the French market with minimal success in other geographies but that was about to change with the 2005 acquisition of Adonix by Sage Group.
At first, it seemed like Sage didn’t really understand where X3 fit in respect to their global portfolio but it didn’t take long for them to see the international capabilities that would allow X3 to become a global ERP solution positioned above their traditional accounting applications in each region.
Under Sage’s ownership the Sage X3 product (new name for Adonix X3) has flourished with major investments in the user interface and strong recruitment of partners globally creating the largest channel of X3 resellers in the product’s history and major development adding new core features and integration to extended solutions within the Sage portfolio to include Sage Enterprise Intelligence, Sage Payments, and more. Integrations also exist to many popular third party products including Salesforce.com for CRM.
