[4] Ed McVaney originally trained as an engineer at the University of Nebraska, and in 1964 was employed by Western Electric, then by Peat Marwick, and moved to Denver, in 1968, and later became a partner at Alexander Grant where he hired Jack Thompson and Dan Gregory.

"[5] McVaney felt that accounting clients did not understand what was required for software development, and decided to start his own firm.

Start-up clients included McCoy Sales, a wholesale distribution company in Denver, and Cincinnati Milacron, a maker of machine tools.

Gregory flew to Shell Oil in Douala, Cameroon to install the company's first international, multi-national, multi-currency client software system.

McVaney and his company developed what would be called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software in response to that business requirement.

By late 1996, JD Edwards delivered to its customers the result of a major corporate initiative: the software was now ported to platform-independent client–server systems.

[7] The company became publicly listed on September 24, 1997, with vice-president Doug Massingill being promoted to chief executive officer, at an initial price of $23 per share, trading on NASDAQ under the symbol JDEC.

Within a year of the release of OneWorld, customers and industry analysts were discussing serious reliability, unpredictability and other bug-related issues.

So serious were these major quality issues with OneWorld that customers began to raise the possibility of class-action lawsuits, leading to McVaney's return from retirement as CEO.

McVaney also encouraged customer feedback by supporting an independent JD Edwards user group called Quest International.

Tools Release 8.96, along with the application's upgrade to version 8.12, saw the replacement of the older, often unstable proprietary object specifications (also called "specs") with a new XML-based system, proving to be much more reliable.

Tools Release 8.97 shipped a new web service layer allowing the JD Edwards software to communicate with third-party systems.

However, Oracle saw a position for JDE in the medium-sized company space that was not filled with either its e-Business Suite or its newly acquired PeopleSoft Enterprise product.

[12] Despite the release of Fusion apps, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and World is still sold and supported by Oracle and runs numerous businesses worldwide.