The initial idea for Petrolsoft's inventory management product came from founder David Gamboa family's cash flow problems at their chain of retail gasoline stations.

Gordon Hartogensis, a Stanford computer science graduate, joined the company in 1993 as the third partner to lead product development.

Petrolsoft’s technology would choose the optimal way to restore inventory proportionality to the station based on its forecasts of sales by product grade.

[12] By this time, Petrolsoft had about 50 specialized employees working in three global offices: San Diego, London[13][14] and Singapore and had released multi-lingual versions of their software for use worldwide.

[15] In September 2000, following an extended sales effort, on-site pilot program and the acquisition of Petrolsoft by Aspen Technology, Chevron[16] became one of the largest US customers.

In May 2001, Petro-Canada[17] became the largest Canadian customer, utilizing the software to manage the majority of their company-owned sites located in Ontario and Quebec.

This real-time information flow changed the way the downstream petroleum industry operated and increased profitability across all adopters.

[22] Petrolsoft's suite of supply chain management tools completed Aspen's fully integrated petroleum offering from the sourcing of crude oil, through the manufacturing process, and down to the end customer putting gasoline into their vehicle.