D&B Software was formed by the merger of the Management Science America and McCormack & Dodge companies in June 1990, under the ownership of the Dun & Bradstreet

Dun & Bradstreet

Dun & Bradstreet is a Fortune 500 public company headquartered in Short Hills, New Jersey, USA that provides information on businesses and corporations for use in credit decisions, B2B marketing and supply chain management...

 corporation. The separate company headquarters, located in Massachusetts and Atlanta, were retained with videoconferencing used for communication. Originally, the merged company was a leading supplier of financial packages that ran on mainframe computer

Mainframe computer

Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...

s. In 1991, they released the client-server middleware

Middleware

Middleware is computer software that connects software components or people and their applications. The software consists of a set of services that allows multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact...

 application suite named SmartStream that ran on HP-UX

HP-UX

HP-UX is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on UNIX System V and first released in 1984...

. In 1996, D&B Software was acquired by the Canadian client-server application firm Geac Computer Corporation

Geac Computer Corporation

Geac Computer Corporation, Ltd was a producer of enterprise resource planning, performance management, and industry specific software based in Markham, ON. It was acquired by Infor Global Solutions in March 2006 for US$1 billion....

for US$150 million, who immediately split the services into two divisions.