By the late 1990s a large company might run SAP for its books, Siebel for its sales team, and a dozen homegrown systems besides, and none of them spoke to each other. CrossWorlds sold the translator. Its software carried a business process, such as a new order, across every system it touched. Katrina Garnett founded the company in 1996. It went public in June 2000, three months after the Nasdaq peaked, when investors were starting to turn away from software stocks.

Connectors Between Islands

Garnett incorporated CrossWorlds in March 1996, and it shipped its first products in November 1997. The company built ready-made connectors for popular business applications and process modules for common jobs, like taking an order or updating a customer record. Instead of writing custom code to link every pair of systems, a company could plug each one into CrossWorlds once. Rivals such as TIBCO and webMethods sold similar ideas.

Ten Dollars, Then Big Blue

CrossWorlds priced its IPO at $10 a share on June 2, 2000, and listed on Nasdaq as CWLD. The timing was hard. Corporate software budgets shrank after the dot-com crash, and the company kept losing money. In late 2001 IBM agreed to buy CrossWorlds, and the deal closed in January 2002. IBM folded its software into the WebSphere family of business integration products.

Cover: The Angel of the Ninth Sphere, or Primum Mobile, plate 49 from Planets and Spheres, Master of the E-Series Tarocchi. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for the celestial spheres (linking many worlds).