JDA's Development Roadmap Features iSeries in Supporting Role

Published: June 6, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Modernizing decades-old back-office systems can be like walking a tight rope, as JDA Software Group is discovering. On one hand, hundreds of retailers that use JDA's first product, the OS/400-based Merchandise Management System (MMS), have made it the backbone of their operations. On the other hand, the era of the top-down monolithic programming architecture is over, and JDA now must accommodate these MMS customers as it shifts to offering supply chain software in smaller, Microsoft .NET-based chunks.

JDA last month held its annual user group meeting, FOCUS 2006, where the company outlined its new Strategic Demand Management (SDM) development strategy, which is really the second-coming of the Portfolio Enabled strategy that it announced at FOCUS 2005. JDA also talked up its $211 million acquisition of supply chain planning vendor Manugistics, although, because the acquisition is still pending, the company hasn't yet provided full details on how Manugistics software will integrate with JDA's existing suite.

Acquisitions have been good to JDA, which traces its roots back to the modest days when it was just focused on providing ERP, or merchandise management, software to retailers. The company's first product was the OS/400-based MMS (now called MMS-i in some marketing material), its second was Windows-based point of sale (POS) software, and its third was a Unix-based version of MMS, which today is called Portfolio Merchandise Management, or PMM. Currently JDA has somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 400 MMS customers, and about 100 PMM customers.

JDA has used acquisitions to widen its supply chain offerings over the years, including Arthur for supply chain planning, Intactix for category management and E3 for replenishment. However, the acquisitions also resulted in a mish-mash of disparate code bases and platforms, which resulted in the Portfolio Enabled strategy for normalizing data. Now JDA is looking to move much of its code to a common platform and data format, which will simplify product management and reduce or eliminate redundancies.

"Our SDM strategy is really our way of integrating and enhancing those acquisitions and putting them on a common platform," says Dan Moran, the vice president of JDA's product management group. As much as possible, that common platform will be the Microsoft stack, including Windows Server, SQL Server, and the .NET programming tools. The Unix-based Oracle database will also be supported in JDA's next-generation SDM products.

However, existing MMS and PMM users may be allowed to maintain their DB2/400 database layer in an n-tier SDM implementation. JDA hasn't announced a formal timeline for enabling DB2/400 support. If it happens, it will not occur until the first wave of SDM applications, including new merchandise planning, replenishment, optimization, and store and space planning, ships in the first quarter of 2007. "Our approach is to have the iSeries targeted as a database server" for JDA's new SDM applications, Moran says. "It would be the same client- and application server-level software, but behind it would have the choice of database."

JDA realizes this Microsoft-centered message may not appeal to all of its customers, although the company maintains that customers by and large are receptive to its message of simplification and standardization. To that end, at last year's FOCUS, the company announced it would support the OS/400 products--including MMS and the E3 planning products, which are used by 400 to 500 customers--for at least 10 years.

In the meantime, MMS and E3 customers won't become dead-end branches in the JDA family tree, Moran says. "If they want to continue to use the merchandising capabilities of MMS, they can still benefit from implementing these other SDM capabilities, the same way they're using them today."

At the same time, JDA will be working to re-write the functionality contained in these OS/400 applications in .NET and Windows. This means breaking up the monolithic programs into more easily digestible components and Web services that can be glued together as part of a service oriented architecture. "The longer-term strategy for MMS is to take some of the capabilities that currently make up the MMS product and portfolio--enable those, but maybe not as a comprehensive package, but as pieces," Moran says.

JDA says iSeries users shouldn't worry about this .NET redevelopment program. "We certainly don't want to give the message we're abandoning the iSeries," says Moran, who has been with JDA for a very long time and understands the loyalty of this customer base. "We have a lot of iSeries customers in the marketplace and we don't want that to be the message. We realize they wont' take kindly to abandoning them."

E3 customers, in particular, have wholeheartedly embraced the changes, Moran says. JDA has promised the new .NET-based SDM replenishment program, called Portfolio Replenishment Optimization, will have more capability than the OS/400-based E3 replenishment programs and customers are eagerly awaiting it, he says. "E3 customers are very excited about the direction Replenishment Optimization is taking," he says. "We're making it a lot more powerful and simpler. We're also including some functional enhancements they wanted."

The feedback from MMS customers isn't as enthusiastic, although there are some MMS customers, such as clothing retailer Mervyn's, that are strong backers of the new approach. "JDA's Strategic Demand Management product vision is clear," said Kurt Streitz, senior vice president and CIO of Mervyn's, according to a JDA press release. "While other software companies are saying that they are integrating their products, none have the same breadth of solutions with the depth of functionality as JDA."

However, not all MMS customers are welcoming the supporting role that the iSeries plays in JDA's SDM strategy. "Because of the longer-term migration--we've not even announced a date yet--they're trying to figure out how to get the most out of what they have, and also get the most out of SDM applications," Moran says. "It's not like we're going to be forcing them off the product."

JDA hasn't announced a sunset date for MMS, and it may never announce one. However, JDA will debut a Windows-based successor to MMS--the working title is Merchandise Operations, according to Moran. MMS users may be allowed to maintain DB2/400 as the back-end database to this application, although JDA hasn't announced an official timeframe to deliver iSeries support in the SDM products.

In any event, support for Oracle and SQL Server databases will be delivered first and, probably, foremost, as software salespeople tend not to recommend a solution that's contrary to the developers' stated direction. JDA has also yet to explain how a hybrid DB2/400-Windows application will simplify the lives of MMS customers, that have grown accustomed to the simplified operation an integrated OS/400 solution typically affords. SOAs and Web services are supposed to break down barriers limiting the interaction of business applications, but that promise hasn't yet been fulfilled.

If there's one thing JDA's customers can't complain about, it's that the vendor hasn't offered a clear statement of direction. That direction is unequivocally, unapologetically Microsoft .NET. That directness is more than many enterprise software vendors can offer.

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