Guild Companies

At the Quest Global user conference for users of J.D. Edwards' ERP applications in Denver last week, Hewlett Packard Co and JDE will announce that the two companies will start delivering in August a prebundled, preintegrated JDE 5-on-ProLiant solution running on top of Windows 2000 and Windows 2003. The bundle is targeted at small and midsized shops with 50 to 150 ERP users.

This offering, which will carry a discount over the individual server, operating system, database, and application component prices, will be available on the HP ProLiant DL380 and DL580 servers. The DL380 is a two-way machine based on Intel Corp's "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors running at 2.4 GHz to 3.06 GHz and with up to 6 GB of main memory, while the DL580 is a four-way server based on the 2.0 GHz "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors and with up to 32 GB of main memory. These machines are plenty big enough to run the database and application servers for applications like JDE 5 (formerly known as OneWorld) all on a single machine, says Brian Allison, director of enterprise application alliances at HP. If customers need more power, however, HP will slip in an eight-way ProLiant DL740 or DL760, which has up to eight Gallatin chips and up to 64 GB of main memory.

Starting in August, the ProLiant bundle for JDE 5 will be available on Windows operating systems supporting SQL Server 2000. Exactly how big a discount HP and JDE will give on the bundles was unclear as we went to press, but it has to be big enough to make deals happen, particularly as IBM is fighting hard to retain the JDE accounts it does control. "We want ProLiant to be the default, no-brainer choice for SMB customers," says Allison. While IBM has similar bundling programs on the iSeries, it does not have a similar deal for the Intel-based xSeries server line it sells. That will probably change fast now that HP has teamed up with JDE.

Later in the year, in an obvious move to entice diehard iSeries and AS/400 customers to move off OS/400 onto Wintel iron, HP and JDE will offer bundles on the ProLiant DL380 and DL580 servers running IBM Corp's own DB2 Universal Data Base software. While the Windows, Linux, and Unix implementation of DB2 is distinct from the DB2/400 variant at the heart of the OS/400 operating system, it is a lot closer to DB2/400 than is SQL Server or Oracle Corp's Oracle9i database. Allison says that most of HP's 1,100 JDE shops who have chosen Windows-on-Intel as their platform opt for SQL Server, but there is some DB2 and a smattering of Oracle. Most of HP's JDE accounts that support Oracle databases have chosen its HP-UX Unix platform, however.

HP says that 60 percent of the JDE customer base that has opted to install OneWorld or JDE 5 on Intel iron have opted for ProLiant machines as their Wintel platform. And while most people don't know this, HP-UX is the preferred Unix platform among JDE's Unix customers, beating out Sun Microsystems' Solaris and even IBM's AIX variants. The HP-UX platform has always been strong in the midrange ERP space, stronger even than IBM's own System/3X-AS/400-iSeries platform, on which JDE got its start 25 years ago.