The Four Hundred

J.D. Edwards has started the rollout of the next version of its enterprise applications, named J.D. Edwards 5, to commemorate the fifth generation of the company's software. The new suite will not mark a wholesale shift from what the software giant was already shipping, with the OneWorld ERP suite and associated supply chain, CRM, and business intelligence components. Rather, company officials say J.D. Edwards 5 represents a "major direction statement" and lays the foundation for technology to come.

With J.D. Edwards 5, the company is delivering a common underlying framework built on XML that paves the way for all of the various components of the J.D. Edwards 5 suite to be closely integrated with one another. Since the last major release of new software, the OneWorld release in 1996, the market for enterprise applications has changed tremendously, and J.D. Edwards has been forced to purchase additional products, such as CRM and supply chain applications, to keep up with other providers of enterprise apps, such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and SAP. While the J.D. Edwards 5 release will include new functionality, much of the "newness" of this release is the way in which the company is packaging and integrating its solutions.

J.D. Edwards 5 software will simultaneously be forward-looking and compatible with older versions of J.D. Edwards' software, such as WorldSoftware, said Jim Godley, J.D. Edwards' senior director of product strategy. "It's not any kind of major architectural shift for our customers. It will allow our customers to move into it at their own pace," he said. "It's the beginnings of a new architecture that we're evolving into to be minimally disruptive to existing customers, not a wholesale architecture change."

Such new technologies forthcoming with J.D. Edwards 5 include support for Web services, a way in which users can tap into and use application resources dynamically over the Internet. The applications delivered under the J.D. Edwards 5 banner will use XML for inter-application communication, and they will support the so-called Web services protocols, such as Simple Object Access Protocol, Web Services Description Language, and the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration registry of Web services available for use over the Internet. The new Web services support will be delivered through the Extended Process Integration middleware, which can be found in the Collaboration and Integration module, and which has been the key piece linking WorldSoftware with J.D. Edwards CRM and advance planning applications.

Some of the J.D. Edwards 5 components are already shipping, and some will start shipping later this year. The names of those seven applications are Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Supplier Relationship Management, Business Intelligence, Collaboration and Integration, and Tools and Technology. Of the seven, only the Supplier Relationship Management component will be an entirely new piece of software.

More details about the new features and planned availability dates for these components—specifically the new enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, and supplier relationship management components—will be announced at J.D. Edwards' annual user group meeting, FOCUS, starting next week. At this point, what is known about the new ERP component is that it will be, more or less, a refresh of the OneWorld suite that the company started shipping in 1996. As such, users of the RPG-based WorldSoftware package will be able to migrate directly to the J.D. Edwards 5 ERP application without first stopping at OneWorld.

In the past, WorldSoftware users have been reluctant to move to OneWorld, for a variety of reasons. OS/400 shops will have better reasons to upgrade to J.D. Edward 5 ERP because it will contain new functionality that they've been looking for, Godley said, including items important to service industries such as project management, and contract and service billing. "They're waiting for additional functionality to be released, and that functionality is in J.D. Edwards 5," Godley said. "This may be the right time for them to move. We can help them with that."

The CRM component, which J.D. Edwards bought last summer when it acquired CRM vendor YOUcentric, will get a version 2 update this fall. The company plans to announce details of its new supply chain components at its FOCUS user group. All of the components will run on OS/400, except compute-intensive business intelligence components, which will run on Unix or Windows and connect to the DB2/400 database. Other operating systems supported by J.D. Edwards 5 components include Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Windows.

While, on the one hand, J.D Edwards is trying to tie its various components closer together, it is also breaking them apart, to make it easier for customers to get what they need. "We've made it a lot easier from a licensing and a pricing standpoint," Godley said. "We've unbundled what we previously had as a large product suite and made it a little bit more granular . . . to tailor the applications that are brought together."

Key to this ethos of painless—or at least less painful—implementations will be J.D. Edwards' new OneMethodology, which aims to offer customers an integrated set of consulting and education services based on their specific needs.

A day after announcing J.D. Edwards 5, the company announced its financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2002, which ended April 30. Software license fee revenue dropped by 13 percent to $54.1 million for the quarter, while revenue from services rose by 6.2 percent to $169.5 million, compared with the same quarter a year ago. Overall, revenues increased by about $1.7 million, or 0.7 percent, to $223.6 million, and the company posted announced pro forma net income of about $7.6 million, a 165 percent increase from last year. Without counting amortization related to J.D. Edwards' acquisitions and the other ways its accountants quantify intangibles, the actual net income for the quarter was $3.5 million.