The Four Hundred

J.D. Edwards is looking to be meaner and leaner as it goes to battle against high-end ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP to win and retain customers in the midmarket sector. This was evident from what J.D. Edwards executives said during the company's annual FOCUS 2002 user conference, where they filled in the blanks created three weeks ago when the company made its initial announcements about its next generation of software, known as J.D. Edwards 5.

As SAP and Oracle continue as they have for the last five years, looking down-market to try to replace the revenue that has been drying up at the upper end of the global ERP market, and as Microsoft looks to break into the ERP midmarket from the low-end, which it will soon dominate as a result of its Great Plains and Navision acquisitions, J.D. Edwards will continue as it has, providing software for the "midrange to midcap market" (defined as companies with more than $200 million in annual revenues), the same customer set it has served for the last 25 years, executives said last week at FOCUS 2002, held in Denver, Colorado.

Company executives characterized SAP and Oracle as bullying ERP software vendors eager to take advantage of hapless clients by selling them software they may not need or use or be able to install in a timely manner. Whereas SAP and Oracle force customers to swallow their entire suites of applications, J.D. Edwards executives say they know that's not the right way to win customer loyalty. Instead, as part of its J.D. Edwards 5 rollout, the company is committing to giving customers the option to mix and match their J.D. Edwards software applications as they see fit. This is what its midmarket customers have been asking for, company executives said: software that provides the functionality they need, that is easy to install, and that is fast to provide a return on investment. Key to this new drive is the company's new OneMethodology, which promises to provide implementation services that are customized to the exact needs of particular clients.

To serve its clients' changing needs, J.D. Edwards is rolling out a number of new applications, as well as updating existing ones. On May 21, J.D. Edwards announced J.D. Edwards 5, so called because it is the fifth generation of the company's enterprise software. Besides providing a technological basis for evolving future releases of the software to become "services based" (which presumably means Web services), the company has delineated distinct lines that separate the seven core applications that make up the J.D. Edwards 5 suite.

At FOCUS 2002 last week, the company announced a new version of its core ERP system, ERP 8.0, which is the follow-on to the OneWorld Xe application that started shipping in 2001, and provided additional details about the new Supplier Resource Management, or SRM, application that debuts with J.D. Edwards 5. ERP 8.0 will run on the same platforms as OneWorld Xe, including OS/400, Windows NT/2000, AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris. J.D. Edwards announced enhancements to Demand Consensus, a module that was announced in January and that is to ship with the CRM application. With the new version of the Demand Consensus collaborative forecasting application, J.D. Edwards has added the capability to mesh human projections with historical data, thereby improving the accuracy of sales forecasts by 20 percent, the company says.

J.D. Edwards also announced a new product called Tactical Network Optimization, or TNO, a product associated with its Strategic Network Optimization module that will ship with its new SRM application. TNO is a graphical interface that gives companies the power to plan and optimize the design of their production and distribution networks according to several variables, including the profit, costs, and constraints associated with each plant or segment of the company's supply chain. New Internet capabilities were also added to Product and Distribution Planning, or PDP, another SRM module. The new capabilities in PDP will allow customers and suppliers to view and share detailed information about production schedules over the Web, based on their role in the supply chain.

In terms of direct enhancements to ERP 8.0, J.D. Edwards has updated the Warehouse Management module with a new workflow engine that fully automates the product pick-up, packing, and shipping process, and allows companies to automatically send customers updates about their shipments, the company says. In a separate announcement, J.D. Edwards said it has updated ERP 8.0 with enhancements aimed at customers in service industries, which, the company says, accounts for a third of its license revenue. New functionality in the Enterprise Asset Management module of ERP 8.0 include a way to more effectively assign people to projects based on a calendar that shows their schedule, availability, priorities, and backlog. Enhanced time entry and billing functions were also added to the Workforce Management module, along with the capability to enforce travel policies and spending limits for mobile employees, and to substitute one currency for another in the expense reports of employees in international companies.

J.D. Edwards also provided further details about its new Real Estate Management module, which was announced in May along with J.D. Edwards 5. This module, which ships as part of ERP 8.0, allows companies to manage how they use their properties, and includes the capability to forecast revenue from tenant sales and to protect themselves from financial clauses and other liabilities in lease agreements.

Many more announcements were made at FOCUS 2002 outside of this flurry of ERP-related product enhancements, including a new special-purpose IBM xSeries server that will be preloaded and configured with J.D. Edwards 5 applications. Last year, IBM and J.D. Edwards announced a special-purpose iSeries Model 270 server for J.D. Edwards' OneWorld and WorldSoftware ERP platforms, which was one of several special-purpose servers IBM announced, including those for running ERP systems from Interactive Business Systems and Intentia International, and for running WebSphere and Linux workloads. The new special-purpose J.D. Edwards xSeries server is based on the xSeries 440, which today supports eight Intel "Foster" Pentium 4 Xeon processors and will soon scale up to 16 Foster or "McKinley" Itanium 2 processors. The xSeries 440 server supports up to 64 GB of main memory, and the special J.D. Edwards configuration is bundled with IBM's TotalStorage disk and tape systems and is preloaded with WebSphere Application Server 3.5, the DB2 database, and J.D. Edwards applications software.

J.D. Edwards also announced it is working with IBM to port its applications to Linux. These Linux-based applications will be sold preconfigured on IBM xSeries hardware. The first xSeries-Linux system that IBM and J.D. Edwards plan to deliver will be preloaded with CRM software for the financial services industry, with additional bundles for other industries expected to follow.

J.D. Edwards is working with IBM to deliver a special pSeries server preconfigured with the J.D. Edwards and IBM software. All of the special-purpose servers J.D. Edwards is working with IBM to deliver--iSeries, xSeries, and pSeries versions--will be loaded with industry-specific bundles of J.D. Edwards software, including the consumer processed goods, wholesale and distribution, industrial fabrication and assembly, and real estate industries.

J.D. Edwards and IBM also announced that J.D. Edwards' CRM offering (which it acquired from YOUcentric last year) has been certified by IBM to run natively on the iSeries.