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HP, JDE Team Up to Push Apps on Wintel Iron by Timothy Prickett Morgan Hewlett-Packard and J.D. Edwards are scheduled to start delivering in a few weeks a prebundled, preintegrated JDE 5-on-ProLiant solution that runs on top of Windows 2000 and Windows 2003. The bundle is targeted at small and midsized shops with 50 to 150 ERP users. This may not be the typical iSeries JDE customer, since JDE tends to be installed by larger companies, but it is certainly the heart of the iSeries market. 
This alliance between HP and JDE will have repercussions throughout the OS/400 market, perhaps bigger than the pending PeopleSoft acquisition of JDE. Hopefully, the iSeries marketing team will realize this and do something a little more dramatic than offering a Bumblebee-for-JDE iSeries configuration with a modest discount, as it did last year. The iron that HP is pushing into these small shops is, by iSeries standards, pretty big iron, so IBM can't counter with an entry iSeries Model 800 solution with a single, radically geared-down processor and limited software support and win deals against this pending ProLiant bundle. This HP-JDE bundle, 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'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. The DL580 is a four-way server, based on the 2.0 GHz to 2.8 GHz "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors, with up to 32 GB of main memory. These two machines are big enough to run the database and application servers for applications like JDE 5 (formerly known as OneWorld) 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. In August, the ProLiant bundle for JDE 5 will become available on Windows operating systems supporting SQL Server 2000. Exactly how big a discount HP and JDE will give on the bundles was unclear at press time, 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 [small and midsized business] 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 quickly, now that HP has teamed up with JDE. And that does not necessarily bode well for the iSeries, either. Two Wintel vendors competing hard against each other can put tremendous pressure on iSeries resellers trying to peddle JDE's software to the same customers on the OS/400 platform. Later in the year, in an obvious move to entice diehard iSeries and AS/400 customers to move from OS/400 to Wintel iron, HP and JDE will offer bundles on the ProLiant DL380 and DL580 servers running IBM'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's Oracle9i database. Allison says that most of HP's 1,100 JDE shops have chosen Windows-on-Intel as their platform choice 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, even stronger than IBM's own System/3X-AS/400-iSeries platform, on which JDE got its start 25 years ago. As the largest application provider pushing iSeries iron, JDE has to push the iSeries harder than other platforms, not only to set the right example for other software providers, but also to help IBM win deals with the iSeries. IBM has to help JDE make that happen by bringing the right iSeries hardware and software bundle to market at the right price to compete--and I mean really compete--against the HP-JDE bundle on ProLiants.
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