Royal Caribbean Cruises the Seas with Updated JDE ‘Blue Stack’

April 27, 2010 Alex Woodie

Royal Caribbean Cruises has successfully upgraded its ERP system to the latest release of JD Edwards EntepriseOne, Oracle announced yesterday. The company, which owns Royal Caribbean International and several other cruise lines, remained on the IBM Power Systems platform, and runs EnterpriseOne on i/OS using what Oracle calls the “blue stack” configuration.

Royal Caribbean worked with SYSTIME, a large JD Edwards consultancy that’s a subsidiary of the CMS Group, to upgrade the company’s implementation of OneWorld Xe to a current release of EnterpriseOne.

The cruise line, which is a Norwegian/American company with headquarters in Miami, Florida, needed an ERP upgrade to smooth out disparities among core applications, to streamline business process flows, to tighten up security, and to make the company more efficient as it seeks to expand its market share in an increasingly competitive industry.

“To successfully execute this growth strategy, we needed a modern IT infrastructure that could quickly and easily integrate with our existing applications and systems,” stated Royal Caribbean Cruises’ IT manager Mark Musial.

When the upgrade was complete, EnterpriseOne was hooked into more than 30 internal applications, as well as six external systems. About 5,500 users have access to the software, which was implemented by SYSTIME on time and under budget, Musial says.

Royal Caribbean has been an AS/400 shop since the S/3x days, and maintained that IT heritage even after Oracle’s acquisition of JD Edwards–the “i” platform’s most respected ERP system–in 2004. Analysts have shown that running EnterpriseOne on the System i platform costs significantly less than running it on Windows or Linux platforms, largely as the result of the fact that fewer personnel are required to manage the proprietary Big Blue server.

Meanwhile, Oracle also offers its own range of Unix and Linux operating systems and middleware for JD Edwards. It pushes an EnterpriseOne package that includes the Linux operating system and its own database and middleware as a “red stack.”