J. D. Edwards Article that I felt was pertinent -- MIDRANGE-L

Hi,

My apologies if you get this e-mail multiple times, but I think it's important, so I have sent it to midrange-l, as well as bcc:ing several other people to whom I feel it is relevant.

I am not normally in the habit of quoting articles that I get from other sources, but I found this in my e-mail the day before yesterday, and I felt that it was pertinent.

It shows how JDE customers are pushing JDE to extend the life of the World product (which is, as I understand it, completely green screen) as opposed to their One-World product (which as I understand it is totally GUI).

Based on the reactions from very many of our customers, and from what else I hear around the industry, One-World can be very buggy, is difficult to implement, and is very expensive from a CPU/hardware/peripheral perspective.

My read into this is that this is a further illustration as to the failure of client/server computing to deliver, although JDE certainly could have a different perspective.

This is a good piece of journalism written by Timothy Prickett Morgan, MMU's Editor.

I did get permission from midrange computing to post this. However to due such they requested me to put in some advertising for them, which is appended at the bottom of the note so that you don't have to look at it. (*BULLSHIT - I even had to fill out a "permissions document", but they own the copyright, so I have played their game. I guess that's one of the reasons that I write for News/400 today.)

Al

Monday Morning AS/400 Update 07/17/00

A Midrange Computing Publication (http://www.midrangecomputing.com)
Timothy Prickett Morgan, Editor
____________________________________________________________

J.D. Edwards Extends WorldSoftware's Life Another Three Years

Being the biggest AS/400 software house in the world can be
a difficult existence. On the one hand, J.D. Edwards &
Company has a very large and loyal customer base with its
WorldSoftware suite of RPG enterprise resource planning
(ERP) applications. The WorldSoftware installed base, which
is close to 4,000 unique customers worldwide, generates
hundreds of millions of dollars of software, services, and
support revenues a year for JDE; it has accounted for
several billion dollars in revenues over the course of
JDE's history, which extends back to the System/38 days. On
the other hand, JDE has been peddling its OneWorld suite
for AS/400, UNIX, and Windows NT servers for the past three
years, and it has been trying to coerce that WorldSoftware
base to move to OneWorld.

By and large, even though OneWorld has included many
features and interfaces to third-party supply chain
management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM),
data warehousing, and e-business applications,
WorldSoftware customers have been content to stay with the
RPG applications they know and understand and have avoided
moving to CASE-tool-generated OneWorld programs, which,
according to JDE implementers, do not offer the same
performance that the WorldSoftware product does. (That's
the nature of hand-tuned vs. CASE-tool coding, and is not a
slam against JDE in the slightest.)

Several months ago, according to my sources within JDE, the
company brought in dozens of WorldSoftware customers to
talk about the future of the WorldSoftware product line,
which is set to expire on February 28, 2002. Having
survived the Y2K transition and having been under the gun to
convert themselves into e-businesses, JDE's WorldSoftware
customers said point blank that what they really wanted was
for JDE to extend the life of WorldSoftware and put some
programmers to work on bringing some of the functionality
in the OneWorld suite over to WorldSoftware.

In establishing the WorldSoftware Organization, a separate
division within JDE, the company is going to do exactly
what customers are asking. Specifically, JDE has agreed to
support the WorldSoftware suite until February 28, 2005.
(The release support lasts through February so companies
can get W2 forms out on the old releases.) That's another
three years for those 4,000 customers to mull over their
options. In addition, JDE has put 50 programmers on the job
of building interfaces to WorldSoftware that allow it to
link to Siebel System's CRM suite, Ariba's e-commerce suite,
and JDE's own Active Supply Chain SCM suite (which JDE got
by virtue of its acquisition of Numetrix last year).

Active Supply Chain is actually a UNIX suite developed in
IBM's AIX, and for OneWorld customers it is actually
supported on the AS/400 through the Portable Applications
Solutions Environment (PASE) built into OS/400 V4R4 and
V4R5. While JDE could have dropped it in alongside
WorldSoftware from the get-go, WorldSoftware has not been a
top priority, much less an equal priority, to OneWorld
until now.

My sources say that the exact delivery schedule for Active
Supply Chain links for WorldSoftware is not yet set, but it
is not a software porting issue so much as a service and
support issue; it is going to take some time to build the
interfaces, to be sure, but it will also take time to get a
support organization that is acquainted with both products
to help customers use it. Ditto for Siebel and Ariba
products and for IBM's WebSphere StoreFront (formerly known
as Net.Commerce).

As things now stand, JDE has about 900 developers in total,
but many of them work on documentation and other projects.
Compared to that number, 50 programmers for the
WorldSoftware organization may not sound like a big number,
but those 50 programmers have the code base from the AS/400
implementation of OneWorld to work from, which cuts down on
the resources necessary to build interfaces to third-party
products. JDE also has plans to expand the development
roster in the coming months, although exactly how many
programmers the unit will ultimately have is unclear. Most
significantly, close to 300 of the dedicated 560 tech-
support staff at JDE are already on the WorldSoftware
product, and that ratio is apparently not going to change
as the company adds customers. JDE is very keen on making
those 4,000 customers happy, even if they do require a lot
less hand-holding on average than the 2,000 OneWorld
customers that JDE has worldwide.

IBM is, as you may imagine, thrilled by this announcement
from JDE. There are a couple of reasons for this. For one,
JDE still sells some new WorldSoftware licenses every year--
WorldSoftware is a big hit in the Asia/Pacific region
lately--and each one of those results in an AS/400 sale.
Moreover, JDE's products for the AS/400 are probably the
most logical alternative for AS/400 shops that want to move
from System Software Associates' Business Planning and
Control System (BPCS) ERP suite to another suite. Earlier
in the year, after years of struggle and decline, SSA was
bought by Gores Technology Group, a Los Angeles company
that specialized in buying pieces of companies spun out as
part of mergers and acquisitions. SSA has some 6,500
customers worldwide, and while Gores is keen on keeping
those customers, some are going to jump ship. Perhaps most
significantly, with the three-year extension on
WorldSoftware's life, IBM, JDE, and their respective
partners may actually start promoting the RPG version,
which has been updated with graphical interfaces using
Seagull Software's JWalk Java GUI tool. Although the
anecdotal evidence suggests that it is rare that AS/400-
based WorldSoftware customers change platform when they
migrate to OneWorld, the sales of AS/400s to new OneWorld
customers not coming from WorldSoftware have been low, and
increasingly customers opt for non-AS/400 platforms.

In the first quarter of 2000, say my sources at JDE, the AS/400
supported less than half of the revenue that JDE
brought in on new shipments of ERP suites, while UNIX and NT
got more than half. My best guess is that the actual ratio--
which JDE will not divulge--is 40 percent on AS/400 (with
almost all of it being for OneWorld), 60 percent on UNIX
and NT. If WorldSoftware sales pick up, the AS/400 could
hold steady at 40 percent of JDE's sales, rather than
decline to 25 or 30 percent as I reckon it would have in the
absence of a revitalized WorldSoftware base. I would also
venture that UNIX would get about 30 percent and that
Windows NT/2K, by virtue of the increasing emphasis on
smaller enterprises in the ERP market, would have got about
40 to 45 percent of the market. But now that WorldSoftware
will continue to be a viable product and IBM has powerful
Model 270 Pulsar servers at attractive prices, maybe the AS/400
can make up for some lost ground.

IBM and JDE are right now putting together some joint
marketing campaigns to bring this message to the
WorldSoftware base and to potential JDE customers who might
prefer WorldSoftware over OneWorld for the next few years.
They will also bring home the message that JDE has been
sending out since its user group meeting last month, which
is that the company is cool with the idea of the
coexistence of WorldSoftware and OneWorld on AS/400s.

Only time will tell what effect JDE's new stance on
WorldSoftware will have on the AS/400 market. No matter
what, JDE is doing right by its AS/400 customers and IBM's
AS/400 business will benefit from that. This sure beats
killing off WorldSoftware--unless you happen to make your
living migrating WorldSoftware customers to OneWorld, that is.

Story ends here.

Below is what I received from Midrange Computing, with their required advertisement. I have not clicked on the link, but be their guest.

>I understand that you would like to use a story from the most recent issue
>of Monday Morning AS/400 Update. If you would like to merely excerpt the
>story, please feel free to do so. If you are going to do that, we ask that
>you do reference the publication name in full, note that it is published by
>Midrange Computing, and provide a link back to the publication (It's
>located at
>http://www.midrangecomputing.com/mmu/currentissue1.cfm?20000717.)
>
>If you would like to use the story in full, please let me know. We have a
>short permission for we will need to you to fill out.

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Al Barsa, Jr. - Account for Midrange-L

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