From Bruce McIntyre -- SYSTEM21

I have never cut and pasted a message from a non-subscriber before, but I 
think you will agree that this time it is warranted.  This was sent to the 
mailing list 11/30/99

Doug


Allow me to introduce myself.

My name is Bruce McIntyre and I run JBA's product development organization.
My email address is bmcintyre@jbana.com and I welcome questions from our
customers.

The decisions relating to Product Development were not made by Geac but
were made by myself in consultation with other long term JBA employees.
They are also decisions we had reached under the prior management to a
large degree.

There has been a lot of turmoil at JBA and some difficult decisions have
been made recently. As bad as it has been for us I am sure for customers it
has been much worse. However, as customers I think you are entitled to
correct information concerning some of the changes in the Product
Development area.

In Mr. Murphy's posting some incorrect information exists.

The Product Labs in Birmingham England were not decimated. In fact not a
single analysts, designer, tester or programmer working on application
software left that facility during the recent voluntary redundancy process.
None are being considered for potential redundancy.

The focus for the potential redundancy analysis was in the areas of
non-productive and ineffective overhead activities. Product Marketing has
long been an issue with JBA. The centralized Product Marketing function is
being reduced. However, we have left intact the local Product Marketing
functions. It is our belief that the regions closer to the customer will be
far more effective in helping us direct the product.

In the meantime we have continued our development activities and are
targeting quality issues as an area of prime concern. This is not at the
expense of ongoing development and investment in the products. In fact all
the strategic investments we at JBA had under way before the Geac
acquisition continue as before.

A comment was made about Sri Lanka. We closed Sri Lanka some 10 months ago,
while we were JBA and long before Geac.

The development facility in Canada has not been closed. The products they
were making had limited sales and we have absorbed the products back into
our Birmingham operation. There has been some downsizing in that facility
in line with their repositioning as a Product Services Organization
undertaking custom work for customers.

There are 8 people working in Ireland and we still have not made any final
decisions concerning the fate of that facility. The majority of the work
done there has been the research into adaptation of advanced technologies,
such as XML, MQ Series, Biz Talk, Java, Jacada J Connects and EDI
replacements. This work is complete and we have transferred the knowledge
to a development team in Birmingham who are producing product that you as
customers will see in the next 6-8 months.

I invite you to ask specific questions, I will respond to the list as a
whole or to individuals.

In a time like this it is important for you as customers to understand what
is going on in development. Please accept this opportunity to ask the
questions important to you.



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