The JD Edwards Advisor

On May 21, IBM unveiled its first production server running the much-awaited POWER6 processor. That raises fresh questions about when POWER6 chips will come to the rest of the System p product family, not to mention IBM’s System i. Those questions are on the minds of JD Edwards customers, as many of them run their applications on POWER servers. Fortunately, IBM is providing its field force and Business Partners with answers, and I’m going to reveal them to you in this posting.

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Business Objects calls itself the world’s leading business intelligence (BI) software company, a claim that Oracle plans to challenge following its Hyperion, Siebel, and Sunopsys acquisitions. However, Business Objects has launched a new marketing campaign that could help it weather whatever Oracle and other BI vendors throw at it. That campaign should be of interest to JD Edwards customers, as most of them own Business Objects products.

Most EnterpriseOne and World customers know Business Objects as the vendor behind Crystal Reports, a reporting tool that comes bundled with JD Edwards applications. The full scope of what Business Objects offers, and for that matter what BI does, is something that many people in the JD Edwards community have never had the chance to fully understand. The launch of a major new marketing campaign by Business Objects, aimed at shedding some light on the BI subject, is thus of potential interest to the JD Edwards community. A short browse through the vendor’s refreshed web site can thus be an eye-opening experience.

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If you run EnterpriseOne and are finding that your pre-payroll processing runs are coming up with incorrect figures, you are not alone. Our consultants have noticed that a number of EnterpriseOne shops are having similar problems with their pre-payroll runs. The errors do not seem to be restricted to any particular server or software platform, as some of the afflicted sites run on Intel systems and Microsoft’s SQL Server while others run on IBM’s System i and DB2.

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One month ago, Oracle President Charles Phillips dedicated most of his keynote speech at the Collaborate conference to announcing a new technology initiative: Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA). When an Oracle president kicks off a conference in this way, it must mean that AIA is a big deal. Knowing this, we have been on a quest on your behalf to figure out exactly what AIA is all about and whether it is of any great consequence to the JD Edwards community.

The bottom line is that AIA is important. However, its near term relevance to you depends on the size and complexity of your application environment. For the roughly 200 top-end JD Edwards customers, AIA is definitely something that needs to be understood soon. Everyone else will be impacted by AIA in the fullness of time, but need not be highly concerned at this moment.

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If you are in the market for an IBM System i or System p to run JD Edwards applications, you’ve probably been wondering when Big Blue will replace its current crop of POWER5 servers with ones that run on POWER6 chips. After all, IBM has been telling its customers that the price/performance of POWER6 will be significantly better than POWER5. Who wouldn’t want to benefit from that improvement if they could manage to hold off on an acquisition until the new servers ship?

Today, I’m going to offer all of the information that I can legally give you to satisfy your curiosity. That should help you figure out whether you should buy a POWER5 server now or wait for the POWER6 lineup to ship.

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I just read a new report from my colleagues at Andrews Consulting Group that I would recommend to any JD Edwards professional. The report, Why You Need a Data Warehouse, explains how a properly designed data warehouse can improve query, reporting, and analysis of JD Edwards data by orders of magnitude. I’ve posted the report on our Research and White Papers page where anyone can download it. I encourage you to do so.

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A couple of weeks ago, a JD Edwards Advisor reader left a comment on one of our seldom-viewed pages that made me realize we were not being as helpful as we should. The question was, “You say this is a web site where we can get answers to our JD Edwards questions. So where on the site do I ask my question?”

Hmmm…that is a good question! Today, we are providing that person (and the rest of you) with the answer. If you look at the menu bar, you will see that we now have an Ask a Question page where you can fire away at us with whatever burning question you have about EnterpriseOne, World, and anything related to the applications. If we don’t have the answer, we’ll make a good faith effort to find someone who does. Even if you don’t have a question, we bet you will learn something from the answers we give to other readers. So stop by our new page on a regular basis…and don’t be afraid to speak up.

The best thing about Collaborate 2007 was how little dramatic news there was for JD Edwards customers – and how wonderful that was. Our community has seen more than its share of excitement over the past ten years, so the period of relative peace and tranquility we have now entered is very welcome. Oracle is not ignoring us; instead, it has made the pragmatic (and appropriate) decision to leave us largely alone for the time being.

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If you love a freebie, I have good news for you. For a limited time, Quest—the international association for JD Edwards and PeopleSoft users—is allowing anyone to download the slides from all of the education sessions held at Collaborate 07. This is not just an offer for Quest members; anyone can download the slides and benefit from them. So if you could not attend last month’s annual user conference (or if you attended and want to build on what you learned), just go to the download site.

Before you click off to Quest’s web site, there are a couple of things you should know. First, not all of the slides are available yet because the presenters are still submitting them. I have noticed, however, that the number of available slide decks has been steadily increasing over the last several days. Second, Quest will not make the slides available to the public forever. The organization will move them to its Education Archive at the end of May, a place that is only available to Quest Members. So if you want to build on your JD Edwards expertise, check out the Quest site today. And while you’re at it, think about becoming a Quest member if you’re not one already. For all the work it does on behalf of users, the organization deserves our support.