In 2006, Andrews Consulting Group released a white paper entitled The Transformation of JD Edwards Applications that you can download from our white papers section. This year, we are revisiting the subject of how Oracle is transforming our applications with a new series of articles. We welcome your comments and questions as the series evolves.
As I explained in our first article in this series, Oracle has set an ambitious goal for itself. That goal is to make it easy for all of its Applications Unlimited (AU) offerings—including JD Edwards—to invoke functions from the rest of Oracle’s vast application portfolio. This would make each AU product significantly more complete than it is today.
If Oracle realizes its vision, it could make life dramatically different for JD Edwards customers. A company might, for instance, integrate functions from Oracle’s Agile, Demantra, G-Log, and Siebel products under the covers of EnterpriseOne or World. Indeed, it might even integrate some of the latest Fusion Applications in the same way. In some cases, these integrations would require the deployment of selected components of the integrated applications. In other cases, the customer would invoke the functions from an Oracle-hosted site. Either way, the resulting integrations would be virtually seamless, with data flowing almost effortlessly between the new functions and the underlying JD Edwards applications.
How could Oracle make it so easy for JD Edwards and other AU customers to close the functionality gaps in their existing applications? The answer lies in two strategic initiatives that the software giant has been pursuing for more than two years. The first initiative is to repackage much of the “best of breed” functionality in its applications as composite business processes. These processes will integrate with AU applications and each other via a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The second initiative is to create an “integration platform” that governs how composite business processes are created and defines how they interoperate with AU applications over SOAs.
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Last week, Oracle demonstrated once again that like the Godfather, it can make offers to other software vendors that they cannot refuse. The company announced that middleware rival BEA has agreed to become part of Oracle for $8.5 billion in cash, or $19.375 per share. While the deal cost Larry Ellison and his crew significantly more than the $17 per share they originally bid for BEA, it was less than the $21 per share that BEA insisted it was worth. With the stock market tanking and taking tech shares down with it, BEA undoubtedly realized that it would be a long time before it would see a better offer.
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Over the last several weeks, Oracle has quietly posted two significant software offerings for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne users on its web sites. The first offering, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 8.97, is one of the most substantial upgrades to EnterpriseOne Tools in years. The second, the Financial Management and Compliance Console, provides role-based financial analytics via a dashboard-style interface. Both offerings are now available for download by licensed EnterpriseOne users.
If you have not looked at EnterpriseOne Tools 8.97, you really owe it to yourself to do so. If you are a system administrator or CNC, we bet that you’ll love the new Server Manager. Put simply, Server Manager takes the many disparate tools and interfaces used to manage EnterpriseOne servers and consolidates them to a single tool with a consistent, intuitive interface. While we have not run user tests on Server Manager, our hunch is that the tool will significantly reduce the time that sysadmins spend on tasks such as server installation, patch management, package builds, and configuration management.
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In 2006, Andrews Consulting Group released a white paper entitled The Transformation of JD Edwards Applications that you can download from our white papers section. This year, we are revisiting the subject of how Oracle is transforming our applications with a new series of articles. We welcome your comments and questions as the series evolves.
When Oracle President Charles Phillips delivered his keynote speech at the vendor’s annual OpenWorld user conference last November, he gave the audience a simple roadmap to Oracle’s strategy for its products, including JD Edwards applications. As Phillips put it, the strategy consists of three deceptively simple mandates:
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Be more complete. Give customers the functionality they need to seamlessly automate all their business processes without the functional fragmentation that is still common.
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Be better integrated. Take the task of integrating software off the shoulders of customers by delivering a platform for integration.
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Embrace open standards. Make the integration platform as open as possible so that IT professionals and vendors can access it regardless of their technology choices.
This article is the first in a series of columns that will take this simple strategy and explore what it means for the future of JD Edwards applications. In the articles, we will examine how Oracle plans to transform our applications of choice along the three dimensions of functional completeness, integration, and openness.
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