Oracle OpenWorld here I come

Open World starts next Sunday and I will be there with so many different hats to wear I may need to pay extra for checked luggage.  My first goal will be to collect useful intelligence and you can count on numerous postings based on what I uncover.  A larger than usual number of JDE experts from Oracle will be present and nearly 100 sessions of interest to our community will be presented, some in a shorter than an hour format as an experiment. 

My JDE contacts expect a decent turnout from our community but I suspect attendance will be down from last year.  For those who cannot go, send me a note if there is anything specific you are looking for news about.  I do know that the turnout of JDE centric vendors will be light this year. 

On Monday I will be in Moscone West room 2003 at 2:30PM local time to accept an award on behalf of one of my JDE clients.  I can’t disclose the details until after the presentation but any of you that are at the conference and free at that time might want to come and sit in to see one of your peers be recognized by Oracle. 

I will be wearing my vendor hat (actually it will be a blue shirt) on Tuesday night when the JDE and PeopleSoft attendees gather for a social hour at the end of the day.  Andrews Consulting Group will be introducing a PeopleSoft version of our very popular RapidDecision pre-built data warehouse.  We will have a vendor table in the PeopleSoft area.  If you are attending and want to say hello look me up there. 

Going in, some of the things I hope to learn more about include: 

• Will plans for JDE evolution change at all with Lyle Ekdahl now in charge?
• Are Fusion Applications really on the horizon (and should we care)?
• What will happen once Oracle actually takes over Sun?
• Are JDE customers buying Oracle’s many “edge” applications?
• Has the Oracle view of BI changed since last year? 

Suggestions to add to my list are always welcome.

 

Oracle and IBM: Can this unique relationship last?

Romances between high profile celebrities never seem to last.  Might the same thing be true for alliances between giant technology businesses?  For nearly five years IBM and Oracle have enjoyed a strange and wonderful relationship.   Executives have been quite complementary of each other, have invited their counterparts to speak at each other’s major selling events, and otherwise have showed many signs of true friendship.  Oracle has declared IBM to be its Partner of the Year multiple times.

A series of recent developments have the potential to erode this special relationship:

• The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, after IBM made a low-ball bid to buy it, clearly got a lot of teeth grinding in Armonk.
• By acquiring BEA, Oracle threatens IBM’s critical WebSphere franchise.
• Competition is intensifying for Business Intelligence market share as each absorbs major acquisitions (Hyperion and Siebel for Oracle, Cognos and SPSS for IBM).

Oracle only exists because 30 years ago IBM foolishly delayed exploiting the relational database concept it invented. Larry Ellison had the vision to jump in and systematically take over that market.  It took IBM more than twenty years to get over the resulting anger, jealousy and sense of unfairness.

The acquisition of PeopleSoft early in 2005, one of IBM’s strongest ISV partners, shocked IBM into rethinking its attitude toward Oracle.  Suddenly, it made sense to at least appear friendly in front of thousands of mutual customers.  IBM swallowed its pride and sent a posse of peacemakers to Redwood Shores.  Once there, numerous common interests were uncovered:

• IBM’s service business was making a fortune installing, supporting, enhancing and running Oracle software products.
• Both shared a passionate belief in open standards including Linux.
• Neither cared for Microsoft’s technological bullying.

President Charles Phillips became Oracle’s designated driver for the new friendship.  So far he has kept the relationship remarkably strong.  His task gets harder every year since both are in a race to acquire software companies as fast as they can be absorbed.  It was thus inevitable that the mutual buying binge would eventually lead to conflict.

Surprisingly, IBM did not seem to mind too much last year when Oracle grabbed BEA even though it competes strongly with WebSphere – the crown jewel of IBM’s own software business.

Then at OpenWorld 2008 Oracle introduced a database appliance built with HP hardware.  Once again IBM shrugged it off after a polite call from Phillips to IBM CEO Sam Palmisano.  It seemed like no big deal since the market niche being targeted was small.  It helped that Oracle also reaffirmed its lack of interest in selling hardware.

The wild card came earlier this year when Sun put itself up for sale.  IBM took its usual very careful look and came up with an offer that the Sun board felt it could refuse.  Days later Oracle swaggered into the saloon and put a sack of gold nuggets on the table.  IBM was surprised along with most outside observers.  Regular readers of this blog know that we saw it coming (see our April 9, 2009 post).

The big question remains: What will Oracle do with Sun (assuming it will gain approval from the European Union)?  No one outside Oracle knows but that will not stop me from making a few guesses.

The obvious strategy is for Oracle/Sun to build integrated appliances that include hardware, databases, middleware and even applications.  Oracle has already announced what is likely the first of many appliance offerings.  This represents a far greater challenge to IBM than anything Oracle has previously done.  The hardware play is not what IBM cares about – margins in hardware have become miserable.  Integrated offerings strongly challenge IBM’s middleware franchise.  More importantly, they reduce IBM’s role providing associated services and even the demand for such services.  The current era of détente will likely come to an end if integrated Oracle appliances gain significant traction in the market.

The Sun acquisition goes beyond putting Oracle into the hardware and appliance business.  Oracle now has control of both Java and the mySQL open source database – the Sun assets IBM really cared about.  This seriously diminishes IBM’s dream of providing leadership in middleware, application development and the openness movement.

Independent of the Sun acquisition, competition between IBM and Oracle in the BI market continues to intensify.  A separate series of postings will explore this fascinating and important development and its implications for the JDE community.  BI adds one more growing source of intense competition and therefore friction between Oracle and IBM.

The option of openly declaring war on Oracle as a result of all these transgressions is not available to IBM given the continuing synergy of its services business.  In any case, it is not in the nature of the key executives involved to engage in old style vitriolic attacks.  Still, it is hard to picture the Oracle/IBM relationship being as cordial as it has been recently a year from now.

Since most of you have important vendor relationships with both Oracle and IBM we will continue to follow developments as they unfold.  At the very least, they will provide some entertainment.

Please, keep those comments, questions and opposing opinions coming!

 

The Understanding Oracle Series

Cold Fusion

 We live in times when good things to worry about range from “which steroid era players belong in the Hall of Fame?” to “can our species survive climate change?”  Given the range of real things to be concerned about, JD Edwards users do not need to spend any time worrying about Oracle Fusion Applications. 

When Fusion was first announced, SAP and other Oracle competitors started calling it Con-Fusion.  Three years later, a modest level of confusion about it still remains. The giant media event Oracle held at San Francisco city hall early in 2006 to explain Fusion left as many questions open as it answered.  It also left an impression that refuses to go away within the JD Edwards community that the day will come when Oracle will try to force all of its application customers to go through an expensive and painful conversion.  Countless attempts by Oracle executives to clarify what will really happen since then have not completely cleared the air. 

Without going into the subject in the depth required to have it make complete sense, I will try to briefly net out why Fusion Applications is a subject that is not worthy of your concern.  First, a clarification.  Fusion is three things – a technical architectural blueprint that Oracle is following (and that seems to be working out), a body of Oracle middleware products that are well respected and established, and a still under development set of new applications.  The discussion below applies only to these Fusion Applications. 

Fusion Applications were scheduled to start arriving in 2008.  They didn’t.  No one seemed to notice or care and Oracle management quietly adopted a policy of making minimal use of the F word.  For example, Charles Phillips in his recent keynote at Collaborate confined himself to one brief reference to Fusion Middleware.  This was the only time the F word crossed his lips.  By not mentioning Fusion out loud Oracle could be preparing us for the introduction of a new brand name.  Marketing people love to rename things, especially when the current name develops unwanted connotations. 

Ironically, the original grand vision behind Fusion is a good one that is actually working surprisingly well in practice.  One characteristic of big ideas is that time has a way of altering them in unpredictable ways.  In the case of Fusion, the big change has been the replacement of the application leg of the stool with a better idea.  Oracle introduced the nuanced concept of Applications Unlimited to explain it.  In overly simplistic terms, the notion is that Oracle’s customers can keep using whatever application suite they have (eBusiness Suite, JDE or PeopleSoft) and slowly add capability and functionality through a growing list of add-on applications.  Oracle Transportation Manager, based on the acquisition of G-Log is a good example. 

Instead of continuing to call the technological standards that glue together old applications and new functionality Fusion Architecture, Oracle has introduced another challenging term: Application Integration Architecture or AIA.  By doing so Oracle has indirectly admitted that the original Fusion strategy has changed in an important way.  Rather than just say that a better idea came along, Oracle is finessing the point. 

A project lives on within Oracle to build Fusion Applications.  Instinct tells us that its priority inside Oracle dropped significantly after John Wookie left in 2008.   He was the executive responsible for applications when the original Fusion Application concept emerged.  Wookie was replaced by Ed Abbo, a senior executive that came to Oracle as part of the Siebel acquisition.  Abbo left Oracle in mid-2009 and was not replaced. Instead, rising star Thomas Kurian now controls all Oracle product development including applications.  Under Kurian we expect Oracle’s acquired applications to evolve through the injection of Fusion technology rather than via replacement. 

During 2010 Oracle is likely to complete field-testing of at least a few Fusion Application modules.  An announcement of general availability will then follow.  Relatively little is likely to be invested in marketing in support of it. 

The net of our reading of the tea leafs is that Fusion Applications has morphed into more of a research effort than a serious attempt to invent a new ERP suite that will massively replace existing applications.  The main reason is more technological than political. 

The key technology behind Fusion Architecture is Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) – a sophisticated way to build software out of reusable building blocks.  As Oracle started to build Fusion Applications it dawned on them that these building blocks could also be incorporated into existing applications.  AIA was therefore created as the mechanism for making this happen.  If most Oracle customers can get the main benefits of Fusion without a painful conversion, what is the incentive to do so? 

A future posting will explain why we believe that only a modest number organizations will buy Fusion Applications in their pure form in the next few years.  In the meantime, you will have to trust me and spend whatever time you allocate to worrying (for me its usually 3-4AM) thinking about more important things. 

Please, keep those comments, questions and opposing opinions coming!

 

Understanding Oracle – Advertising

Many customers wonder why Oracle never invests in advertising JD Edwards software.  Is this a signal that our favorite product line is somehow out of favor?  We were concerned as well and poked around to find out why.  The answer both surprised us and provided some interesting insight into the strange and wonderful entity that is Oracle. 

It was a great relief to find out that JDE Edwards is not at all out of favor. It is not at the top of the list of Oracle’s most important products, but it gets more positive attention and recognition by Oracle senior management every year.  Oracle’s decision to not visibly promote JD Edwards is part of a broader policy to spend as little as possible in total on advertising.  The little that is spent (relative to competitors) is focused on the Oracle brand name and not on any specific offerings. 

Dislike of advertising is a personal quirk of Larry Ellison’s who takes great pride in spending far less as a percentage of revenue than competitors.  As long as he is CEO the policy is unlikely to change.  We have heard that debating this point with him can be a career limiting choice. 

When Ellison does open his wallet we have been told that he favors magazines and posters in places like airports. Ellison supposedly will often write the copy himself.  He apparently also insists on personally choosing the name for all new products.  This is a possible explanation for the strange decision to call the BI product Oracle obtained when it bought Siebel Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus or OBIEE+ for short (some clients pronounce it “obese”). 

The Ellison marketing mantra appears to be “if we build it, they will figure it out”.   It is not hard to guess how he might have developed that opinion.  During the two decades when Oracle was primarily a database vendor his approach made a great deal of sense.  We believe that the technicians who make most database buying decisions are largely immune to marketing hype.  It is in their nature to make detailed evaluations of the available choices and form options largely based on technical characteristics. 

Ellison learned early on that slick marketing and advertising is a waste of money when selling IT infrastructure software to deeply technical experts.  This principle held up well when Oracle got into the middleware business since similar buying dynamics are present.  The question in my mind is whether this logic also applies to applications and business intelligence.  In my experience, it does not because a different type of person controls the buying decision – one whose opinions can be shaped by the right kind of advertising. 

In my experience, good advertising educates buyers.  When attempting to sell something new and complex it is necessary to help potential buyers to understand what is being offered to them.  The cost of both applications and BI is high.  Approval requires the full support of both end users and non-technical executives.  It is thus my opinion that Oracle’s aversion to spending money on advertising tends to lead them to under-invest in the education of prospects. I believe that Oracle’s application business has succeeded in spite of this policy. 

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no influence over what Ellison thinks so my opinion does not matter.  You can therefore expect Oracle to continue to only advertise its brand name and to largely do so in print.  The JDE product line will not be advertised in any meaningful way but neither will any other specific products. 

Oracle’s overall product line will become more useful, valuable and capable over time.  As it does the names for new offerings will continue to be complex and confusing and too little help will be provided to potential buyers to makes sense of what they are and why they should be bought.  Oracle will continue to assume that buyers will figure out what it is offering and that its sale force will be capable of closing deals with very little educational air cover.  This will likely continue to work among larger enterprises but may continue to limit sales to more modestly sized organizations. 

The bottom line is that Oracle will keep forcing prospects to work harder to understand its offerings than some of its competitors.  Once understood, however, Oracle’s offerings will often be worth the effort.

 

Abbo and Hensarling – did they jump or were they pushed out?

 Since we broke the story of Lenely Hensarling leaving Oracle early this week there has been speculation elsewhere that both he and his former boss Ed Abbo must have been pushed aside.  If that indeed was the case it might imply that a major change in direction for Oracle’s application business was coming. 

All the intelligence I have been able to gather this week points in the opposite direction.  I believe that both of them decided to leave on their own.  Most importantly, I do not think that a major change in direction has been signaled by this.  The opposite is more likely: facing a short-term leadership vacuum, momentum will cause Oracle’s application business to remain on its previous course for now. 

Oracle has not responded to my requests for official comment so I am left to read the tea leaves on my own.  Here are the reasons behind my conclusion: 

• Oracle’s top management is consumed with acquiring Sun and is not focused on fine-tuning the internal organization, especially parts that are performing well.
• The “Applications Unlimited” unit Abbo was running was doing just fine under his leadership, especially in a very weak market. No reason to change horses.
• Oracle’s earnings announcement this week indicated that weakness was primarily being felt in data base sales and that applications were selling surprisingly well.
• When a senior executive is removed for poor performance there is almost always a replacement waiting in the wings.  A full quarter later the Abbo position has not been filled.
• Under Hensarling’s leadership the JDE unit has exceeded the modest expectations that Oracle had for it when PeopleSoft was bought.  His responsibilities within Oracle have been increasing recently.  For example, the unit developing data warehouse connectors for all Oracle applications reported to Hensarling.
• If Oracle management was unhappy with Hensarling they would not have promoted Lyle Ekdahl to replace him.  Ekdahl has been the power behind the scenes during the entire Hensarling tenure. 

Oracle’s executive ranks are already short on people that have a deep understanding of how to develop and sell applications.  Oracle’s core competency has always been technology and infrastructure software.  It needs more people like Abbo and Hensarling not less.  Even in a job market where talent is abundant Oracle will not fine it easy to obtain true experts on applications. 

Ekdahl will carry on the strategy now in place largely because he had a major role shaping it.  He will report directly to Tom Kurian who now has responsibility for all software development within Oracle.  With the de facto retirement of Chuck Rozwat, Kurian is now a virtual peer of co-presidents Safra Katz and Charles Phillips. 

More postings discussing Lyle Ekdahl, Tom Kurian and what all the musical chairs at Oracle means to the JD Edwards community will be coming soon.  Your comments will be most welcome.

 

Is the ERP Era Over? Reflections on IBM’s latest view of IT

Business Optimization is the new mantra that IBMers are all now chanting in unison.  The IBM chain of logic goes something like this:

• ERP and CRM applications (such as JD Edwards) did a good job of automating processes but a point of diminishing returns has been reached.
• Business Intelligence (BI) has enabled a much deeper understanding of how businesses really work.  It has largely been used so far to report on past activity.
• The next great leap forward will come from using the information BI provides to use predictive analytics to optimize decision-making and to react in real time. 

Business Optimization is a goal to achieve, is not something you buy.  Not surprisingly, many of the things that IBM sells are needed to achieve it such as Cognos, InfoSphere, DB2, servers, services and eventually SPSS.  Is IBM’s new view of the diminishing role of applications colored by the fact that it does not sell any of them?  While bias is certainly present, the core argument seems to be basically sound. 

Even though Oracle has become one of the world’s top two application vendors, it seems to buy into much of IBM’s logic.  Oracle uses the term Business Process Optimization to say essentially the same thing. 

Oracle is certainly not giving up on applications.  It is investing heavily in a next generation application suite called Fusion Applications.  When I have asked senior Oracle executives about what the essential difference will be between Fusion and existing applications the answer has netted down to “fully embedded BI”.  Exactly how Oracle plans to pull this off remains completely unclear compounded by the ever-receding date when the first Fusion Application modules will arrive. 

Our experience at Andrews Consulting Group seems to support the thought that opportunities for improvement through information technology are indeed shifting away from making incremental improvements in applications.  As a company that helps JD Edwards customers move up to new releases, this is a little painful to admit.  Sadly, it seems as if each wave of new features seems to offer less dramatic benefits and tends to appeal to a narrower segment of the community. 

We have therefore shifted our own business to focus on finding ways to make BI more affordable and useable.  Those curious about how we are doing this should visit our RapidDecision website. 

Future postings will explore further how Oracle, IBM and the other major IT vendors view the future of applications and the new phenomenon that most are calling Business Optimization.  A major shift is in progress in information technology.  We will do our part to help the JD Edwards community understand what it means to all of us.

 

Lenley Hensarling joins Ed Abbo and Tom Siebel at C3

Lenley Hensarling, the Group VP in charge of JD Edwards has been recruited away from Oracle to join a new venture with the working name C3.  I was told that it stands for something like Carbon Conscious Consumers.  Apparently C3 will focus on carbon reduction issues.  It is being led and financed by Tom Siebel, the founder of Siebel Systems which Oracle acquired in 2006. 

Hensarling was seemingly recruited by his old boss Ed Abbo, the former Siebel Systems CEO.  Abbo was running Oracle’s Applications business until he left earlier this summer.  From what we have pieced together so far, Abbo was enticed away from Oracle by Tom Siebel and then convinced Hensarling to join them. 

No details are available on what C3 hopes to become.  Its vision must be something extraordinary to attract executive talent like Abbo and Hensarling away from important roles within Oracle.  Tom Siebel appears to be joining the ranks of other wealthy businessmen who are using their fortunes to improve the world such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Ted Turner, Pete Peterson, and Gordon Moore.  It will be fun to follow the impact that this interesting combination of money, vision and talent has over time. 

Abbo and Hensarling have left to join a cause in which they believe and to follow a charismatic leader.  Oracle apparently tried to entice them to stay and we understand that the departures were completely friendly.  The departures should not be read as a signal that wrenching changes in application strategy are coming or that anything is seriously wrong within Oracle. 

Lenley Hensarling did a great job steering the JDE product line through its most dramatic transition following the Oracle takeover.  Our community will miss his vibrant leadership.  I am glad to see him contributing to a cause that I personally strongly support and wish him and everyone at C3 great success. 

Hensarling will be replaced by Lyle Ekdahl, currently the top product planner for JDE and the person that did much of the heavy lifting during Hensarling’s tenure.  A more extensive posting on Ekdahl and the implications of his appointment will follow soon.

 

Breaking News – Lenley Hensarling leaves Oracle

Lenley Hensarling, the Group VP in charge of JD Edwards development has apparently left Oracle.  There has been no official word from Oracle but his personal LinkedIn profile confirms that he has moved on to become VP of Development for a start up business.  We have asked for a formal statement from Oracle and will be working our informal network to ferret out what this means to our community. 

Hensarling’s departure follows that of Ed Abbo the former Siebel executive that was running Oracle’s Applications.  Hensarling reported directly to Abbo before he left.  It is not yet clear if there is a connection between the two departures. 

Expect additional postings on this topic as more concrete information becomes available.  Anyone with more information, questions, or comments can either post them as comments or send me an email through the site.

 

Understanding Oracle: European Union slows down the Sun deal

Just as Sun was about to disappear below the horizon and be absorbed into the ocean that is Oracle, the European Union (EU) anti-trust police held up the stop sign.  The acquisition that Oracle management wanted so badly to finish in time for OpenWorld will now not be finalized until at least January.  Readers of this blog may thus need to suffer along with more of my tortured metaphors about Sun for months to come. 

The EU wants time to evaluate whether the deal will overly limit competition in the database market due to Sun’s recent takeover of the mySQL open source DBMS.  Control over Java by one of a shrinking number of middleware vendors is apparently also an EU concern. 

Oracle thought it was home free after the US Justice Department offered it’s blessing last month.  The delay has to be a huge disappointment.  We have heard that this particular deal has energized Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in a way that none of the previous forty-some acquisitions did.  He has apparently cut back on racing around on his giant yacht and other outside interests to focus on figuring out how these two very different businesses will fit together. 

It is not yet clear to me why Ellison wants to jump into the low margin, insanely competitive hardware market at this point.  On the other hand, history suggests that he likely sees something not obvious to the rest of us.  The very sound logic behind the PeopleSoft acquisition was not clear until years after it closed. 

The EU has not stopped Oracle and Sun from starting to work together on integrated hardware/software appliances.  A webinar has been scheduled for September 15 to announce the first one.  It is being promoted as the world’s first OLTP database machine featuring Sun FlashFire Technology.  Once we hear the details we will let our readers know if this particular offering is relevant for our community. 

Assuming that the EU objections are eventually dealt with, I can’t wait to hear the answers to some big questions: 

• What other hardware/software (and possibly services) appliances are coming?
• How will Sun’s microprocessor business keep up with Intel, IBM and others?
• Where will the various parts of Sun report in?  Will the pieces be split up?
• How will Oracle act as steward of the Java franchise?
• Will the open source mySQL database thrive or wither under Oracle control?
• Will Sun founder Scott McNealy play a visible role or stay out of sight?
• What will the impact be on both the IBM and HP alliances? 

Sadly, it will be 2010 before most of the answers become available.  In the near term, it is probably good for the JD Edwards attendees at OpenWorld that the Sun deal was pushed.  Issues that are of more immediate concern to our community will get more attention.  An upcoming posting will focus on what OpenWorld will offer to us. 

Have you signed up to be notified of new JD Edwards postings?  It is simple, free and convenient.  A short email will notify you when a new posting has gone up.  You will also occasionally be notified of events of importance to the JD Edwards community such as webinars, user group meetings, and conferences.

 

Understanding Oracle – a new series of Advisor postings

 People tend to have strong feelings about Oracle Corporation – some very positive others quite negative.  Whatever your emotional feelings are, it is time to put them aside.  Oracle now controls the fate of the JD Edwards software so what matters is what Oracle does, not how loveable it is. 

Personally, I knew little about Oracle when it bought PeopleSoft – my overall impression was quite negative.  News of the acquisition was appalling since I imagined countless horrible things that might happen.  Happily, my concerns were unfounded – JD Edwards and its customers are far better off under Oracle’s ownership than they would have been as an independent company or a part of some other entity.  Not everything has gone perfectly, but the positives have greatly outnumbered the negatives.  

After more than four years trying to do so, I cannot claim to fully understand Oracle.  It is a mysterious, complex entity that does not ever completely reveal itself.  Managing Andrews Consulting Group forces me to make assumptions about what Oracle will do next.  This makes it necessary for me to invest a great deal of time trying to figure Oracle out. 

The Understanding Oracle series of postings will share what I have learned so far, ruminate on what it appears to mean, and speculate about what is likely to happen next.  Hopefully, it will inspire some of you to add to your own observations and opinions. 

This series of postings will continue for as long as there is interest and we have new insights to provide.  Its goal is to help the JD Edwards community better understand Oracle Corporation so that we can all make better decisions. 

Let us know either through a posting or directly via email what you want to know about Oracle and we will try to cover it. 

Have you signed up to be notified of new JD Edwards postings?  It is simple, free and convenient.  A short email will notify you when a new posting has gone up.  You will also occasionally be notified of events of importance to the JD Edwards community such as webinars, user group meetings, and conferences.

 

JD Edwards Advisor Improvements

Starting this month the JD Edwards Advisor will offer more news, information and analysis – and still be available to visitors for free.  The appearance of the site has been refreshed to help call attention to an expansion of the number of posting and the depth of coverage of the topics you want and need to understand.  One of the first things you will see is a new series of article on the topic of Understanding Oracle. 

JD Edwards Advisor subscribers will continue to be reminded via email each time a new article is posted.  Starting now, subscribers will also receive invitations and notifications of events specific to our community including webinars, conferences and user group meetings.  If at any time you would like to stop receiving this valuable information, simply unsubscribe. 

This site has been providing useful information in a concise, highly readable form since November 2006.  Nearly 1,000 of your peers visit this site each week because it provides valuable information and observations that are unavailable anywhere else.  A publicity campaign will insure that the entire JD Edwards community is aware of all that this site has to offer. 

Posting planned for the near future will answer the questions that concern you most: 

• Should you be concerned about Fusion Applications?
• Why doesn’t Oracle advertise JD Edwards?
• Is OS/400 still the right operating system for JD Edwards?
• Will the Oracle/IBM relationship survive the Sun acquisition?
• What is Business Performance Optimization? 

The JD Edwards Advisor will continue to be highly interactive – if something concerns you let us know. We will do our best to provide you with the information you need to make effective use of your JD Edwards software.

 

The Top Ten Things JD Edwards Customers Need to Know

Two years ago we published a list of the top ten things that JDE customers need to know.  Looking back it held up very well.  Enough time has passed that it seems to make sense to make up a new list so here goes: 

1. JDE has settled in as a successful part of the Oracle product line.
2. You will not be forced to convert to Fusion or anything else.
3. The benefits of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are quietly arriving.
4. Oracle hates to spend money on marketing. 
5. Oracle and IBM both agree that BI is the next big thing.
6. Cracks may grow in the IBM / Oracle relationship.
7. Stay on your IBM System i (aka Power servers) for as long as you like.
8. You will eventually need a new development environment.  Oracle and IBM will fight hard to sell you one.
9. Staying relatively current on releases is worth the effort.
10. Acquisitions will continue until there is little left to buy. 

Starting next week, we will be significantly increasing the number of new postings and otherwise upgrading and improving this site.  Over time expect a separate posting expanding on each of the topics listed above so stay tuned.

 

What happened at Quest West?

Quest West had a decidedly exotic atmosphere this year at the San Diego Marriott hotel since a movie with the working title “Paul” was being filmed there at the same time.  A wild assortment of costumed actors wandered about surrounded by countless supporting personnel.  It was not obvious why some actors were dressed as hobbits, others storm troopers and a few as wookies.  I will have to pay my $10 for a ticket sometime next year to find out what the movie being shot is about. 

The presentations were informative but far less visually dramatic.  As usual, Oracle provided a keynote speaker.  The time was used for a demonstration of the new web based support facility called My Oracle Support that will replace MetaLink 3 later this week on August 28.  Make sure that the people within your organization that use the support site are aware of the change and are ready for it. 

The My Oracle Support user interface is decidedly cool and includes a mind numbing variety of options and settings. The presentation was useful and very professional but I wonder why it was not offered as a breakout session instead of being a general session. I would have preferred to have Oracle use the featured Thursday main tent session to provide more insight into overall direction. 

On the other hand, the roughly 50 people who returned for the Friday sessions heard an excellent presentation by Oracle’s Lyle Ekdahl who ran a town hall session for JD Edwards.  Lyle has a unique gift for presenting technical material in a way that is entertaining, understandable, and informative.  This time of year major announcements are saved up for OpenWorld, so the only real news involved the availability of a new AIA integration of some of the Demantra (aka advanced planning) modules with E1.  Lyle’s overview of plans for the evolution of E1 (and even World) over time and how it fits into a broader Oracle strategy was outstanding.  Future posting will be devoted to this topic. 

As usual, my main goal at the conference was to collect useful morsels of information and gossip to share via this medium.  Here is a summary of what I picked up: 

• Oracle’s top management structure has recently changed in a way that could benefit the JD Edwards community.  Ed Abbo, who ran Oracle’s application business, has left.  Application development now reports to Thomas Kurian.  JDE executive Lenley Hensarling now reports directly to Kurian.
• Chuck Roswat has gone walkabout (technically a leave of absence but likely a de facto retirement).  Roswat was a direct report to Ellison and the executive in charge of all product development including applications. Kurian has taken his place making him a peer of co-presidents Safra Catz and Charles Phillips.
• A future posting will try to sort out the meaning of the organization change but the bottom line is that Hensarling (and therefore JDE) is no longer buried far down the Oracle org chart. 
• Apparently Oracle Founder and CEO Larry Ellison has become especially excited and energized by the Sun acquisition that looks like it will close formally before OpenWorld.  Time spent by Ellison on hobbies such as trying to win back the America’s Cup has apparently been cut way back.
• My wild guess that Oracle might spin off the Sun hardware unit appears to have been wrong.  Ellison seems to relish the challenge of creating fully integrated appliance offerings.  I remain skeptical about Oracle’s chances of successfully pulling this off, but I would never bet against Oracle’s ability to meet a technical challenge. 

Much more on all of these topics will be coming after the Labor Day Holiday – stay tuned.

 

The BI Buying Binge Continues

The latest wave of acquisitions should eliminate any doubt that the leading IT vendors are fixated on Business Intelligence (BI).  Oracle struck first by announcing that Golden Gate Software was now part of its growing collection of data management software vendors.  IBM pulled an even bigger fish flopping into the boat by spending over a billion dollars to buy SPSS, a leader in data mining (a.k.a. predictive analytics). 

It is hardly news anymore when either Oracle or IBM buys another software company.  The two of them have been buying up everything in sight since Oracle started the race by taking over PeopleSoft.  The question here is whether any of this matters to JD Edwards customers.  The simple answer is that both moves are far more important to our community than they appear to be on the surface. 

Most of you probably never heard of Golden Gate Software before this posting.  I personally had no idea who they were when the announcement hit the wire (the people in my BI practice knew them well, however).  Golden Gate’s specialty is real-time data integration meaning it knows how keep multiple databases tightly synchronized over time.  This capability fills a major void in the Oracle product line.  It is especially valuable when the database being synchronized is a data warehouse.  The alternatives all put a heavy performance burden on the source servers and force users to make due with out of date information. 

My company has been heavily promoting the concept of real-time updating of data warehouses for ten years.  By acquiring Golden Gate Oracle is adding its endorsement to this point of view.  As usual, the acquisition will take months to become official.  After that it will take a while for the new technology to be absorbed into Oracle offerings so do not expect products with real-time capability to be available until 2011.  It continues to be our belief that BI has to be real-time to be truly useful and it is great to have Oracle support that point of view. 

The impact of the IBM SPSS acquisition will be real but perhaps slower to impact most of you.  Data mining is really cool, but it remains a technology that has not yet become mainstream.  Having the full weight of IBM’s sales engine behind it will likely speed up adoption of this valuable capability.

 

Goodies from Oracle and IBM

After Labor Day I will be posting an important article about the unique relationship between Oracle and IBM and all that it has withstood.  In the meantime, here are a few tidbits that represent tangible evidence that the friendship between these two industry giants remains strong for now. 

The first is a tuning guide for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers that use IBM Power Systems servers (the new replacement for AS/400 and System i). It outlines key JD Edwards EnterpriseOne parameters and settings for optimal performance and is based on lab tests and customer feedback.  Those who have not yet moved up to a Power System server but are considering doing so might want to have a look as well.  Click here to get the download. 

I have also obtained a paper that describes Universal Batch Engine (UBE) performance tests done for the Donaldson Company to assess the performance improvements available from upgrading to IBM i 6.1 and to POWER6 processors. The results show that i 6.1 provided an improvement of approximately 10-13 percent when compared to i 5.4. The results also show that POWER6 processors and i 6.1 together provided an improvement of approximately 58 percent when compared to POWER4 processors and i 5.4. This validates previous results which indicate significant performance improvements available from POWER6 processors and i 6.1.  Click here to get the case history download. 

For those that have not looked into it, the case for moving up to IBM Power servers looks quite compelling to us.  When evaluating it don’t forget to factor in the difference in power and AC, a major source of savings (and another little way to help save the planet).  Check it out for yourselves.

 

Smart Strategies for Uncertain Times

Every technology vendor is trying to make the case that it can help you climb out of the hole that the world economy has dug for your company.  Oracle sent Senior VP John Kopcke to Quest NE recently to tell us why the offering now being called Enterprise Performance Management or EPM could be the ladder that helps you climb out. 

Kopcke’s presentation was well designed and informative.  45 minutes was not nearly enough to let him get through the very sophisticated story he came to tell.  Still, the 100 or so attendees who sat through his Thursday morning keynote seemed to value what they heard.  John was kind enough to send us a PDF version of his slides that you are welcome to download.  Even if your business is not a near term candidate for EPM, the story the presentation contains is one worth taking the time to understand. 

It is impossible to accurately summarize Oracle’s case for EPM briefly.  I’ll try anyway hoping that anyone that becomes even vaguely interested will be motivated to dig into the details.  Those that want to understand more than it is possible to convey in this posting can contact us directly. 

The chain of logic behind Oracle’s EPM story is elaborate (hence the need for 49 slides).  Our oversimplified summary is:

• Difficult decisions need to be based on the insightful analysis of data
• When the going gets tough, effective organizations gather intelligence
• Oracle has assembled a sophisticated set of software products that enable the collection and analysis of the data needed for effective decision making
• The umbrella term for what buyers can do with this broad collection of software is Enterprise Performance Management or EPM 

EPM is thus a management concept and not one of the many software products that Oracle offers.  This is confusing since PeopleSoft previously used the EPM term to refer to a data warehousing option.  Hyperion has also referred to its products in the past as EPM and some Oracle people who are not up on the latest marketing jargon continue to do so.  Other vendors including IBM are using very similar terminology to describe concepts and products that do not fit the Oracle model. 

In current Oracle-speak, an enterprise can manage its performance most effectively (and thus achieve Enterprise Performance Management) through the combination of an impressive array of products that Oracle has assembled.   These products fall into five categories: 

• Fusion Middleware – the necessary underlying infrastructure software.  Most of the building blocks have been part of the Oracle product line for years.
• Business Intelligence Foundation – software tools to help analyze the data.  The main components came from the Siebel and Hyperion acquisitions.
• Analytic Applications – pre-built dashboards, reports and displays that came along when Siebel was acquired.
• Performance Management Applications – financial consolidation and modeling software that was the foundation of the Hyperion product line.
• EPM Workspace – Oracle’s term for the devices and tools used to access and display the results. 

EPM is therefore also Oracle’s brand name for the uniting vision behind the acquisitions of Siebel, Hyperion and many smaller software vendors.  Since the acquired pieces are still being put together it is as much a blueprint for future development as it is a description of what can be bought today.  The story gets clearer and better told every few months, but don’t be discouraged if it still seems too complex to make sense to you.  

For reasons that will be covered in future postings, very few JDE customers are currently ready to buy the featured EPM components including Analytic Applications and Performance Management Applications.  Over time they will evolve into important offerings for our community, but remain works-in-progress for most of us in the near term.  In the meantime, it is useful to understand that there is a grand vision behind Oracle’s acquisition binge and that it is one that will continually broaden the choices available to us. 

My goal is to enable those that follow these postings over time to develop a complete understanding of Oracle’s grand vision.  Readers will have to be patient though, since it will take time to provide you with all the pieces to this elaborate puzzle.  Thanks in advance for your patience.

 

News from Foxwoods

With attendance way down at almost every conference this year it was a pleasant surprise that around 100 JDE customers came to Foxwoods resort in Connecticut this week joined by another 200 or so PeopleSoft customers and a similar number of vendors, consultants and Oracle groupies.  It is too bad that more of you were unable to get the tightwads that control spending in your companies to let you come.

Quest has already decided to cancel the Midwest conference planned for December but still plans to go ahead with the one scheduled for San Diego in August.  IMHO these events can safely be shortened to two days versus the current three-day schedule.  Those that did come seemed to get good value for their investment of time and money. 

The Thursday keynote by Oracle Senior VP John Kopcke was excellent.  It was a good sign that Oracle sent someone at his level to this event.  Look for a posting covering his speech as soon as he sends me his Power Point slides.  John made a strong case for using BI tools including those Oracle picked up in the Hyperion acquisition as a means of achieving management excellence. 

Other useful or interesting tidbits picked up at the conference included: 

• Oracle management is heavily focused on closing the Sun deal.  If it is done in time, a major theme at OpenWorld will be explaining what it all means.
• The Quest Q&A publication is going digital – no more hard copy. Besides our humble attempts to provide information of interest and value, Q&A is one of the few available sources of independent information on what Oracle is doing for the JD Edwards community.
• Oracle’s plan for a big bang announcement this summer of BI 11g has been pushed back into 2010.  As we learn more, additional postings on this subject will be provided.
• Oracle itself held its annual sales kickoff online this year.  Instead of bringing thousands of reps together everything was recorded and provided via the Internet.  I am sure it saved lots of money and was a more efficient way to transfer information, but what fun is it being an Oracle sales rep if you cannot go to Vegas each June and have a few things happen that need to stay in Vegas? 

I found attending a conference in a casino this year mildly depressing.  Seeing row after row of slot machines sitting idle is a stark reminder of what things have come to.  Where did all those little old ladies go who smoked and pushed quarters into machines as fast as they could? 

Anyone else that went is welcome to offer comments or observations.

 

Should JD Edwards customers go to Oracle Open World?

Each autumn the customers, partners, vendors, and others that make up the Oracle ecosystem descend on downtown San Francisco.  Oracle’s insatiable appetite for acquisitions has made the OpenWorld conference almost unmanageably large.  Last October over 40,000 people came making it the largest event held within the city.  Roughly 2,000 of them shared an interest in JD Edwards software. 

This year OpenWorld will be held October 11 through 15.  If you are considering going now is the right time to make plans, especially arrangements for hotels and flights.  It is safe to assume that the recession will impact attendance, but even if “only” 30,000 people show up those that do come need to do lots of advanced planning in order to get full value from the event. 

This will be my fifth Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) in a row.  The advice and opinions offered below are based on that experience and input from a number of my Oracle contacts.  It is offered to help you decide if going makes sense and, if so, how to make the experience worthwhile.  Comments from other veterans are encouraged. 

Reasons to consider going:

• This is Oracle’s one big event and a great place to develop an understanding of the large and complex business that controls the fate of JD Edwards software.
• 100+ sessions will focus on topics of interest to the JDE community.
• Over 1,000 of your peers will be there.  Most will come to a JDE focused cocktail party usually held Tuesday evening.
• Even when crowded, San Francisco is a wonderful place to visit. 

Reasons to stay home:

• 90% of OOW is not JDE centric.
• The logistics can be complex and intimidating.
• Collaborate and regional Quest events are better choices if you are only allowed to go to one outside event per year.
• The idiots that run your company are too cheap to let you go. 

General comments and observations:

• Unless you are an Oracle partner, there is little reason to come Sunday.
• The keynote sessions can be a hassle to get into. Most are available via closed-circuit video in the nearby Marriott hotel.
• The JDE sessions will mostly be at the InterContinental Hotel.
• This year Oracle will experiment with 30 minute sessions for some topics.
• Business Intelligence and what Oracle calls Business Performance Management will be major themes this year.  See other postings for more on this topic.
• A big focus will be on how to take advantage of Oracle applications that integrate well with JDE applications such as Oracle Transportation Manager.
• Thankfully, Oracle’s in-the-works acquisition of Sun Microsystems will likely not be done in time to impact OOW.  Little will be said if the deal is not legally complete by then.  Some Sun centric people will come out of curiosity but not in large enough numbers to make things overcrowded. It is unlikely that we will learn much about what Oracle plans to do with Sun.
• A huge social/networking event will be held Wednesday night.  If you feel like partying like it is 1999 with 20,000+ others it can be fun.  You must have a tolerance for large crowds, loud music, bus rides and a cold wind coming off the bay to enjoy it. 

For those who cannot go, The JD Edwards Advisor will be there to collect intelligence and consolidate it into easily digestible morsels.

 

Will I see you at Foxwoods?

Many of you were unable to go to Collaborate in May due either to cutbacks in travel budgets or fear of catching the swine flu.  Hopefully, as the season for regional events kicks off at Foxwoods Casino July 15-17 many of those who could not come to Orlando will be able to free up the time and funding for the regional conference that is nearest to you.  The other events are in San Diego August 19-21, and Chicago December 8-10. 

The best source for detailed information about any of these regional events is the Quest web site www.questdirect.org . 

I will be at Foxwoods all day on Thursday the 16^th and welcome the opportunity to meet any of you that would like to exchange ideas in person.  Andrews Consulting Group will have two booths in the expo area and if I am not near one when you stop by any of my associates that are there can track me down.  We will be conducting four sessions that I will definitely be attending :

#62570 Inventory Reconciliation-There has to be a better way! Thursday July 16th 10:40 Room Bravo A

#62580 Making BI Work Best, Wednesday July 15th 2:10 pm Room Bravo A

#62590 How to Implement a Successful BI Solution, Wednesday  July 15th 3:20 pm Celebrity Ballroom J

#62600 The Business Case for Business Intelligence, Thursday, July 16th 10:40 am Celebrity Ballroom C

Expo visitors can all get a free copy of my book Revolutionizing IT: The art of using information technology effectively.  Just stop by either the Andrews Consulting Group or the RapidDecision booth.   Advisor readers can follow the link and also receive a free copy of my book.

Consistent with what this blog has been saying for months, the big theme Oracle is promoting in 2009 is Business Intelligence, which they prefer to refer to using the even grander term Business Performance Management (BPM).  Oracle sponsored events at the regional conferences starting at Foxwoods will have a heavy BI/BPM flavor as a result.  After the conference we will report on what we learn. 

Those on tight travel budgets, especially anyone living within driving distance, should consider just coming for the day on Thursday.  The expo will be open all day, the main keynote is that morning, and a high percentage of the sessions occur then.  Doing it that way makes for a long and tiring but also very cost effective day. 

I hope to see lots of you there.

 

More thoughts on AS/400

My brief note last week on the slow motion demise of the server to which so many of us have been loyal has triggered a number of thoughtful responses.  Not surprisingly, many of you seemed appalled at the suggestion that it may be time to start looking beyond AS/400.  Such a reaction reinforces the point that began the article – loyalty to AS/400 remains strong even though IBM has largely stopped both the marketing and enhancement of it. 

I did not suggest that the time had come to abandon ship.  What I did say was: “There is nothing wrong with continuing to run code written for OS/400 on what has evolved into an outstanding server platform.  It is reliable, cost effective, energy efficient and offers the flexibility of also running AIX or Linux software.  There is also no urgent reason to replace OS/400 specific applications such as JDE World.  Such applications will run just fine on Power servers for many years to come.” 

It will make sense for many of you to keep running World on Power servers until after the polar ice is gone.  Upgrades to anything new only make sense at what we call “inflection points” – a time when conditions have changed sufficiently to warrant a major shift in strategy.  Inflection points are usually the result of events such as an acquisition, new ownership or management, or dramatic changes in business conditions.  When such points occur, it will make sense to look at moving up to EnterpriseOne rather than to continue putting more duct tape and chewing gum on World. 

What concerned me most is that some organizations continue to invest in significant custom software development projects using RPG and the ILE development environment.  Given the current realities, doing so is not a wise investment.  Continuing to make minor tweaks to existing RPG code is not what I was talking about.  Development projects that multiple individuals work on for months or even years are what I had in mind. 

The case for moving up in class to a leading edge development environment will be made here over the course of a number of articles.  I will rely on my associate Jim Louys, who has overseen the upgrading of a great deal of worn out RPG code personally, to help tell the story.  If I was the first AS/400 advocate on Earth, Jim was #2.  He started his career as a programmer in Rochester working on what became the foundation for OS/400.  Jim was the original source for the “Silverlake” code name.  His credentials as an AS/400 loyalist are unmatched.  Much of his current work, however, revolves around breathing new life into older code and applications.  I am optimistic that the articles he will offer will be very enlightening. 

All I really ask is for all of you to keep an open mind to the new possibilities out there.  Most of you will be pleasantly surprised by what you discover. 

Please, keep those comments and opposing opinions coming!