Future of JD Edwards

Big changes are gathering on the horizons for JD Edwards’s customers and consultants, casting a shadow of doubt over high level enterprise IT decisions. There is a lot of angst surrounding Oracle’s efforts to provide the JDE community with a cost-effective business intelligence solution, made worse by the stunning growth of Cloud Computing and Oracle Fusion middleware.

When Oracle acquired PeopleSoft in 2005, they promised that JD Edwards customers would continue to get unlimited support with enhanced versions. While they have continued to release new JD Edwards versions, the enhancements have been outpaced by the speed of Oracle Fusion app development.

Oracle BI 11g is a part of Fusion middleware, and the enterprise edition allows for both cloud and non-cloud deployment. Oracle BI applications have been certified for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne since May 2009.

However, the enhancements included in 11g have made it almost impossible to ignore.  Oracle has made it extremely easy by providing BI with open identity management and a single sign-on (SSO) platform that supports multiple Oracle and non-Oracle identity management.

Future of JD Edwards with BI

Of course, Oracle is not the only one offering BI solutions for JDE. For example, take the 10 year old integration of the MicroStrategy 7 Platform into JDE. Companies like Pentaho with an army of open source developers are spending enormous resources to implement usage of ETL to extract ERP data from systems like JD Edwards and SAP. Popular BI Applications for JD Edwards are also being offered by IBM and RapidDecisions (offers both SAP BO and Microstrategy 9 based solution).

Oracle still has the home field advantage. Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) is used for deploying and managing BI, and the same OEM is also used for managing middleware and ERP applications. This is probably one of the reasons why Oracle BI works better with Oracle’s stable of ERP and CRM systems including Oracle EBS, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel.

Its usage tracking features allow for charge back or customer billing on private and public clouds. The BI server inserts the tracking data for every query into a log file or into a database table. Reports are used to extract this data and compute system usage for billing or charge back.

In fact, it is so flexible and scalable that Oracle cites how Oracle CRM on Demand has integrated Oracle BI into a cloud-based SaaS delivery model. BI is now available to Oracle CRM on Demand users everywhere from the home page to dashboards everywhere in the application. A single click can provide detailed data, and users can easily perform historical and comparative trend analysis.

Future of JD Edwards – Cloud

I think that time has now come for JD Edwards customers to decide on two things. The first is a move to the Cloud and then a move to SaaS/Cloud BI. Oracle BI 11g and major BI software providers still do offer non-cloud deployments. However, the countdown clock is ticking for on-premise JD Edwards support via Applications Unlimited. The transition to the cloud might be easier if you did it on your own terms, instead of being dragged by Oracle as it eventually limits/winds down support.

Author: Consultant at CIONNE.com.

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