Oracle's Profit magazine recently interviewed Lyle Ekdahl, Oracle Group Vice President for JD Edwards, in an article titled "Innovation, commitment, and loyalty the secrets to JD Edwards’ success".  In the interview Lyle describes how the JDE product has grown since it became part of Oracle five years ago and Oracle's ongoing commitment to it.

A key message from Lyle is: "Our customers have seen consistent investment in product innovation over the past five years, and we are delighted to have earned their loyalty. As part of Oracle, we’ve had 15 discrete development releases for both JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and JD Edwards World products. We’ve brought seven new products to market and announced integrations that benefit JD Edwards customers. That’s a lot of work and investment from Oracle. And our customers are proving their support of our strategy by upgrading to the newest releases of our products. And we get our share of new customers, which validates that we are providing viable industry solutions to the marketplace."

These are the types of reasons why Jireh continues to invest in supporting JDE, helping JDE customers upgrade to the latest releases, and seeking out new customers for the JDE solution.

We encourage you to read the full article.

Oracle has recently conducted a case study comparing the cost of ownership for their JD Edwards EnterpriseOne solution (JDE) against SAP in the same company.

Key findings:

• SAP cost almost twice as much as JDE to implement;
• SAP costs more than four times as much as JDE in administration per end-user;
• SAP requires more than four times as many IT support staff as does JDE;
• SAP has ongoing costs more than four times as much as JDE.

What is particularly interesting about this study - apart from the findings! - is that the comparison is between two similar divisions of the same company running similar business processes, so it is almost a direct comparison and therefore the findings are more compelling.

Oracle have given permission for us to share the case study, so please email me if you want a copy.

Gavin Knight, Director of Business Consulting

As we type this it is Wednesday morning here in San Francisco and we are heading into day three of the Oracle OpenWorld conference.

Mark has just been interviewed by Oracle PR talking about our joint JDE customer Bendon.  We expect Oracle to publish a video clip of the interview in a couple months and will feature it here on the Jireh Blog when they have.

Yesterday (Tuesday here in San Francisco) Mark spent a lot of time in the conference demo grounds meeting Oracle people and checking out the latest in JDE and related software, and building our relationships with Oracle.

Gavin took a different approach yesterday and spent a lot of time in conference sessions about JDE and about Fusion Applications.  These sessions provided valuable information on the options the newer releases offer our customers whether they be running JDE on its own (as we expect most JDE customers will operate for some years) or start to supplement JDE with Fusion Applications (which opens up some interesting possibilities - particularly around embedded decision support, embedded reporting and collaboration). Update: Gavin also attended a customer panel of three customers sharing their recent experiences upgrading to JDE EnterpriseOne 9.0 - there were some valuable insights shared.

If you would like to meet up at OpenWorld to discuss how Jireh can help you with your JDE system, or if you have a particular question you would like us to investigate at the conference, please contact us on Twitter (@JirehJDE) or directly:

• Mark Elley, Managing Director, +64 (27) 672 5126, mark.elley@jireh.net.nz
• Gavin Knight, Business Consulting Director, +64 (21) 428 059, gavin.knight@jireh.net.nz