J.D. Edwards Finds Its Inner-Self Within Its 5th Incarnation

Nevertheless, the acquisition of YOUCentric bears its challenges too. The major one is that YOUCentric has had only a handful of customers that have integrated their new SFA software to an ERP system including J.D. Edwards' one, whereas other CRM modules have yet to create a live reference. As YOUCentric offering is rather a CRM development platform than a well-defined CRM product, it may not have a major appeal to customers that prefer the off-the-shelf product. Therefore, it will take some time for the complete architectural products' alignment beyond the mere integration at portal level as to have an overall market appeal and consecutive impact to J.D. Edwards' top line, despite the products compatible architectures, data mapping technology and therefore potentially expedient integration. There has almost not been articulated industry-specific CRM functionality yet, contrary to the company's espoused vertical focus at the J.D. Edwards 5 level.

Furthermore, in spite of all the a impressive announcements in Part One and Part Two, J.D. Edwards still faces more challenges ahead. Indeed, to put things in the right perspective, one should bear in mind that the company's license revenue in 2002 will still likely be almost 50% less than the corresponding revenue of $419 million in 2000, back when the company was still merely an ERP player, although the total revenue may remain flat or will grow 5% compared to $874 million in 2001 (still being well below the $1 billion mark in 2000).

Figure 1.

Aso, as J.D. Edwards 5 is still an evolving concept and portfolio of applications, SAP and Oracle still feature much broader functionality footprints. To compete J.D. Edwards recently turned to a number of alliances (see Part Two). Nevertheless, with these competitors' impending endeavors to complete re-architecting their products' flexibility, they may be better positioned than J.D. Edwards in the future. To that end, J.D. Edwards 5's actual SRM functionality is still largely a figment of imagination, as in its current state, the SRM solution is on par with a basic e-procurement package for indirect materials.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is another area where the company seems to be trailing the competition. Although there have been partnerships with several prominent PLM suppliers (e.g., Agile, MatrixOne, and PTC), none of these have been vocally touted, which makes one skeptical about the true strength of these partnerships if they are based on serendipitous necessity (i.e., common customers) rather than on virtue of strategic alliance. This, combined with an apparent lack of more decisive announcements by J.D. Edwards in this regards, leads us to the conclusion that PLM product strategy is not a high priority at this stage. Similar situation is with regard to portal solutions and trading exchanges, which, until the IBM deal materializes in earnest some time on 2003, still lack important pieces such s search engine and knowledge management (KM), most of which have been mastered by SAP, PeopleSoft, or Oracle.

Additionally, J.D. Edwards 5 product cohesiveness across the range will have likely been uneven at this stage given higher level of XPI/XPB-based integration between CRM, manufacturing and distribution applications are still in progress, as well as industry-specific XBPs (e.g., real estate, construction, field service, high-tech, etc.). The company will therefore have to articulate more clearly the current state of affairs of its entire portfolio integration (i.e., disclosure of its current and future approaches to application programming interfaces (APIs), with a level of granularity, hierarchy, technical build, and so on), as to avoid any ensuing customers' disillusion and disappointment.

Also, although the company has smartly federated its service-based product architecture in preparation for Web services compliance, there is still a colossal outstanding work to address many aspects of enabling full end-to-end collaborative processes via multiple applications from multiple vendors with disparate architectures, such as language-independent calls to APIs (preferably via Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)), publicly available documented APIs (preferably using Web Services Description Language (WSDL)), backward API compatibility for last few product releases, and APIs should be registered in an industry-accepted directory (i.e., Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)).
J.D. Edwards' competition is also growing direct proportionally to its product offering growth, which might become too much to cope with given it has lower license revenue (expressed both as a percentage of total revenue and in raw dollar amounts), market share, global presence, and resources compared to some (albeit not many) competitors. In a pure ERP sense, it competes against SAP, Oracle, and PeopleSoft in the higher-end of the market, while in the Tier 2 range it faces Intentia, IFS, Baan, SSA GT, QAD, MAPICS, and Geac as some of just as fierce competition.

As the company starts to build up its channel market with VARs owing to its strong focus at the small-to-medium enterprises (SME) level, it will inevitably (despite its attempts to downplay the likelihood) face an army of competitors spearheaded by Microsoft Business Solutions' Great Plains and Navision offerings (see Microsoft 'The Great' Poised To Conquer Mid-Market, Once and Again), Epicor, Exact Software, Scala and Best Software to name only few.

Looking further at the SCM market, the company challenges SAP, Oracle, Baan and PeopleSoft and the pure player likes of i2, Logility, and Manugistics. As mentioned earlier, J.D. Edwards also has to be taken quite seriously in the CRM space against Siebel, Onyx, Pivotal, SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle, while in the professional services automation (PSA), there are again Lawson, PeopleSoft, Ariba, Siebel, SAP, Oracle, and a number of PSA specialists such as Deltek, Niku, Evolve, Novient and Changepoint.