ERP is dead, says JD Edwards

By Jason Norwood-Young for PeopleSoft

Johannesburg, 22 Sep 2000

Enterprise resource planning (ERP), which was once touted as the answer to the enterprise`s IT needs, no longer survives in its historical form. The demise of the monolithic ERP system was witnessed a few years ago and was replaced by modular components.

Today, not even the modular approach is driving revenue in this saturated market space. SAP went the portal path with its mySAP.com offering, while Oracle took market share with its enterprise application products.

JD Edwards is taking the middle ground, selling supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM) and procurement solutions around its OneWorld ERP product. Its differentiator, it believes, is its open standards approach.

"ERP as such is dead," says Piet Buyck, VP, Active Supply Chain Group, JD Edwards. "Our new message is collaborate or die."

This collaborative strategy is enabled through the use of the XML (extensible markup language) translator Netfish, which is currently the hub of the JD Edwards product wheel. The SCM solution, ERP, departmental planning, CRM and procurement spokes all link into the XML hub, allowing any enterprise component to interact with any other.

Buyck believes the days of owning customers through lack of interoperability are numbered, and cites this as competitor Oracle`s weakness. "We won`t protect our customer base through lack of openness - we`ll just be better than anyone else. The monolithic systems did protect you from opposition, but did not promote any possibilities."

Much of JD Edwards` solutions already stem from third-party vendors: procurement from Ariba and Atlas, CRM from Siebel, and the supply chain from the Numetrix acquisition.

The company has not stopped development on its ERP platform: OneWorld XE is expected to ship on 11 October but JD Edwards doesn`t expect this to be its main revenue stream.

"ERP by itself adds very little value to an organisation anymore. Without it you can do very little, but with it, what you connect to it is what will bring you value."