JD Edwards South Africa has announced that it is working with Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID) to deliver business intelligence solutions to its enterprise software customers. The announcement follows the companies having collaborated on one of the largest business intelligence sites in SA.
JD Edwards has built its business intelligence offering on an OEMed version of the MicroStrategy platform; KID, in turn, is the local distributor for MicroStrategy, and has a critical mass of skills, making the partnership logical, says Andrew Krause, sales director of JD Edwards South Africa.
"Many organisations have come to understand that the value of an enterprise software suite is best extended through a tightly aligned business intelligence application," says Krause. "To ensure we could do this, we embedded MicroStrategy`s source code into JD Edwards 5 and pre-built a number of strategic business metrics, key performance indicators, or KPIs, scorecards, and reports based on data and business processes in of our core business applications.
"Our enterprise clients find these prebuilt components very attractive as they dramatically reduce the time typically taken to add value to enterprise software. We provide the applications, and KID has the technical expertise and skills to deliver them for our clients, so we are leveraging their experience."
JD Edwards` approach is in line with what Gartner terms corporate performance management, or CPM, and what AMR calls EPM, or enterprise performance management. This is the ability to drive planning, budgeting and forecasting, query and analysis, monitoring and balanced scorecard off a single analytical engine: in effect, off one, centralised view of the truth. This MicroStrategy does by drawing and presenting its data in a normalised format out of JD Edwards` core systems.
"Setting up the KPIs in such a manner is skills- and labour-intensive and can cost up to seven times more than the software itself," adds Krause. "The fact that we can eliminate this labour and cost and save time is what is driving rapid adoption of JD Edwards Business Intelligence."
With more than 150 local clients JD Edwards is one of SA`s leading enterprise software vendors. Krause expects many of these clients to adopt its business intelligence offering, which will be delivered through its partnership with KID.
"We backed MicroStrategy because of the company`s clear vision with regards to business intelligence, and its technology leadership," says KID MD Aubrey van Aswegen. This stance has been validated by JD Edwards` commitment to the platform as the core of its integrated business intelligence offering, and the market`s rapid takeup of the platform. We anticipate JD Edwards Business Intelligence will become one of the most successful solutions in the market, and we will gear up as required to deliver in terms of this partnership."
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